9. WOODEN CHURCHES OF THE NORTH
I cannot pledge myself to this theory of the origin of the vaulting shaft, but the reader will find some interesting confirmations of it in Dahl’s work on the wooden churches of Norway. The inside view of the church of Borgund shows the timber construction of one shaft run up through a crossing architrave, and continued into the clerestory; while the church of Urnes is in the exact form of a basilica; but the wall above the arches is formed of planks, with a strong upright above each capital. The passage quoted from Stephen Eddy’s Life of Bishop Wilfrid, at p. 86 of Churton’s “Early English Church,” gives us one of the transformations or petrifactions of the wooden Saxon churches. “At Ripon he built a new church of polished stone, with columns variously ornamented, and porches.” Mr. Churton adds: “It was perhaps in bad imitation of the marble buildings he had seen in Italy, that he washed the walls of this original York Minster, and made them ‘whiter than snow.’”
10. CHURCH OF ALEXANDRIA
The very cause which enabled the Venetians to possess themselves of the body of St. Mark, was the destruction of the church by the caliph for the sake of its marbles: the Arabs and Venetians, though bitter enemies, thus building on the same models; these in reverence for the destroyed church, and those with the very pieces of it. In the somewhat prolix account of the matter given in the Notizie Storiche (above quoted) the main points are, that “il Califa de’ Saraceni, per fabbricarsi un Palazzo presse di Babilonia, aveva ordinato che dalle Chiese d’ Cristiani si togliessero i più scelti marmi;” and that the Venetians, “videro sotto i loro occhi flagellarsi crudelmente un Cristiano per aver infranto un marmo.” I heartily wish that the same kind of punishment were enforced to this day, for the same sin.
11. RENAISSANCE LANDSCAPE
I am glad here to re-assert opinions which it has grieved me to be suspected of having changed. The calmer tone of the second volume of “Modern Painters,” as compared with the first, induced, I believe, this suspicion, very justifiably, in the minds of many of its readers. The difference resulted, however, from the simple fact, that the first was written in great haste and indignation, for a special purpose and time;—the second, after I had got engaged, almost unawares, in inquiries which could not be hastily nor indignantly pursued; my opinions remaining then, and remaining now, altogether unchanged on the subject which led me into the discussion. And that no farther doubt of them may be entertained by any who may think them worth questioning, I shall here, once for all, express them in the plainest and fewest words I can. I think that J. M. W. Turner is not only the greatest (professed) landscape painter who ever lived, but that he has in him as much as would have furnished all the rest with such power as they had; and that if we put Nicolo Poussin, Salvator, and our own Gainsborough out of the group, he would cut up into Claudes, Cuyps, Ruysdaels, and such others, by uncounted bunches. I hope this is plainly and strongly enough stated. And farther, I like his later pictures, up to the year 1845, the best; and believe that those persons who only like his early pictures do not, in fact, like him at all. They do not like that which is essentially his. They like that in which he resembles other men; which he had learned from Loutherbourg, Claude, or Wilson; that which is indeed his own, they do not care for. Not that there is not much of his own in his early works; they are all invaluable in their way; but those persons who can find no beauty in his strangest fantasy on the Academy walls, cannot distinguish the peculiarly Turneresque characters of the earlier pictures. And, therefore, I again state here, that I think his pictures painted between the years 1830 and 1845 his greatest; and that his entire power is best represented by such pictures as the Temeraire, the Sun of Venice going to Sea, and others, painted exactly at the time when the public and the press were together loudest in abuse of him.
Turner. Tintoret.
Massaccio.
John Bellini.
Albert Durer.
Giorgione.
Paul Veronese.
Titian.
Rubens.
Correggio.
Orcagna.
Benozzo Gozzoli.
Giotto.
Raffaelle.
Perugino.
I desire, however, the reader to observe that I said, above, professed landscape painters, among whom, perhaps, I should hardly have put Gainsborough. The landscape of the great figure painters is often majestic in the highest degree, and Tintoret’s especially shows exactly the same power and feeling as Turner’s. If with Turner I were to rank the historical painters as landscapists, estimating rather the power they show, than the actual value of the landscape they produced, I should class those, whose landscapes I have studied, in some such order as this at the side of the page:—associating with the landscape of Perugino that of Francia and Angelico, and the other severe painters of religious subjects. I have put Turner and Tintoret side by side, not knowing which is, in landscape, the greater; I had nearly associated in the same manner the noble names of John Bellini and Albert Durer; but Bellini must be put first, for his profound religious peace yet not separated from the other, if but that we might remember his kindness to him in Venice; and it is well we should take note of it here, for it furnishes us with a most interesting confirmation of what was said in the text respecting the position of Bellini as the last of the religious painters of Venice. The following passage is quoted in Jackson’s “Essay on Wood-engraving,” from Albert Durer’s Diary:
“I have many good friends among the Italians who warn me not to eat or drink with their painters, of whom several are my enemies, and copy my picture in the church, and others of mine, wherever they can find them, and yet they blame them, and say they are not according to ancient art, and therefore not good. Giovanni Bellini, however, has praised me highly to several gentlemen, and wishes to have something of my doing: he called on me himself, and requested that I would paint a picture for him, for which, he said, he would pay me well. People are all surprised that I should be so much thought of by a person of his reputation: he is very old, but is still the best painter of them all.”
A choice little piece of description this, of the Renaissance painters, side by side with the good old Venetian, who was soon to leave them to their own ways. The Renaissance men are seen in perfection, envying, stealing, and lying, but without wit enough to lie to purpose.
12. ROMANIST MODERN ART
It is of the highest importance, in these days, that Romanism should be deprived of the miserable influence which its pomp and picturesqueness have given it over the weak sentimentalism of the English people; I call it a miserable influence, for of all motives to sympathy with the Church of Rome, this I unhesitatingly class as the basest: I can, in some measure, respect the other feelings which have been the beginnings of apostasy; I can respect the desire for unity which would reclaim the Romanist by love, and the distrust of his own heart which subjects the proselyte to priestly power; I say I can respect these feelings, though I cannot pardon unprincipled submission to them, nor enough wonder at the infinite fatuity of the unhappy persons whom they have betrayed:—Fatuity, self-inflicted, and stubborn in resistance to God’s Word and man’s reason!—to talk of the authority of the Church, as if the Church were anything else than the whole company of Christian men, or were ever spoken of in Scripture98 as other than a company to be taught and fed, not to teach and feed.—Fatuity! to talk of a separation of Church and State, as if a Christian state, and every officer therein, were not necessarily a part of the Church,99 and as if any state officer could do his duty without endeavoring to aid and promote religion, or any clerical officer do his duty without seeking for such aid and accepting it:—Fatuity! to seek for the unity of a living body of truth and trust in God, with a dead body of lies and trust in wood, and thence to expect anything else than plague, and consumption by worms undying, for both. Blasphemy as well as fatuity! to ask for any better interpreter of God’s Word than God, or to expect knowledge of it in any other way than the plainly ordered way: if any man will do he shall know. But of all these fatuities, the basest is the being lured into the Romanist Church by the glitter of it, like larks into a trap by broken glass; to be blown into a change of religion by the whine of an organ-pipe; stitched into a new creed by gold threads on priests’ petticoats; jangled into a change of conscience by the chimes of a belfry. I know nothing in the shape of error so dark as this, no imbecility so absolute, no treachery so contemptible. I had hardly believed that it was a thing possible, though vague stories had been told me of the effect, on some minds, of mere scarlet and candles, until I came on this passage in Pugin’s “Remarks on articles in the Rambler”:—
“Those who have lived in want and privation are the best qualified to appreciate the blessings of plenty; thus, those who have been devout and sincere members of the separated portion of the English Church; who have prayed, and hoped, and loved, through all the poverty of the maimed rites which it has retained—to them does the realisation of all their longing desires appear truly ravishing. * * * Oh! then, what delight! what joy unspeakable! when one of the solemn piles is presented to them, in all its pristine life and glory!—the stoups are filled to the brim; the rood is raised on high; the screen glows with sacred imagery and rich device; the niches are filled; the altar is replaced, sustained by sculptured shafts, the relics of the saints repose beneath, the body of Our Lord is enshrined on its consecrated stone; the lamps of the sanctuary burn bright; the saintly portraitures in the glass windows shine all gloriously; and the albs hang in the oaken ambries, and the cope chests are filled with orphreyed baudekins; and pix and pax, and chrismatory are there, and thurible, and cross.”
One might have put this man under a pix, and left him, one should have thought; but he has been brought forward, and partly received, as an example of the effect of ceremonial splendor on the mind of a great architect. It is very necessary, therefore, that all those who have felt sorrow at this should know at once that he is not a great architect, but one of the smallest possible or conceivable architects; and that by his own account and setting forth of himself. Hear him:—
“I believe, as regards architecture, few men have been so unfortunate as myself. I have passed my life in thinking of fine things, studying fine things, designing fine things, and realising very poor ones. I have never had the chance of producing a single fine ecclesiastical building, except my own church, where I am both paymaster and architect; but everything else, either for want of adequate funds or injudicious interference and control, or some other contingency, is more or less a failure. ***
“St. George’s was spoilt by the very instructions laid down by the committee, that it was to hold 3000 people on the floor at a limited price; in consequence, height, proportion, everything, was sacrificed to meet these conditions. Nottingham was spoilt by the style being restricted to lancet,—a period well suited to a Cistercian abbey in a secluded vale, but very unsuitable for the centre of a crowded town. ***
“Kirkham was spoilt through several hundred pounds being reduced on the original estimate; to effect this, which was a great sum in proportion to the entire cost, the area of the church was contracted, the walls lowered, tower and spire reduced, the thickness of walls diminished, and stone arches omitted.” (Remarks, &c., by A. Welby Pugin: Dolman, 1850.)
Is that so? Phidias can niche himself into the corner of a pediment, and Raffaelle expatiate within the circumference of a clay platter; but Pugin is inexpressible in less than a cathedral? Let his ineffableness be assured of this, once for all, that no difficulty or restraint ever happened to a man of real power, but his power was the more manifested in the contending with, or conquering it; and that there is no field so small, no cranny so contracted, but that a great spirit can house and manifest itself therein. The thunder that smites the Alp into dust, can gather itself into the width of a golden wire. Whatever greatness there was in you, had it been Buonarroti’s own, you had room enough for it in a single niche: you might have put the whole power of it into two feet cube of Caen stone. St. George’s was not high enough for want of money? But was it want of money that made you put that blunt, overloaded, laborious ogee door into the side of it? Was it for lack of funds that you sunk the tracery of the parapet in its clumsy zigzags? Was it in parsimony that you buried its paltry pinnacles in that eruption of diseased crockets? or in pecuniary embarrassment that you set up the belfry foolscaps, with the mimicry of dormer windows, which nobody can ever reach nor look out of? Not so, but in mere incapability of better things.
I am sorry to have to speak thus of any living architect; and there is much in this man, if he were rightly estimated, which one might both regard and profit by. He has a most sincere love for his profession, a heartily honest enthusiasm for pixes and piscinas; and though he will never design so much as a pix or a piscina thoroughly well, yet better than most of the experimental architects of the day. Employ him by all means, but on small work. Expect no cathedrals from him; but no one, at present, can design a better finial. That is an exceedingly beautiful one over the western door of St. George’s; and there is some spirited impishness and switching of tails in the supporting figures at the imposts. Only do not allow his good designing of finials to be employed as an evidence in matters of divinity, nor thence deduce the incompatibility of Protestantism and art. I should have said all that I have said above, of artistical apostasy, if Giotto had been now living in Florence, and if art were still doing all that it did once for Rome. But the grossness of the error becomes incomprehensible as well as unpardonable, when we look to what level of degradation the human intellect has sunk at this instant in Italy. So far from Romanism now producing anything greater in art, it cannot even preserve what has been given to its keeping. I know no abuses of precious inheritance half so grievous, as the abuse of all that is best in art wherever the Romanist priesthood gets possession of it. It amounts to absolute infatuation. The noblest pieces of mediæval sculpture in North Italy, the two griffins at the central (west) door of the cathedral of Verona, were daily permitted to be brought into service, when I was there in the autumn of 1849, by a washerwoman living in the Piazza, who tied her clothes-lines to their beaks: and the shafts of St. Mark’s at Venice were used by a salesman of common caricatures to fasten his prints upon (Compare Appendix 25); and this in the face of the continually passing priests: while the quantity of noble art annually destroyed in altarpieces by candle-droppings, or perishing by pure brutality of neglect, passes all estimate. I do not know, as I have repeatedly stated, how far the splendor of architecture, or other art, is compatible with the honesty and usefulness of religious service. The longer I live, the more I incline to severe judgment in this matter, and the less I can trust the sentiments excited by painted glass and colored tiles. But if there be indeed value in such things, our plain duty is to direct our strength against the superstition which has dishonored them; there are thousands who might possibly be benefited by them, to whom they are now merely an offence, owing to their association with idolatrous ceremonies. I have but this exhortation for all who love them,—not to regulate their creeds by their taste in colors, but to hold calmly to the right, at whatever present cost to their imaginative enjoyment; sure that they will one day find in heavenly truth a brighter charm than in earthly imagery, and striving to gather stones for the eternal building, whose walls shall be salvation, and whose gates shall be praise.
13. MR. FERGUSSON’S SYSTEM
The reader may at first suppose this division of the attributes of buildings into action, voice, and beauty, to be the same division as Mr. Fergusson’s, now well known, of their merits, into technic, æsthetic and phonetic.
But there is no connection between the two systems; mine, indeed, does not profess to be a system, it is a mere arrangement of my subject, for the sake of order and convenience in its treatment: but, as far as it goes, it differs altogether from Mr. Fergusson’s in these two following respects:—
The action of a building, that is to say its standing or consistence, depends on its good construction; and the first part of the foregoing volume has been entirely occupied with the consideration of the constructive merit of buildings: but construction is not their only technical merit. There is as much of technical merit in their expression, or in their beauty, as in their construction. There is no more mechanical or technical admirableness in the stroke of the painter who covers them with fresco, than in the dexterity of the mason who cements their stones: there is just as much of what is technical in their beauty, therefore, as in their construction; and, on the other hand, there is often just as much intellect shown in their construction as there is in either their expression or decoration. Now Mr. Fergusson means by his “Phonetic” division, whatever expresses intellect: my constructive division, therefore, includes part of his phonetic: and my expressive and decorative divisions include part of his technical.
Secondly, Mr. Fergusson tries to make the same divisions fit the subjects of art, and art itself; and therefore talks of technic, æsthetic, and phonetic, arts, (or, translating the Greek,) of artful arts, sensitive arts, and talkative arts; but I have nothing to do with any division of the arts, I have to deal only with the merits of buildings. As, however, I have been led into reference to Mr. Fergusson’s system, I would fain say a word or two to effect Mr. Fergusson’s extrication from it. I hope to find in him a noble ally, ready to join with me in war upon affectation, falsehood, and prejudice, of every kind: I have derived much instruction from his most interesting work, and I hope for much more from its continuation; but he must disentangle himself from his system, or he will be strangled by it; never was anything so ingeniously and hopelessly wrong throughout; the whole of it is founded on a confusion of the instruments of man with his capacities.
Mr. Fergusson would have us take—
“First, man’s muscular action or power.” (Technics.)
“Secondly, those developments of sense by which he does!! as much as by his muscles.” (Æsthetics.)
“Lastly, his intellect, or to confine this more correctly to its external action, his power of speech!!!” (Phonetics.)
Granting this division of humanity correct, or sufficient, the writer then most curiously supposes that he may arrange the arts as if there were some belonging to each division of man,—never observing that every art must be governed by, and addressed to, one division, and executed by another; executed by the muscular, addressed to the sensitive or intellectual; and that, to be an art at all, it must have in it work of the one, and guidance from the other. If, by any lucky accident, he had been led to arrange the arts, either by their objects, and the things to which they are addressed, or by their means, and the things by which they are executed, he would have discovered his mistake in an instant. As thus:—
These arts are addressed to the,– Muscles!!
Senses,
Intellect;
or executed by,– Muscles,
Senses!!
Intellect.
Indeed it is true that some of the arts are in a sort addressed to the muscles, surgery for instance; but this is not among Mr. Fergusson’s technic, but his politic, arts! and all the arts may, in a sort, be said to be performed by the senses, as the senses guide both muscles and intellect in their work: but they guide them as they receive information, or are standards of accuracy, but not as in themselves capable of action. Mr. Fergusson is, I believe, the first person who has told us of senses that act or do, they having been hitherto supposed only to sustain or perceive. The weight of error, however, rests just as much in the original division of man, as in the endeavor to fit the arts to it. The slight omission of the soul makes a considerable difference when it begins to influence the final results of the arrangement.
Mr. Fergusson calls morals and religion “Politick arts” (as if religion were an art at all! or as if both were not as necessary to individuals as to societies); and therefore, forming these into a body of arts by themselves, leaves the best of the arts to do without the soul and the moral feeling as rest they may. Hence “expression,” or “phonetics,” is of intellect only (as if men never expressed their feelings!); and then, strangest and worst of all, intellect is entirely resolved into talking! There can be no intellect but it must talk, and all talking must be intellectual. I believe people do sometimes talk without understanding; and I think the world would fare ill if they never understood without talking. The intellect is an entirely silent faculty, and has nothing to do with parts of speech any more than the moral part has. A man may feel and know things without expressing either the feeling or knowledge; and the talking is a muscular mode of communicating the workings of the intellect or heart—muscular, whether it be by tongue or by sign, or by carving or writing, or by expression of feature; so that to divide a man into muscular and talking parts, is to divide him into body in general, and tongue in particular, the endless confusion resulting from which arrangement is only less marvellous in itself, than the resolution with which Mr. Fergusson has worked through it, and in spite of it, up to some very interesting and suggestive truths; although starting with a division of humanity which does not in the least raise it above the brute, for a rattlesnake has his muscular, æsthetic, and talking part as much as man, only he talks with his tail, and says, “I am angry with you, and should like to bite you,” more laconically and effectively than any phonetic biped could, were he so minded. And, in fact, the real difference between the brute and man is not so much that the one has fewer means of expression than the other, as that it has fewer thoughts to express, and that we do not understand its expressions. Animals can talk to one another intelligibly enough when they have anything to say, and their captains have words of command just as clear as ours, and better obeyed. We have indeed, in watching the efforts of an intelligent animal to talk to a human being, a melancholy sense of its dumbness; but the fault is still in its intelligence, more than in its tongue. It has not wit enough to systematise its cries or signs, and form them into language.
But there is no end to the fallacies and confusions of Mr. Fergusson’s arrangement. It is a perfect entanglement of gun-cotton, and explodes into vacuity wherever one holds a light to it. I shall leave him to do so with the rest of it for himself, and should perhaps have left it to his own handling altogether, but for the intemperateness of the spirit with which he has spoken on a subject perhaps of all others demanding gentleness and caution. No man could more earnestly have desired the changes lately introduced into the system of the University of Oxford than I did myself: no man can be more deeply sensible than I of grievous failures in the practical working even of the present system: but I believe that these failures may be almost without exception traced to one source, the want of evangelical, and the excess of rubrical religion among the tutors; together with such rustinesses and stiffnesses as necessarily attend the continual operation of any intellectual machine. The fault is, at any rate, far less in the system than in the imperfection of its administration; and had it been otherwise, the terms in which Mr. Fergusson speaks of it are hardly decorous in one who can but be imperfectly acquainted with its working. They are sufficiently answered by the structure of the essay in which they occur; for if the high powers of mind which its author possesses had been subjected to the discipline of the schools, he could not have wasted his time on the development of a system which their simplest formulæ of logic would have shown him to be untenable.
Mr. Fergusson will, however, find it easier to overthrow his system than to replace it. Every man of science knows the difficulty of arranging a reasonable system of classification, in any subject, by any one group of characters; and that the best classifications are, in many of their branches, convenient rather than reasonable: so that, to any person who is really master of his subject, many different modes of classification will occur at different times; one of which he will use rather than another, according to the point which he has to investigate. I need only instance the three arrangements of minerals, by their external characters, and their positive or negative bases, of which the first is the most useful, the second the most natural, the third the most simple; and all in several ways unsatisfactory.
But when the subject becomes one which no single mind can grasp, and which embraces the whole range of human occupation and enquiry, the difficulties become as great, and the methods as various, as the uses to which the classification might be put; and Mr. Fergusson has entirely forgotten to inform us what is the object to which his arrangements are addressed. For observe: there is one kind of arrangement which is based on the rational connection of the sciences or arts with one another; an arrangement which maps them out like the rivers of some great country, and marks the points of their junction, and the direction and force of their united currents; and this without assigning to any one of them a superiority above another, but considering them all as necessary members of the noble unity of human science and effort. There is another kind of classification which contemplates the order of succession in which they might most usefully be presented to a single mind, so that the given mind should obtain the most effective and available knowledge of them all: and, finally, the most usual classification contemplates the powers of mind which they each require for their pursuit, the objects to which they are addressed, or with which they are concerned; and assigns to each of them a rank superior or inferior, according to the nobility of the powers they require, or the grandeur of the subjects they contemplate.
Now, not only would it be necessary to adopt a different classification with respect to each of these great intentions, but it might be found so even to vary the order of the succession of sciences in the case of every several mind to which they were addressed; and that their rank would also vary with the power and specific character of the mind engaged upon them. I once heard a very profound mathematician remonstrate against the impropriety of Wordsworth’s receiving a pension from government, on the ground that he was “only a poet.” If the study of mathematics had always this narrowing effect upon the sympathies, the science itself would need to be deprived of the rank usually assigned to it; and there could be no doubt that, in the effect it had on the mind of this man, and of such others, it was a very contemptible science indeed. Hence, in estimating the real rank of any art or science, it is necessary for us to conceive it as it would be grasped by minds of every order. There are some arts and sciences which we underrate, because no one has risen to show us with what majesty they may be invested; and others which we overrate, because we are blinded to their general meanness by the magnificence which some one man has thrown around them: thus, philology, evidently the most contemptible of all the sciences, has been raised to unjust dignity by Johnson.100 And the subject is farther complicated by the question of usefulness; for many of the arts and sciences require considerable intellectual power for their pursuit, and yet become contemptible by the slightness of what they accomplish: metaphysics, for instance, exercising intelligence of a high order, yet useless to the mass of mankind, and, to its own masters, dangerous. Yet, as it has become so by the want of the true intelligence which its inquiries need, and by substitution of vain subtleties in its stead, it may in future vindicate for itself a higher rank than a man of common sense usually concedes to it.
Nevertheless, the mere attempt at arrangement must be useful, even where it does nothing more than develop difficulties. Perhaps the greatest fault of men of learning is their so often supposing all other branches of science dependent upon or inferior to their own best beloved branch; and the greatest deficiency of men comparatively unlearned, their want of perception of the connection of the branches with each other. He who holds the tree only by the extremities, can perceive nothing but the separation of its sprays. It must always be desirable to prove to those the equality of rank, to these the closeness of sequence, of what they had falsely supposed subordinate or separate. And, after such candid admission of the co-equal dignity of the truly noble arts and sciences, we may be enabled more justly to estimate the inferiority of those which indeed seem intended for the occupation of inferior powers and narrower capacities. In Appendix 14, following, some suggestions will be found as to the principles on which classification might be based; but the arrangement of all the arts is certainly not a work which could with discretion be attempted in the Appendix to an essay on a branch of one of them.