Kitabı oku: «Arrows of the Chace, vol. 1/2», sayfa 9

[From “the Oxford Museum,” pp. 60-90.]
Gothic Architecture and the Oxford Museum

January 20, 1859.

My Dear Acland: I was not able to write, as I had hoped, from Switzerland, for I found it impossible to lay down any principles respecting the decoration of the Museum which did not in one way or other involve disputed points, too many, and too subtle, to be discussed in a letter. Nor do I feel the difficulty less in writing to you now, so far as regards the question occurring in our late conversations, respecting the best mode of completing those interior decorations. Yet I must write, if only to ask that I may be in some way associated with you in what you are now doing to bring the Museum more definitely before the public mind—that I may be associated at least in the expression of my deep sense of the noble purpose of the building—of the noble sincerity of effort in its architect—of the endless good which the teachings to which it will be devoted must, in their ultimate issue, accomplish for mankind. How vast the range of that issue, you have shown in the lecture which I have just read, in which you have so admirably traced the chain of the physical sciences as it encompasses the great concords of this visible universe.¹²² But how deep the workings of these new springs of knowledge are to be, and how great our need of them, and how far the brightness and the beneficence of them are to reach among all the best interests of men—perhaps none of us can yet conceive, far less know or say. For, much as I reverence physical science as a means of mental education (and you know how I have contended for it, as such, now these twenty years, from the sunny afternoon of spring when Ehrenberg and you and I went hunting for infusoria in Christchurch meadow streams, to the hour when the prize offered by Sir Walter Trevelyan and yourself for the best essay on the Fauna of that meadow, marked the opening of a new era in English education¹²³)—much, I say, as I reverence physical science in this function, I reverence it, at this moment, more as the source of utmost human practical power, and the means by which the far-distant races of the world, who now sit in darkness and the shadow of death, are to be reached and regenerated. At home or far away—the call is equally instant—here, for want of more extended physical science, there is plague in our streets, famine in our fields; the pest strikes root and fruit over a hemisphere of the earth, we know not why; the voices of our children fade away into silence of venomous death, we know not why; the population of this most civilized country resists every effort to lead it into purity of habit and habitation—to give it genuineness of nourishment, and wholesomeness of air, as a new interference with its liberty; and insists vociferously on its right to helpless death. All this is terrible; but it is more terrible yet that dim, phosphorescent, frightful superstitions still hold their own over two-thirds of the inhabited globe, and that all the phenomena of nature which were intended by the Creator to enforce His eternal laws of love and judgment, and which, rightly understood, enforce them more strongly by their patient beneficence, and their salutary destructiveness, than the miraculous dew on Gideon’s fleece, or the restrained lightnings of Horeb—that all these legends of God’s daily dealing with His creatures remain unread, or are read backwards, into blind, hundred-armed horror of idol cosmogony.

How strange it seems that physical science should ever have been thought adverse to religion! The pride of physical science is, indeed, adverse, like every other pride, both to religion and truth; but sincerity of science, so far from being hostile, is the path-maker among the mountains for the feet of those who publish peace.

Now, therefore, and now only, it seems to me, the University has become complete in her function as a teacher of the youth of the nation to which every hour gives wider authority over distant lands; and from which every rood of extended dominion demands new, various, and variously applicable knowledge of the laws which govern the constitution of the globe, and must finally regulate the industry, no less than discipline the intellect, of the human race. I can hardly turn my mind from these deep causes of exultation to the minor difficulties which beset or restrict your undertaking. The great work is accomplished; the immediate impression made by it is of little importance; and as for my own special subjects of thought or aim, though many of them are closely involved in what has been done, and some principles which I believe to be, in their way, of great importance, are awkwardly compromised in what has been imperfectly done—all these I am tempted to waive, or content to compromise when only I know that the building is in main points fit for its mighty work. Yet you will not think that it was matter of indifference to me when I saw, as I went over Professor Brodie’s¹²⁴ chemical laboratories the other day, how closely this success of adaptation was connected with the choice of the style. It was very touching and wonderful to me. Here was the architecture which I had learned to know and love in pensive ruins, deserted by the hopes and efforts of men, or in dismantled fortress-fragments recording only their cruelty—here was this very architecture lending itself, as if created only for these, to the foremost activities of human discovery, and the tenderest functions of human mercy. No other architecture, as I felt in an instant, could have thus adapted itself to a new and strange office. No fixed arrangements of frieze and pillar, nor accepted proportions of wall and roof, nor practised refinement of classical decoration, could have otherwise than absurdly and fantastically yielded its bed to the crucible, and its blast to the furnace; but these old vaultings and strong buttresses—ready always to do service to man, whatever his bidding—to shake the waves of war back from his seats of rock, or prolonged through faint twilights of sanctuary, the sighs of his superstition—he had but to ask it of them, and they entered at once into the lowliest ministries of the arts of healing, and the sternest and clearest offices in the service of science.

And the longer I examined the Museum arrangements, the more I felt that it could be only some accidental delay in the recognition of this efficiency for its work which had caused any feeling adverse to its progress among the members of the University. The general idea about the Museum has perhaps been, hitherto, that it is a forced endeavor to bring decorative forms of architecture into uncongenial uses; whereas, the real fact is, as far as I can discern it, that no other architecture would, under the required circumstances, have been possible; and that any effort to introduce classical types of form into these laboratories and museums must have ended in ludicrous discomfiture. But the building has now reached a point of crisis, and it depends upon the treatment which its rooms now receive in completion, whether the facts of their propriety and utility be acknowledged by the public, or lost sight of in the distraction of their attention to matters wholly external.

So strongly I feel this, that, whatever means of decoration had been at your disposal, I should have been inclined to recommend an exceeding reserve in that matter. Perhaps I should even have desired such reserve on abstract grounds of feeling. The study of Natural History is one eminently addressed to the active energies of body and mind. Nothing is to be got out of it by dreaming, not always much by thinking—everything by seeking and seeing. It is work for the hills and fields,—work of foot and hand, knife and hammer,—so far as it is to be afterwards carried on in the house, the more active and workmanlike our proceedings the better, fresh air blowing in from the windows, and nothing interfering with the free space for our shelves and instruments on the walls. I am not sure that much interior imagery or color, or other exciting address to any of the observant faculties, would be desirable under such circumstances. You know best; but I should no more think of painting in bright colors beside you, while you were dissecting or analyzing, than of entertaining you by a concert of fifes and cymbals.

But farther: Do you suppose Gothic decoration is an easy thing, or that it is to be carried out with a certainty of success at the first trial, under new and difficult conditions? The system of the Gothic decorations took eight hundred years to mature, gathering its power by undivided inheritance of traditional method, and unbroken accession of systematic power; from its culminating point in the Sainte Chapelle, it faded through four hundred years of splendid decline; now for two centuries it has lain dead—and more than so—buried; and more than so, forgotten, as a dead man out of mind; do you expect to revive it out of those retorts and furnaces of yours, as the cloud-spirit of the Arabian sea rose from beneath the seals of Solomon? Perhaps I have been myself faultfully answerable for this too eager hope in your mind (as well as in that of others) by what I have urged so often respecting the duty of bringing out the power of subordinate workmen in decorative design. But do you think I meant workmen trained (or untrained) in the way that ours have been until lately, and then cast loose on a sudden, into unassisted contentions with unknown elements of style? I meant the precise contrary of this; I meant workmen as we have yet to create them: men inheriting the instincts of their craft through many generations, rigidly trained in every mechanical art that bears on their materials, and familiarized from infancy with every condition of their beautiful and perfect treatment; informed and refined in manhood, by constant observation of all natural fact and form; then classed, according to their proved capacities, in ordered companies, in which every man shall know his part, and take it calmly and without effort or doubt,—indisputably well, unaccusably accomplished, mailed and weaponed cap-à-pie for his place and function. Can you lay your hand on such men? or do you think that mere natural good-will and good-feeling can at once supply their place? Not so: and the more faithful and earnest the minds you have to deal with, the more careful you should be not to urge them towards fields of effort, in which, too early committed, they can only be put to unserviceable defeat.

Nor can you hope to accomplish by rule or system what cannot be done by individual taste. The laws of color are definable up to certain limits, but they are not yet defined. So far are they from definition, that the last, and, on the whole, best work on the subject (Sir Gardiner Wilkinson’s) declares the “color concords” of preceding authors to be discords, and vice versâ.¹²⁵

Much, therefore, as I love color decoration when it is rightly given, and essential as it has been felt by the great architects of all periods to the completion of their work, I would not, in your place, endeavor to carry out such decoration at present, in any elaborate degree, in the interior of the Museum. Leave it for future thought; above all, try no experiments. Let small drawings be made of the proposed arrangements of color in every room; have them altered on the paper till you feel they are right; then carry them out firmly and simply; but, observe, with as delicate execution as possible. Rough work is good in its place, three hundred feet above the eye, on a cathedral front, but not in the interior of rooms, devoted to studies in which everything depends upon accuracy of touch and keenness of sight.

With respect to this finishing, by the last touches bestowed on the sculpture of the building, I feel painfully the harmfulness of any ill-advised parsimony at this moment. For it may, perhaps, be alleged by the advocates of retrenchment, that so long as the building is fit for its uses (and your report is conclusive as to its being so), economy in treatment of external feature is perfectly allowable, and will in nowise diminish the serviceableness of the building in the great objects which its designs regarded. To a certain extent this is true. You have comfortable rooms, I hope sufficient apparatus; and it now depends much more on the professors than on the ornaments of the building, whether or not it is to become a bright or obscure centre of public instruction. Yet there are other points to be considered. As the building stands at present, there is a discouraging aspect of parsimony about it. One sees that the architect has done the utmost he could with the means at his disposal, and that just at the point of reaching what was right, he has been stopped for want of funds. This is visible in almost every stone of the edifice. It separates it with broad distinctiveness from all the other buildings in the University. It may be seen at once that our other public institutions, and all our colleges—though some of them simply designed—are yet richly built, never pinchingly. Pieces of princely costliness, every here and there, mingle among the simplicities or severities of the student’s life. What practical need, for instance, have we at Christchurch of the beautiful fan-vaulting under which we ascend to dine? We might have as easily achieved the eminence of our banquets under a plain vault. What need have the readers in the Bodleian of the ribbed traceries which decorate its external walls? Yet, which of those readers would not think that learning was insulted by their removal? And are there any of the students of Balliol devoid of gratitude for the kindly munificence of the man who gave them the beautiful sculptured brackets of their oriel window, when three massy projecting stones would have answered the purpose just as well? In these and also other regarded and pleasant portions of our colleges, we find always a wealthy and worthy completion of all appointed features, which I believe is not without strong, though untraced effect, on the minds of the younger scholars, giving them respect for the branches of learning which these buildings are intended to honor, and increasing, in a certain degree, that sense of the value of delicacy and accuracy which is the first condition of advance in those branches of learning themselves.

Your Museum, if you now bring it to hurried completion, will convey an impression directly the reverse of this. It will have the look of a place, not where a revered system of instruction is established, but where an unadvised experiment is being disadvantageously attempted. It is yet in your power to avoid this, and to make the edifice as noble in aspect as in function. Whatever chance there may be of failure in interior work, rich ornamentation may be given, without any chance of failure, to just that portion of the exterior which will give pleasure to every passer-by, and express the meaning of the building best to the eyes of strangers. There is, I repeat, no chance of serious failure in this external decoration, because your architect has at his command the aid of men, such as worked with the architects of past times. Not only has the art of Gothic sculpture in part remained, though that of Gothic color has been long lost, but the unselfish—and, I regret to say, in part self-sacrificing—zeal of two first-rate sculptors, Mr. Munro and Mr. Woolner, which has already given you a series of noble statues, is still at your disposal, to head and systematize the efforts of inferior workmen.

I do not know if you will attribute it to a higher estimate than yours of the genius of the O’Shea family,¹²⁶ or to a lower estimate of what they have as yet accomplished, that I believe they will, as they proceed, produce much better ornamental sculpture than any at present completed in the Museum. It is also to be remembered that sculptors are able to work for us with a directness of meaning which none of our painters could bring to their task, even were they disposed to help us. A painter is scarcely excited to his strength, but by subjects full of circumstance, such as it would be difficult to suggest appropriately in the present building; but a sculptor has room enough for his full power in the portrait statues, which are necessarily the leading features of good Gothic decoration. Let me pray you, therefore, so far as you have influence with the delegacy, to entreat their favorable consideration of the project stated in Mr. Greswell’s appeal—the enrichment of the doorway, and the completion of the sculpture of the West Front. There is a reason for desiring such a plan to be carried out, of wider reach than any bearing on the interests of the Museum itself. I believe that the elevation of all arts in England to their true dignity, depends principally on our recovering that unity of purpose in sculptors and architects, which characterized the designers of all great Christian buildings. Sculpture, separated from architecture, always degenerates into effeminacies and conceits; architecture, stripped of sculpture, is at best a convenient arrangement of dead walls; associated, they not only adorn, but reciprocally exalt each other, and give to all the arts of the country in which they thus exist, a correspondent tone of majesty.

But I would plead for the enrichment of this doorway by portrait sculpture, not so much even on any of these important grounds, as because it would be the first example in modern English architecture of the real value and right place of commemorative statues. We seem never to know at present where to put such statues. In the midst of the blighted trees of desolate squares, or at the crossings of confused streets, or balanced on the pinnacles of pillars, or riding across the tops of triumphal arches, or blocking up the aisles of cathedrals—in none of these positions, I think, does the portrait statue answer its purpose. It may be a question whether the erection of such statues is honorable to the erectors, but assuredly it is not honorable to the persons whom it pretends to commemorate; nor is it anywise matter of exultation to a man who has deserved well of his country to reflect that he may one day encumber a crossing, or disfigure a park gate. But there is no man of worth or heart who would not feel it a high and priceless reward that his statue should be placed where it might remind the youth of England of what had been exemplary in his life, or useful in his labors, and might be regarded with no empty reverence, no fruitless pensiveness, but with the emulative, eager, unstinted passionateness of honor, which youth pays to the dead leaders of the cause it loves, or discoverers of the light by which it lives. To be buried under weight of marble, or with splendor of ceremonial, is still no more than burial; but to be remembered daily, with profitable tenderness, by the activest intelligences of the nation we have served, and to have power granted even to the shadows of the poor features, sunk into dust, still to warn, to animate, to command, as the father’s brow rules and exalts the toil of his children. This is not burial, but immortality.

There is, however, another kind of portraiture, already richly introduced in the works of the Museum; the portraiture, namely, of flowers and animals, respecting which I must ask you to let me say a few selfish, no less than congratulatory words—selfish, inasmuch as they bear on this visible exposition of a principle which it has long been one of my most earnest aims to maintain. We English call ourselves a practical people; but, nevertheless, there are some of our best and most general instincts which it takes us half-centuries to put into practice. Probably no educated Englishman or Englishwoman has ever, for the last forty years, visited Scotland, with leisure on their hands, without making a pilgrimage to Melrose; nor have they ever, I suppose, accomplished the pilgrimage without singing to themselves the burden of Scott’s description of the Abbey. Nor in that description (may it not also be conjectured) do they usually feel any couplets more deeply than the—

 
“Spreading herbs and flowerets bright
Glistened with the dew of night.
No herb nor floweret glistened there
But was carved in the cloister arches as fair.”
 

And yet, though we are raising every year in England new examples of every kind of costly and variously intended buildings,—ecclesiastical, civil, and domestic,—none of us, through all that period, had boldness enough to put the pretty couplets into simple practice. We went on, even in the best Gothic work we attempted, clumsily copying the rudest ornaments of previous buildings; we never so much as dreamed of learning from the monks of Melrose, and seeking for help beneath the dew that sparkled on their “gude kail” garden.¹²⁷

Your Museum at Oxford is literally the first building raised in England since the close of the fifteenth century, which has fearlessly put to new trial this old faith in nature, and in the genius of the unassisted workman, who gathered out of nature the materials he needed. I am entirely glad, therefore, that you have decided on engraving for publication one of O’Shea’s capitals;¹²⁸ it will be a complete type of the whole work, in its inner meaning, and far better to show one of them in its completeness than to give any reduced sketch of the building. Nevertheless, beautiful as that capital is, and as all the rest of O’Shea’s work is likely to be, it is not yet perfect Gothic sculpture; and it might give rise to dangerous error, if the admiration given to these carvings were unqualified.

I cannot, of course, enter in this letter into any discussion of the question, more and more vexed among us daily, respecting the due meaning and scope of conventionalism in treatment of natural form; but I may state briefly what, I trust, will be the conclusion to which all this “vexing” will at last lead our best architects.

The highest art in all kinds is that which conveys the most truth; and the best ornamentation possible would be the painting of interior walls with frescos by Titian, representing perfect Humanity in color; and the sculpture of exterior walls by Phidias, representing perfect Humanity in form. Titian and Phidias are precisely alike in their conception and treatment of nature—everlasting standards of the right.

Beneath ornamentation, such as men like these could bestow, falls in various rank, according to its subordination to vulgar uses or inferior places, what is commonly conceived as ornamental art. The lower its office, and the less tractable its material, the less of nature it should contain, until a zigzag becomes the best ornament for the hem of a robe, and a mosaic of bits of glass the best design for a colored window. But all these forms of lower art are to be conventional only because they are subordinate—not because conventionalism is in itself a good or desirable thing. All right conventionalism is a wise acceptance of, and compliance with, conditions of restraint or inferiority: it may be inferiority of our knowledge or power, as in the art of a semi-savage nation; or restraint by reason of material, as in the way the glass painter should restrict himself to transparent hue, and a sculptor deny himself the eyelash and the film of flowing hair, which he cannot cut in marble: but in all cases whatever, right conventionalism is either a wise acceptance of an inferior place, or a noble display of power under accepted limitation; it is not an improvement of natural form into something better or purer than Nature herself.

BRITISH FERNS.

Now this great and most precious principle may be compromised in two quite opposite ways. It is compromised on one side when men suppose that the degradation of a natural form which fits it for some subordinate place is an improvement of it; and that a black profile on a red ground, because it is proper on a water-jug, is therefore an idealization of Humanity, and nobler art than a picture of Titian. And it is compromised equally gravely on the opposite side, when men refuse to submit to the limitation of material and the fitnesses of office—when they try to produce finished pictures in colored glass, or substitute the inconsiderate imitation of natural objects for the perfectness of adapted and disciplined design.

There is a tendency in the work of the Oxford Museum to err on this last side; unavoidable, indeed, in the present state of our art-knowledge—and less to be regretted in a building devoted to natural science than in any other: nevertheless, I cannot close this letter without pointing it out, and warning the general reader against supposing that the ornamentation of the Museum is, or can be as yet, a representation of what Gothic work will be, when its revival is complete. Far more severe, yet more perfect and lovely, that work will involve, under sterner conventional restraint, the expression not only of natural form, but of all vital and noble natural law. For the truth of decoration is never to be measured by its imitative power, but by its suggestive and informative power. In the annexed spandril of the iron-work of our roof, for instance, the horse-chestnut leaf and nut are used as the principal elements of form: they are not ill-arranged, and produce a more agreeable effect than convolutions of the iron could have given, unhelped by any reference to natural objects. Nevertheless, I do not call it an absolutely good design; for it would have been possible, with far severer conventional treatment of the iron bars, and stronger constructive arrangement of them, to have given vigorous expression, not of the shapes of leaves and nuts only, but of their peculiar radiant or fanned expansion, and other conditions of group and growth in the tree; which would have been just the more beautiful and interesting, as they would have arisen from deeper research into nature, and more adaptive modifying power in the designer’s mind, than the mere leaf termination of a riveted scroll.

From “The Oxford Museum.” p. 89.

I am compelled to name these deficiencies, in order to prevent misconception of the principles we are endeavoring to enforce; but I do not name them as at present to be avoided; or even much to be regretted. They are not chargeable either on the architect, or on the subordinate workmen; but only on the system which has for three centuries withheld all of us from healthy study; and although I doubt not that lovelier and juster expressions of the Gothic principle will be ultimately aimed at by us, than any which are possible in the Oxford Museum, its builders will never lose their claim to our chief gratitude, as the first guides in a right direction; and the building itself—the first exponent of the recovered truth—will only be the more venerated the more it is excelled.

Believe me, my dear Acland,

Ever affectionately yours,

J. Ruskin.