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On the Old Road Volume 1 (of 2), essay(s) by John Ruskin |
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Art - 5. The Cestus Of Aglaia - Prefatory |
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_ ART V. THE CESTUS OF AGLAIA PREFATORY.[62] (_Art Journal, January-July 1865; January, February, and April 1866._) (HOM. _Il._ xiv. 220-21.)
26. In one sense, modern Art has more goodness in it than ever Art had before. Its kindly spirit, its quick sympathy with pure domestic and social feeling, the occasional seriousness of its instructive purpose, and its honest effort to grasp the reality of conceived scenes, are all eminently "good," as compared with the insane picturesqueness and conventional piety of many among the old masters. Such domestic painting, for instance, as Richter's in Germany, Edward Frere's in France, and Hook's in England, together with such historical and ideal work as----perhaps the reader would be offended with me were I to set down the several names that occur to me here, so I will set down one only, and say--as that of Paul de la Roche; such work, I repeat, as these men have done, or are doing, is entirely good in its influence on the public mind; and may, in thankful exultation, be compared with the renderings of besotted, vicious, and vulgar human life perpetrated by Dutch painters, or with the deathful formalism and fallacy of what was once called "Historical Art." Also, this gentleness and veracity of theirs, being in part communicable, are gradually learned, though in a somewhat servile manner, yet not without a sincere sympathy, by many inferior painters, so that our exhibitions and currently popular books are full of very lovely and pathetic ideas, expressed with a care, and appealing to an interest, quite unknown in past times. I will take two instances of merely average power, as more illustrative of what I mean than any more singular and distinguished work could be. Last year, in the British Institution, there were two pictures by the same painter, one of a domestic, the other of a sacred subject. I will say nothing of the way in which they were painted; it may have been bad, or good, or neither: it is not to my point. I wish to direct attention only to the conception of them. One, "Cradled in his Calling," was of a fisherman and his wife, and helpful grown-up son, and helpless new-born little one; the two men carrying the young child up from the shore, rocking it between them in the wet net for a hammock, the mother looking on joyously, and the baby laughing. The thought was pretty and good, and one might go on dreaming over it long--not unprofitably. But the second picture was more interesting. I describe it only in the circumstances of the invented scene--sunset after the crucifixion. The bodies have been taken away, and the crosses are left lying on the broken earth; a group of children have strayed up the hill, and stopped beside them in such shadowy awe as is possible to childhood, and they have picked up one or two of the drawn nails to feel how sharp they are. Meantime a girl with her little brother--goat-herds both--have been watering their flock at Kidron, and are driving it home. The girl, strong in grace and honor of youth, carrying her pitcher of water on her erect head, has gone on past the place steadily, minding her flock; but her little curly-headed brother, with cheeks of burning Eastern brown, has lingered behind to look, and is feeling the point of one of the nails, held in another child's hand. A lovely little kid of the goats has stayed behind to keep him company, and is amusing itself by jumping backwards and forwards over an arm of the cross. The sister looks back, and, wondering what he can have stopped in that dreadful place for, waves her hand for the little boy to come away. I have no hesitation in saying that, as compared with the ancient and stereotyped conceptions of the "Taking down from the Cross," there is a living feeling in that picture which is of great price. It may perhaps be weak, nay, even superficial, or untenable--that will depend on the other conditions of character out of which it springs--but, so far as it reaches, it is pure and good; and we may gain more by looking thoughtfully at such a picture than at any even of the least formal types of the work of older schools. It would be unfair to compare it with first-rate, or even approximately first-rate designs; but even accepting such unjust terms, put it beside Rembrandt's ghastly white sheet, laid over the two poles at the Cross-foot, and see which has most good in it for you of any communicable kind. 27. I trust, then, that I fully admit whatever may, on due deliberation, be alleged in favor of modern Art. Nay, I have heretofore asserted more for some modern Art than others were disposed to admit, nor do I withdraw one word from such assertion. But when all has been said and granted that may be, there remains this painful fact to be dealt with,--the consciousness, namely, both in living artists themselves and in us their admirers, that something, and that not a little, is wrong with us; that they, relentlessly examined, could not say they thoroughly knew how to paint, and that we, relentlessly examined, could not say we thoroughly know how to judge. The best of our painters will look a little to us, the beholders, for confirmation of his having done well. We, appealed to, look to each other to see what we ought to say. If we venture to find fault, however submissively, the artist will probably feel a little uncomfortable: he will by no means venture to meet us with a serenely crushing "Sir, it cannot be better done," in the manner of Albert Duerer. And yet, if it could not be better done, he, of all men, should know that best, nor fear to say so; it is good for himself, and for us, that he should assert that, if he knows that. The last time my dear old friend William Hunt came to see me, I took down one of his early drawings for him to see (three blue plums and one amber one, and two nuts). So he looked at it, happily, for a minute or two and then said, "Well, it's very nice, isn't it? I did not think I could have done so well." The saying was entirely right, exquisitely modest and true; only I fear he would not have had the courage to maintain that his drawing was good, if anybody had been there to say otherwise. Still, having done well, he knew it; and what is more no man ever does do well without knowing it: he may not know _how_ well, nor be conscious of the best of his own qualities; nor measure, or care to measure, the relation of his power to that of other men, but he will know that what he has done is, in an intended, accomplished, and ascertainable degree, good. Every able and honest workman, as he wins a right to rest, so he wins a right to approval,--his own if no one's beside; nay, his only true rest _is_ in the calm consciousness that the thing has been honorably done--[Greek: suneidesis hoti kalon]. I do not use the Greek words in pedantry, I want them for future service and interpretation; no English words, nor any of any other language, would do as well. For I mean to try to show, and believe I _can_ show, that a simple and sure conviction of our having done rightly is not only an attainable, but a necessary seal and sign of our having so done; and that the doing well or rightly, and ill or wrongly, are both conditions of the whole being of each person, coming of a nature in him which affects all things that he may do, from the least to the greatest, according to the noble old phrase for the conquering rightness, of "integrity," "wholeness," or "wholesomeness." So that when we do external things (that are our business) ill, it is a sign that internal, and, in fact, that all things, are ill with us; and when we do external things well, it is a sign that internal and all things are well with us. And I believe there are two principal adversities to this wholesomeness of work, and to all else that issues out of wholeness of inner character, with which we have in these days specially to contend. The first is the variety of Art round us, tempting us to thoughtless imitation; the second our own want of belief in the existence of a rule of right. 28. I. I say the first is the variety of Art around us. No man can pursue his own track in peace, nor obtain consistent guidance, if doubtful of his track. All places are full of inconsistent example, all mouths of contradictory advice, all prospects of opposite temptations. The young artist sees myriads of things he would like to do, but cannot learn from their authors how they were done, nor choose decisively any method which he may follow with the accuracy and confidence necessary to success. He is not even sure if his thoughts are his own; for the whole atmosphere round him is full of floating suggestion: those which are his own he cannot keep pure, for he breathes a dust of decayed ideas, wreck of the souls of dead nations, driven by contrary winds. He may stiffen himself (and all the worse for him) into an iron self-will, but if the iron has any magnetism in it, he cannot pass a day without finding himself, at the end of it, instead of sharpened or tempered, covered with a ragged fringe of iron filings. If there be anything better than iron--living wood fiber--in him, he cannot be allowed any natural growth, but gets hacked in every extremity, and bossed over with lumps of frozen clay;--grafts of incongruous blossom that will never set; while some even recognize no need of knife or clay (though both are good in a gardener's hand), but deck themselves out with incongruous glittering, like a Christmas-tree. Even were the style chosen true to his own nature, and persisted in, there is harm in the very eminence of the models set before him at the beginning of his career. If he feels their power, they make him restless and impatient, it may be despondent, it may be madly and fruitlessly ambitious. If he does not feel it, he is sure to be struck by what is weakest or slightest of their peculiar qualities; fancies that _this_ is what they are praised for; tries to catch the trick of it; and whatever easy vice or mechanical habit the master may have been betrayed or warped into, the unhappy pupil watches and adopts, triumphant in its ease:--has not sense to steal the peacock's feather, but imitates its voice. Better for him, far better, never to have seen what had been accomplished by others, but to have gained gradually his own quiet way, or at least with his guide only a step in advance of him, and the lantern low on the difficult path. Better even, it has lately seemed, to be guideless and lightless; fortunate those who, by desolate effort, trying hither and thither, have groped their way to some independent power. So, from Cornish rock, from St. Giles's Lane, from Thames mudshore, you get your Prout, your Hunt, your Turner; not, indeed, any of them well able to spell English, nor taught so much of their own business as to lay a color safely; but yet at last, or first, doing somehow something, wholly ineffective on the national mind, yet real, and valued at last after they are dead, in money;--valued otherwise not even at so much as the space of dead brick wall it would cover; their work being left for years packed in parcels at the National Gallery, or hung conclusively out of sight under the shadowy iron vaults of Kensington. The men themselves, quite inarticulate, determine nothing of their Art, interpret nothing of their own minds; teach perhaps a trick or two of their stage business in early life--as, for instance, that it is good where there is much black to break it with white, and where there is much white to break it with black, etc., etc.; in later life remain silent altogether, or speak only in despair (fretful or patient according to their character); one who might have been among the best of them,[63] the last we heard of, finding refuge for an entirely honest heart from a world which declares honesty to be impossible, only in a madness nearly as sorrowful as its own;--the religious madness which makes a beautiful soul ludicrous and ineffectual; and so passes away, bequeathing for our inheritance from its true and strong life, a pretty song about a tiger, another about a bird-cage, two or three golden couplets, which no one will ever take the trouble to understand,--the spiritual portrait of the ghost of a flea,--and the critical opinion that "the unorganized blots of Rubens and Titian are not Art." Which opinion the public mind perhaps not boldly indorsing, is yet incapable of pronouncing adversely to it, that the said blots of Titian and Rubens _are_ Art, perceiving for itself little good in them, and hanging _them_ also well out of its way, at tops of walls (Titian's portrait of Charles V. at Munich, for example; Tintoret's Susannah, and Veronese's Magdalen, in the Louvre), that it may have room and readiness for what may be generally termed "railroad work," bearing on matters more immediately in hand; said public looking to the present pleasure of its fancy, and the portraiture of itself in official and otherwise imposing or entertaining circumstances, as the only "Right" cognizable by it. 29. II. And this is a deeper source of evil, by far, than the former one, for though it is ill for us to strain towards a right for which we have never ripened it is worse for us to believe in no right at all. "Anything," we say, "that a clever man can do to amuse us is good; what does not amuse us we do not want. Taste is assuredly a frivolous, apparently a dangerous gift; vicious persons and vicious nations have it; we are a practical people, content to know what we like, wise in not liking it too much, and when tired of it, wise in getting something we like better. Painting is of course an agreeable ornamental Art, maintaining a number of persons respectably, deserving therefore encouragement, and getting it pecuniarily, to a hitherto unheard-of extent. What would you have more?" This is, I believe, very nearly our Art-creed. The fact being (very ascertainably by anyone who will take the trouble to examine the matter), that there is a cultivated Art among all great nations, inevitably necessary to them as the fulfillment of one part of their human nature. None but savage nations are without Art, and civilized nations who do their Art ill, do it because there is something deeply wrong at their hearts. They paint badly as a paralyzed man stammers, because his life is touched somewhere within; when the deeper life is full in a people, they speak clearly and rightly; paint clearly and rightly; think clearly and rightly. There is some reverse effect, but very little. Good pictures do not teach a nation; they are the signs of its having been taught. Good thoughts do not form a nation; it must be formed before it can think them. Let it once decay at the heart, and its good work and good thoughts will become subtle luxury and aimless sophism; and it and they will perish together. 30. It is my purpose, therefore, in some subsequent papers, with such help as I may anywise receive, to try if there may not be determined some of the simplest laws which are indeed binding on Art practice and judgment. Beginning with elementary principle, and proceeding upwards as far as guiding laws are discernible, I hope to show, that if we do not yet know them, there are at least such laws to be known, and that it is of a deep and intimate importance to any people, especially to the English at this time, that their children should be sincerely taught whatever arts they learn, and in riper age become capable of a just choice and wise pleasure in the accomplished works of the artist. But I earnestly ask for help in this task. It is one which can only come to good issue by the consent and aid of many thinkers; and I would, with the permission of the Editor of this Journal, invite debate on the subject of each paper, together with brief and clear statements of consent or objection, with name of consenter or objector; so that after courteous discussion had, and due correction of the original statement, we may get something at last set down, as harmoniously believed by such and such known artists. If nothing can thus be determined, at least the manner and variety of dissent will show whether it is owing to the nature of the subject, or to the impossibility, under present circumstances, that different persons should approach it from similar points of view; and the inquiry, whatever its immediate issue, cannot be ultimately fruitless. FOOTNOTES: [62] _Art Journal_, New Series, vol. iv., pp. 5-6. January 1865.--ED. [63] See p. 353, Sec. 83, for a further mention of William Blake.--ED. _ |
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