Lectures on Art | Page 6

troubled one, because every day brought its danger or its change. The
very eventfulness of the life rendered it careless, as generally is still the
case with soldiers and sailors. Now, when there are great powers of
thought, and little to think of, all the waste energy and fancy are thrown
into the manual work, and you have so much intellect as would direct
the affairs of a large mercantile concern for a day, spent all at once,
quite unconsciously, in drawing an ingenious spiral.
Also, powers of doing fine ornamental work are only to be reached by a
perpetual discipline of the hand as well as of the fancy; discipline as
attentive and painful as that which a juggler has to put himself through,
to overcome the more palpable difficulties of his profession. The
execution of the best artists is always a splendid tour-de-force; and
much that in painting is supposed to be dependent on material is indeed
only a lovely and quite inimitable legerdemain. Now, when powers of
fancy, stimulated by this triumphant precision of manual dexterity,
descend uninterruptedly from generation to generation, you have at last,
what is not so much a trained artist, as a new species of animal, with
whose instinctive gifts you have no chance of contending. And thus all
our imitations of other people's work are futile. We must learn first to
make honest English wares, and afterwards to decorate them as may
please the then approving Graces.
14. Secondly--and this is an incapacity of a graver kind, yet having its
own good in it also--we shall never be successful in the highest fields
of ideal or theological art.

For there is one strange, but quite essential, character in us: ever since
the Conquest, if not earlier:--a delight in the forms of burlesque which
are connected in some degree with the foulness of evil. I think the most
perfect type of a true English mind in its best possible temper, is that of
Chaucer; and you will find that, while it is for the most part full of
thoughts of beauty, pure and wild like that of an April morning, there
are even in the midst of this, sometimes momentarily jesting passages
which stoop to play with evil--while the power of listening to and
enjoying the jesting of entirely gross persons, whatever the feeling may
be which permits it, afterwards degenerates into forms of humour
which render some of quite the greatest, wisest, and most moral of
English writers now almost useless for our youth. And yet you will find
that whenever Englishmen are wholly without this instinct, their genius
is comparatively weak and restricted.
15. Now, the first necessity for the doing of any great work in ideal art,
is the looking upon all foulness with horror, as a contemptible though
dreadful enemy. You may easily understand what I mean, by
comparing the feelings with which Dante regards any form of obscenity
or of base jest, with the temper in which the same things are regarded
by Shakespeare. And this strange earthly instinct of ours, coupled as it
is, in our good men, with great simplicity and common sense, renders
them shrewd and perfect observers and delineators of actual nature, low
or high; but precludes them from that specialty of art which is properly
called sublime. If ever we try anything in the manner of Michael
Angelo or of Dante, we catch a fall, even in literature, as Milton in the
battle of the angels, spoiled from Hesiod; while in art, every attempt in
this style has hitherto been the sign either of the presumptuous egotism
of persons who had never really learned to be workmen, or it has been
connected with very tragic forms of the contemplation of death,--it has
always been partly insane, and never once wholly successful.
But we need not feel any discomfort in these limitations of our capacity.
We can do much that others cannot, and more than we have ever yet
ourselves completely done. Our first great gift is in the portraiture of
living people--a power already so accomplished in both Reynolds and
Gainsborough that nothing is left for future masters but to add the calm

of perfect workmanship to their vigour and felicity of perception. And
of what value a true school of portraiture may become in the future,
when worthy men will desire only to be known, and others will not fear
to know them, for what they truly were, we cannot from any past
records of art influence yet conceive. But in my next address it will be
partly my endeavour to show you how much more useful, because
more humble, the labour of great masters might have been, had they
been content to bear record of the souls that were dwelling with them
on