Kitabı oku: «The Eagle's Nest», sayfa 6

112. Then, besides this faculty of clear vision, you have to consider the faculty of metric vision. Neither an eagle, nor a kingfisher, nor any other darting bird, can see things with both their eyes at the same time as completely as you and I can; but think of their faculty of measurement as compared with ours! You will find that it takes you months of labour before you can acquire accurate power, even of deliberate estimate of distances with the eye; it is one of the points to which, most of all, I have to direct your work. And the curious thing is that, given the degree of practice, you will measure ill or well with the eye in proportion to the quantity of life in you. No one can measure with a glance, when they are tired. Only the other day I got half an inch out of a foot, in drawing merely a coat of arms, because I was tired. But fancy what would happen to a swallow, if it was half an inch out in a foot, in flying round a corner!

113. Well, that is the first branch of the questions which we want answered by optical science;—the actual distortion, contraction, and other modification, of the sight of different animals, as far as it can be known from the forms of their eyes. Then, secondly, we ourselves need to be taught the connection of the sense of colour with health; the difference in the physical conditions which lead us to seek for gloom, or brightness of hue; and the nature of purity in colour, first in the object seen, and then in the eye which prefers it.

(The portion of lecture here omitted referred to illustrations of vulgarity and delicacy in colour, showing that the vulgar colours, even when they seemed most glaring, were in reality impure and dull; and destroyed each other by contention; while noble colour, intensely bright and pure, was nevertheless entirely governed and calm, so that every colour bettered and aided all the rest.)

114. You recollect how I urged you in my opening course of lectures rather to work in the school of crystalline colour than in that of shade.

Since I gave that first course of lectures, my sense of the necessity of this study of brightness primarily, and of purity and gaiety beyond all other qualities, has deeply been confirmed by the influence which the unclean horror and impious melancholy of the modern French school—most literally the school of death—has gained over the popular mind. I will not dwell upon the evil phrenzy to-day. But it is in order, at once to do the best I can, in counteraction of its deadly influence, though not without other and constant reasons, that I give you heraldry, with all its splendour and its pride, its brightness of colour, and honourableness of meaning, for your main elementary practice.

115. To-day I have only time left to press on your thoughts the deeper law of this due joy in colour and light.

On any morning of the year, how many pious supplications, do you suppose, are uttered throughout educated Europe for “light”? How many lips at least pronounce the word, and, perhaps, in the plurality of instances, with some distinct idea attached to it? It is true the speakers employ it only as a metaphor. But why is their language thus metaphorical? If they mean merely to ask for spiritual knowledge or guidance, why not say so plainly, instead of using this jaded figure of speech? No boy goes to his father when he wants to be taught, or helped, and asks his father to give him ‘light.’ He asks what he wants, advice or protection. Why are not we also content to ask our Father for what we want, in plain English?

The metaphor, you will answer, is put into our mouths, and felt to be a beautiful and necessary one.

I admit it. In your educational series, first of all examples of modern art, is the best engraving I could find of the picture which, founded on that idea of Christ’s being the Giver of Light, contains, I believe, the most true and useful piece of religious vision which realistic art has yet embodied. But why is the metaphor so necessary, or, rather, how far is it a metaphor at all? Do you think the words ‘Light of the World’ mean only ‘Teacher or Guide of the World’? When the Sun of Justice is said to rise with health in its wings, do you suppose the image only means the correction of error? Or does it even mean so much? The Light of Heaven is needed to do that perfectly. But what we are to pray for is the Light of the World; nay, the Light “that lighteth every man that cometh into the world.”

116. You will find that it is no metaphor—nor has it ever been so.

To the Persian, the Greek, and the Christian, the sense of the power of the God of Light has been one and the same. That power is not merely in teaching or protecting, but in the enforcement of purity of body, and of equity or justice in the heart; and this, observe, not heavenly purity, nor final justice; but, now, and here, actual purity in the midst of the world’s foulness,—practical justice in the midst of the world’s iniquity. And the physical strength of the organ of sight,—the physical purity of the flesh, the actual love of sweet light and stainless colour,—are the necessary signs, real, inevitable, and visible, of the prevailing presence, with any nation, or in any house, of the “Light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world.”

117. Physical purity;—actual love of sweet light, and of fair colour. This is one palpable sign, and an entirely needful one, that we have got what we pretend to pray for every morning. That, you will find, is the meaning of Apollo’s war with the Python—of your own St. George’s war with the dragon. You have got that battle stamped again on every sovereign in your pockets, but do you think the sovereigns are helping, at this instant, St. George in his battle? Once, on your gold of the Henrys’ times, you had St. Michael and the dragon, and called your coins ‘angels.’ How much have they done lately, of angelic work, think you, in purifying the earth?

118. Purifying, literally, purging and cleansing. That is the first “sacred art” all men have to learn. And the words I deferred to the close of this lecture, about the proposed improvements in Oxford, are very few. Oxford is, indeed, capable of much improvement, but only by undoing the greater part of what has been done to it within the last twenty years; and, at present, the one thing that I would say to well-meaning persons is, ‘For Heaven’s sake—literally for Heaven’s sake—let the place alone, and clean it.’ I walked last week to Iffley—not having been there for thirty years. I did not know the church inside; I found it pitch-dark with painted glass of barbarous manufacture, and the old woman who showed it infinitely proud of letting me in at the front door instead of the side one. But close by it, not fifty yards down the hill, there was a little well—a holy well it should have been; beautiful in the recess of it, and the lovely ivy and weeds above it, had it but been cared for in a human way; but so full of frogs that you could not have dipped a cup in it without catching one.

What is the use of pretty painted glass in your churches when you have the plagues of Egypt outside of them?

119. I walked back from Iffley to Oxford by what was once the most beautiful approach to an academical city of any in Europe. Now it is a wilderness of obscure and base buildings. You think it a fine thing to go into Iffley church by the front door;—and you build cheap lodging-houses over all the approach to the chief university of English literature! That, forsooth, is your luminous cloister, and porch of Polygnotus to your temple of Apollo. And in the centre of that temple, at the very foot of the dome of the Radclyffe, between two principal colleges, the lane by which I walked from my own college half an hour ago, to this place,—Brasen-nose Lane—is left in a state as loathsome as a back-alley in the East end of London.

120. These, I suppose, are the signs of extending liberality, and disseminated advantages of education.

Gentlemen, if, as was lately said by a leading member of your Government, the function of a university be only to examine, it may indeed examine the whole mob of England in the midst of a dunghill; but it cannot teach the gentlemen of England in the midst of a dunghill; no, nor even the people of England. How many of her people it ought to teach is a question. We think, now-a-days, our philosophy is to light every man that cometh into the world, and to light every man equally. Well, when indeed you give up all other commerce in this island, and, as in Bacon’s “New Atlantis,” only buy and sell to get God’s first creature, which was light, there may be some equality of gain for us in that possession. But until then,—and we are very far from such a time—the light cannot be given to all men equally. Nay, it is becoming questionable whether, instead of being equally distributed to all, it may not be equally withdrawn from us all: whether the ideas of purity and justice,—of loveliness which is to sanctify our peace,—and of justice which is to sanctify our battle, are not vanishing from the purpose of our policy, and even from the conception of our education.

The uses, and the desire, of seclusion, of meditation, of restraint, and of correction—are they not passing from us in the collision of worldly interests, and restless contests of mean hope, and meaner fear? What light, what health, what peace, or what security,—youths of England—do you come here now to seek? In what sense do you receive—with what sincerity do you adopt for yourselves—the ancient legend of your schools, “Dominus illuminatio mea, et salus mea; quem timebo”?

121. Remember that the ancient theory on which this university was founded,—not the theory of any one founder, observe, nor even the concluded or expressed issue of the wisdom of many; but the tacit feeling by which the work and hope of all were united and completed—was, that England should gather from among her children a certain number of purest and best, whom she might train to become, each in their day of strength, her teachers and patterns in religion, her declarers and doers of justice in law and her leaders in battle. Bred, it might be, by their parents, in the fond poverty of learning, or amidst the traditions and discipline of illustrious houses,—in either manner separate, from their youth up, to their glorious offices—they came here to be kindled into the lights that were to be set on the hills of England, brightest of the pious, the loyal, and the brave. Whatever corruption blighted, whatever worldliness buried, whatever sin polluted their endeavour, this conception of its meaning remained; and was indeed so fulfilled in faithfulness, that to the men whose passions were tempered, and whose hearts confirmed, in the calm of these holy places, you, now living, owe all that is left to you of hope in heaven, and all of safety or honour that you have to trust and defend on earth.

Their children have forfeited, some by guilt, and many in folly, the leadership they inherited; and every man in England now is to do and to learn what is right in his own eyes. How much need, therefore, that we should learn first of all what eyes are; and what vision they ought to possess—science of sight granted only to clearness of soul; but granted in its fulness even to mortal eyes: for though, after the skin, worms may destroy their body, happy the pure in heart, for they, yet in their flesh, shall see the Light of Heaven, and know the will of God.

LECTURE VII.
THE RELATION TO ART OF THE SCIENCES OF INORGANIC FORM

February 9th, 1872

122. I did not wish in my last lecture, after I had directed your attention to the special bearing of some of the principles I pleaded for, to enforce upon you any farther general conclusions. But it is necessary now to collect the gist of what I endeavoured to show you respecting the organs of sight; namely, that in proportion to the physical perfectness or clearness of them is the degree in which they are raised from the perception of prey to the perception of beauty and of affection. The imperfect and brutal instrument of the eye may be vivid with malignity, or wild with hunger, or manifoldly detective with microscopic exaggeration, assisting the ingenuity of insects with a multiplied and permanent monstrosity of all things round them; but the noble human sight, careless of prey, disdainful of minuteness, and reluctant to anger, becomes clear in gentleness, proud in reverence, and joyful in love. And finally, the physical splendour of light and colour, so far from being the perception of a mechanical force by a mechanical instrument, is an entirely spiritual consciousness, accurately and absolutely proportioned to the purity of the moral nature, and to the force of its natural and wise affections.

123. That was the sum of what I wished to show you in my last lecture; and observe, that what remains to me doubtful in these things,—and it is much—I do not trouble you with. Only what I know that on experiment you can ascertain for yourselves, I tell you, and illustrate, for the time, as well as I can. Experiments in art are difficult, and take years to try; you may at first fail in them, as you might in a chemical analysis; but in all the matters which in this place I shall urge on your attention I can assure you of the final results.

That, then, being the sum of what I could tell you with certainty respecting the methods of sight, I have next to assure you that this faculty of sight, disciplined and pure, is the only proper faculty which the graphic artist is to use in his inquiries into nature. His office is to show her appearances; his duty is to know them. It is not his duty, though it may be sometimes for his convenience, while it is always at his peril, that he knows more;—knows the causes of appearances, or the essence of the things that produce them.

124. Once again, therefore, I must limit my application of the word science with respect to art. I told you that I did not mean by ‘science’ such knowledge as that triangles on equal bases and between parallels are equal, but such knowledge as that the stars in Cassiopeia are in the form of a W. But, farther still, it is not to be considered as science, for an artist, that they are stars at all. What he has to know is that they are luminous points which twinkle in a certain manner, and are pale yellow, or deep yellow, and may be quite deceptively imitated at a certain distance by brass-headed nails. This he ought to know, and to remember accurately, and his art knowledge—the science, that is to say—of which his art is to be the reflection, is the sum of knowledges of this sort; his memory of the look of the sun and moon at such and such times, through such and such clouds; his memory of the look of the mountains,—of the look of sea,—of the look of human faces.

125. Perhaps you would not call that ‘science’ at all. It is no matter what either you or I call it. It is science of a certain order of facts. Two summers ago, looking from Verona at sunset, I saw the mountains beyond the Lago di Garda of a strange blue, vivid and rich like the bloom of a damson. I never saw a mountain-blue of that particular quality before or since. My science as an artist consists in my knowing that sort of blue from every other sort, and in my perfect recollection that this particular blue had such and such a green associated with it in the near fields. I have nothing whatever to do with the atmospheric causes of the colour: that knowledge would merely occupy my brains wastefully, and warp my artistic attention and energy from their point. Or to take a simpler instance yet: Turner, in his early life, was sometimes good-natured, and would show people what he was about. He was one day making a drawing of Plymouth harbour, with some ships at the distance of a mile or two, seen against the light. Having shown this drawing to a naval officer, the naval officer observed with surprise, and objected with very justifiable indignation, that the ships of the line had no port-holes. “No,” said Turner, “certainly not. If you will walk up to Mount Edgecumbe, and look at the ships against the sunset, you will find you can’t see the port-holes.” “Well, but,” said the naval officer, still indignant, “you know the port-holes are there.” “Yes,” said Turner, “I know that well enough; but my business is to draw what I see, and not what I know is there.”

126. Now, that is the law of all fine artistic work whatsoever; and, more than that, it is, on the whole, perilous to you, and undesirable, that you should know what is there. If, indeed, you have so perfectly disciplined your sight that it cannot be influenced by prejudice;—if you are sure that none of your knowledge of what is there will be allowed to assert itself; and that you can reflect the ship as simply as the sea beneath it does, though you may know it with the intelligence of a sailor,—then, indeed, you may allow yourself the pleasure, and what will sometimes be the safeguard from error, of learning what ships or stars, or mountains, are in reality; but the ordinary powers of human perception are almost certain to be disturbed by the knowledge of the real nature of what they draw: and, until you are quite fearless of your faithfulness to the appearances of things, the less you know of their reality the better.

127. And it is precisely in this passive and naïve simplicity that art becomes, not only greatest in herself, but most useful to science. If she knew anything of what she was representing, she would exhibit that partial knowledge with complacency; and miss the points beside it, and beyond it. Two painters draw the same mountain; the one has got unluckily into his head some curiosity about glacier marking; and the other has a theory of cleavage. The one will scratch his mountain all over;—the other split it to pieces; and both drawings will be equally useless for the purposes of honest science.

128. Any of you who chance to know my books cannot but be surprised at my saying these things; for, of all writers on art, I suppose there is no one who appeals so often as I do to physical science. But observe, I appeal as a critic of art, never as a master of it. Turner made drawings of mountains and clouds which the public said were absurd. I said, on the contrary, they were the only true drawings of mountains and clouds ever made yet: and I proved this to be so, as only it could be proved, by steady test of physical science: but Turner had drawn his mountains rightly, long before their structure was known to any geologist in Europe; and has painted perfectly truths of anatomy in clouds which I challenge any meteorologist in Europe to explain at this day.

129. And indeed I was obliged to leave “Modern Painters” incomplete, or, rather, as a mere sketch of intention, in analysis of the forms of cloud and wave, because I had not scientific data enough to appeal to. Just reflect for an instant how absolutely whatever has been done in art to represent these most familiar, yet most spectral forms of cloud—utterly inorganic, yet, by spiritual ordinance, in their kindness fair, and in their anger frightful,—how all that has yet been done to represent them, from the undulating bands of blue and white which give to heraldry its nebule bearing, to the finished and deceptive skies of Turner, has been done without one syllable of help from the lips of science.⁶

130. The rain which flooded our fields the Sunday before last, was followed, as you will remember, by bright days, of which Tuesday the 20th was, in London, notable for the splendour, towards the afternoon, of its white cumulus clouds. There has been so much black east wind lately, and so much fog and artificial gloom, besides, that I find it is actually some two years since I last saw a noble cumulus cloud under full light. I chanced to be standing under the Victoria Tower at Westminster, when the largest mass of them floated past, that day, from the north-west; and I was more impressed than ever yet by the awfulness of the cloud-form, and its unaccountableness, in the present state of our knowledge. The Victoria Tower, seen against it, had no magnitude: it was like looking at Mont Blanc over a lamp-post. The domes of cloud-snow were heaped as definitely; their broken flanks were as grey and firm as rocks, and the whole mountain, of a compass and height in heaven which only became more and more inconceivable as the eye strove to ascend it, was passing behind the tower with a steady march, whose swiftness must in reality have been that of a tempest: yet, along all the ravines of vapour, precipice kept pace with precipice, and not one thrust another.

131. What is it that hews them out? Why is the blue sky pure there,—cloud solid here; and edged like marble: and why does the state of the blue sky pass into the state of cloud, in that calm advance?

It is true that you can more or less imitate the forms of cloud with explosive vapour or steam; but the steam melts instantly, and the explosive vapour dissipates itself. The cloud, of perfect form, proceeds unchanged. It is not an explosion, but an enduring and advancing presence. The more you think of it, the less explicable it will become to you.

132. That this should yet be unexplained in the kingdom of the air is, however, no marvel, since aspects of a similar kind are unexplained in the earth, which we tread, and in the water which we drink and wash with. You seldom pass a day without receiving some pleasure from the cloudings in marble; can you explain how the stone was clouded? You certainly do not pass a day without washing your hands. Can you explain the frame of a soap-bubble?

133. I have allowed myself, by way of showing at once what I wanted to come to, to overlook the proper arrangement of my subject, and I must draw back a little.

For all his own purposes, merely graphic, we say, if an artist’s eye is fine and faithful, the fewer points of science he has in his head, the better. But for purposes more than graphic, in order that he may feel towards things as he should, and choose them as we should, he ought to know something about them; and if he is quite sure that he can receive the science of them without letting himself become uncandid and narrow in observation, it is very desirable that he should be acquainted with a little of the alphabet of structure,—just as much as may quicken and certify his observation, without prejudicing it. Cautiously, therefore, and receiving it as a perilous indulgence, he may venture to learn, perhaps as much astronomy as may prevent his carelessly putting the new moon wrong side upwards; and as much botany as will prevent him from confusing, which I am sorry to say Turner did, too often, Scotch firs with stone pines. He may concede so much to geology as to choose, of two equally picturesque views, one that illustrates rather than conceals the structure of a crag: and perhaps, once or twice in his life, a portrait painter might advantageously observe how unlike a skull is to a face. And for you, who are to use your drawing as one element in general education, it is desirable that physical science should assist in the attainment of truth which a real painter seizes by practice of eye.

134. For this purpose I shall appeal to your masters in science to furnish us, as they have leisure, with some simple and readable accounts of the structure of things which we have to draw continually. Such scientific accounts will not usually much help us to draw them, but will make the drawing, when done, far more valuable to us.

I have told you, for instance, that nobody—at least, no painter—can at present explain the structure of a bubble. To know that structure will not help you to draw sea-foam, but it will make you look at sea-foam with greater interest.

I am not able now to watch the course of modern science, and may perhaps be in error in thinking that the frame of a bubble is still unexplained. But I have not yet met, by any chance, with an account of the forces which, under concussion, arrange the particles of a fluid into a globular film; though, from what I know of cohesion, gravity, and the nature of the atmosphere, I can make some shift to guess at the kind of action that takes place in forming a single bubble. But how one bubble absorbs another without breaking it; or what exact methods of tension prepare for the change of form, and establish it in an instant, I am utterly at a loss to conceive.

Here, I think, then, is one familiar matter which up to the possible point, science might condescendingly interpret for us. The exhaustion of the film in preparation for its change: the determination of the smaller bubble to yield itself up to the larger; the instantaneous flash into the new shape, and the swift adjustment of the rectangular lines of intersection in the marvellous vaulting—all this I want to be explained to us, so that, if we cannot understand it altogether, we may at least know exactly how far we do, and how far we do not.

135. And, next to the laws of the formation of a bubble, I want to see, in simple statement, those of the formation of a bottle. Namely, the laws of its resistance to fracture, from without and within, by concussion or explosion; and the due relations of form to thickness of material; so that, putting the problem in a constant form, we may know, out of a given quantity of material, how to make the strongest bottle under given limitations as to shape. For instance,—you have so much glass given you: your bottle is to hold two pints, to be flat-bottomed, and so narrow and long in the neck that you can grasp it with your hand. What will be its best ultimate form?

136. Probably, if you thought it courteous, you would laugh at me just now; and, at any rate, are thinking to yourselves that this art problem at least needs no scientific investigation, having been practically solved, long ago, by the imperative human instinct for the preservation of bottled stout. But you are only feeling now, gentlemen, and recognizing in one instance, what I tell you of all. Every scientific investigation is, in the same sense as this would be, useless to the trained master of any art. To the soap-bubble blower, and glass-blower,—to the pot-maker and bottle-maker,—if dexterous craftsmen, your science is of no account; and the imp of their art may be imagined as always looking triumphantly and contemptuously, out of its successfully-produced bottle, on the vain analysis of centrifugal impulse and inflating breath.

137. Nevertheless, in the present confusion of instinct and opinion as to beautiful form, it is desirable to have these two questions more accurately dealt with. For observe what they branch into. The coloured segments of globe out of which foam is constituted, are portions of spherical vaults constructed of fluent particles. You cannot have the principles of spherical vaulting put in more abstract terms.

Then considering the arch as the section of a vault, the greater number of Gothic arches may be regarded as the intersections of two spherical vaults.

Simple Gothic foliation is merely the triple, quadruple, or variously multiple repetition of such intersection.

And the beauty—(observe this carefully)—the beauty of Gothic arches, and of their foliation, always involves reference to the strength of their structure; but only to their structure as self-sustaining; not as sustaining superincumbent weight. In the most literal of senses, “the earth hath bubbles as the water hath; and these are of them.”

138. What do you think made Michael Angelo look back to the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore, saying, “Like thee I will not build one, better than thee I cannot”? To you or to me there is nothing in that dome different from hundreds of others. Which of you, who have been at Florence, can tell me honestly he saw anything wonderful in it? But Michael Angelo knew the exact proportion of thickness to weight and curvature which enabled it to stand as securely as a mountain of adamant, though it was only a film of clay, as frail, in proportion to its bulk, as a sea shell. Over the massy war towers of the city it floated; fragile, yet without fear. “Better than thee I cannot.”

139. Then think what the investigation of the bottle branches into, joined with that of its necessary companion, the cup. There is a sketch for you of the cup of cups, the pure Greek κάνθαρος, which is always in the hand of Dionusos, as the thunderbolt is in that of Zeus. Learn but to draw that thoroughly, and you won’t have much more to learn of abstract form; for the investigation of the kinds of line that limit this will lead you into all the practical geometry of nature; the ellipses of her sea-bays in perspective; the parabolas of her waterfalls and fountains in profile; the catenary curves of their falling festoons in front; the infinite variety of accelerated or retarded curvature in every condition of mountain debris. But do you think mere science can measure for you any of these things? That book on the table is one of the four volumes of Sir William Hamilton’s “Greek Vases.” He has measured every important vase vertically and horizontally, with precision altogether admirable, and which may, I hope, induce you to have patience with me in the much less complex, though even more scrupulous, measurements which I shall require on my own examples. Yet English pottery remains precisely where it was, in spite of all this investigation. Do you fancy a Greek workman ever made a vase by measurement? He dashed it from his hand on the wheel, and it was beautiful: and a Venetian glass-blower swept you a curve of crystal from the end of his pipe; and Reynolds or Tintoret swept you a curve of colour from their pencils, as a musician the cadence of a note, unerring, and to be measured, if you please, afterwards, with the exactitude of Divine law.

140. But, if the truth and beauty of art are thus beyond attainment by help of science, how much more its invention? I must defer what I have chiefly to say on this head till next lecture; but to-day I can illustrate, simply, the position of invention with respect to science in one very important group of inorganic forms—those of drapery.