WHERE ARE WE IN ART?

"No down my thirteenth newspaper.

doubt education is a fine thing!" said I, meditatively, laying It was a rainy November day, and the reading-room was nearly empty. I had been told the great fact over and over again in some form or other in all the "Dailies" and "Weeklies." It had been repeated in every variety of tone in the little pile of "Monthlies" at my elbow, of which I had skimmed the cream (no one in these days can be expected to go through the labour of a whole article)! The "Quarterlies," in more ponderous fashion, had reiterated the sentiment. We had got hold of the right thing; all that was wanted was more and more of the same. Let everybody be served alike; what is meat for the gander is meat also for the goose, repeated the advocates of women's education, magniloquently (though not exactly in those words). Let everybody learn the same thing that I am learning! How much better and wiser we are than our forefathers! How beautiful for us to be able to say, as in the old story of the French Minister of Instruction when he pulls out his watch, "It is ten o'clock; all the children in the schools in England are doing their sums. It is half-past eleven, they are all writing their copies !" "What everybody says must be true," thought I; "the schoolmaster has got the better of the world, and rules the roast despotically; but then how great is the result!" I repeated, with pride.

Such perfection was rather oppressive, and I could not help yawning a little as I went upstairs, looking round as I went. The decorations of the club were wonderfully fine, no doubt, but perhaps an Italian of the "Cinque-cento" would not have thought them quite successful. Probably, however, he would have been wrong. He was certainly much less "instructed" in art than we are. I strolled to the window, and looked out at a stucco palace on either hand and over the way, with pillars and pilasters added ad libitum, and a glimpse of a long wall with oblong

openings cut in it, stretching the whole length of the street. One of the abominable regiments of black statues which disfigure London stood near the corner, the nicely-finished buttons of whose paletôt, and the creases of whose boots (the originals of which must have been made by Hoby), had often been my wonder, if not admiration.

"Yes, there certainly is a lost art or two, which have somehow made their escape from this best of all worlds, in spite of our drilling and double-distilled training," I sighed.

There was a portfolio of photographs lying on the table, which I turned over abstractedly. The Venus de Milo, and the Theseus of the Parthenon; the Raphael frescoes of the great council of the gods in the Farnesina Palace at Rome; a street in Venice; Durham Cathedral; the decorations of the Certosa at Pavia; some specimens of old Japanese porcelain; some coloured patterns of Persian shawls and prayer-rugs and of Indian inlaid work. Each of them was good and appropriate of its kind, expressing a national or individual taste and feeling, or, best of all, a belief. And none of them were the results of education, but of a kind of instinct of art which no instruction hitherto has been able to give, of which it seems even sometimes to deprive a race, as a savage generally loses his accurate perception of details and his power of memory and artistic perceptions, with his delicacy of hearing and smell, as a consequence of so-called civilization.

The Hindoo arranges colours for a fabric with the same certainty of intuition that a bird weaves his nest, or a spider its web. His blues and greens are as harmonious in their combinations as those of Nature herself; while the "educated" Englishman is now introducing every species of atrocity in form and colour wherever he goes, ruining the beautiful native manufactures by instructions from his superior "standpoint;" forcing the workers to commit every blunder which he does himself at home, in order to adapt their fabrics to the abominable taste of the middle classes in England. Even the missionaries, male and female, cannot hold their hands, and teach the children in schools and hareems crochet and cross-stitch of the worst designs and colours, instead of the exquisite native embroidery of the past. Arsenic greens, magenta and gas-tar dyes, are introduced by order of the merchants into carpets and cashmere shawls; vile colours and forms in pottery and bad lacquer-work are growing up, by command, in China and Japan. There seems to be no check or stay to the irruption of bad taste which is swamping the whole world by our influence. The Japanese have even been recommended to make a Museum of their own beautiful old productions quickly, or the very memory of their existence, and of the manner in which they were made, would be lost.

It is commonly supposed that the taste of the French is better than our own, and the pretty, the bizarre, the becoming, may indeed be said to belong to their domain; but high art is not their vocation. A certain harmony is obtained by quenching colour, as in the " Soupir étouffé," the

"Bismarck malade," the "rose dégradée," the "Celadon" of the Sèvres china, all eighth and tenth degrees of dilution; but pure colour, like that of Persia and of the East generally, they never now dare to dip their hands into. The gorgeous effects of their own old painted glass, the "rose windows" of the churches at Rouen and in many other towns of Normandy, are far beyond their present reach.

The stained glass of all countries in Europe, indeed, belonging to the good times, is a feast of colour which none of the modern work can approach. There is a "Last Judgment," said to be from designs by Albert Dürer, which was taken in a sea-fight on its road to Spain, and put up in a little church at Fairford, in Gloucestershire, which dazzles us with its splendour; and the scraps which are still to be found all over England in village churches (many of which are now believed to be of home manufacture) are as beautiful as the great Flemish windows thirty feet high. At the present day the pigments used, we are told, are finer; the glass is infinitely better rolled, all the manufacturing processes have made wonderful progress, as we proudly declare; only the results of it are utterly and simply detestable-the colours of the great modern windows in Cologne Cathedral and Westminster Abbey set one's very teeth on edge-the temptation to use a stone (if it had come under one's hand) would be frightfully great in front of that at the east end of Ripon.

There lies before me an old Persian rug, all out of shape and twisted in the weaving, but full of subtle quantities in colour, perfect in the proportions of its vivid brilliancy, and a grand new Axminster carpet alongside, of faultless construction, with a design as hideous as its colours are harsh.

It is not only now with productions destined for the English market, but the degradation of art is beginning to spread all over the world -the standards of "instructed" European taste are vitiating the very well-springs of beautiful old work. The "mantilla" of Seville, and the "tovaglia" of the Roman peasant, are supplanted by frightful bonnets; the striking old costumes are disappearing alike in Brittany and in Algiers; in Athens and in Turkey they are giving way to the abominations of Parisian toilettes for the women, while the chimney-pot hat is taking the place of the turban and the kalpac for the men.

The picturesque quaintness of the narrow Egyptian streets dies away, as under a frost, under the hand of Western architects; the delicate pierced woodwork of their projecting balconies is changed for flat windows with red and green "jalousies;" and the Khedive builds minarets, it is true, but like enlarged Mordan pencil-cases. The harmony of the lines in an ancient Arabian fountain or mosque at Cairo, the interlacing patterns of fretwork in the Sarac buildings at Grenada, are marvellous in their exquisite

their own land is ne

to have perished in

secret of their construction in radition of the old work seems

even imitate their own old

creations. "Oh for a touch of a vanished hand!" we say over the ruined tombs of the Memlook Sultans in their desolate beauty, standing lonely in the desert near Cairo, or the wonderful mosques of the deserted city of Beejapore in the Bombay Presidency, whose photographs have lately been printed.

Each nation in the old time had an expression of its thoughts in the buildings in which it housed its gods, its government, and its individuals, which was as distinctive as its language: a tongue, indeed, in stone, in colour and in form, as plain as, indeed plainer than, ever words could frame.

The Egyptian, with the flat square lines of the gigantic slabs placed across the forests of enormous rounded pillars closely packed, the avenues of sphinxes and obelisks leading up (never at right angles, curiously to our sense of conformity) to the temples-solemn, heavy, magnificent, mysterious-with a sentiment of dignified repose, though little of beauty or proportion, but full of symbolism and suggestion and grandeur.

The exquisite Greek buildings, where proportion was almost like music in its scientific harmony of parts, so exact, so modulated, so severe, so lovely-with sculpture forming an almost necessary portion of the architectural design when at its highest point of excellence.

The Saracenic, with its simple grace of construction and delicate detail of ornament, with holy words and combinations of lines in place of natural forms, and soaring beauty of domes, and pierced marble work. The Middle Age Italian, with its inlaid and decorated façades and wealth of columns, and traceries of gay-coloured stones, and contrasts of brilliant light and dark shadows in the deep-set windows and doors, -bright and lovely like Giotto's Campanile at Florence, rising like a flower over the city, or great churches like those of Orvieto and St. Mark's,* with their rich profusion of mosaic and carved stone and quaint modifications of brickwork.

Or the buildings of the Gothic nations (our own included), which often, like those at Mont St. Michel, seem to have so grown out of the situation-where the Art is so interwoven with Nature, that it is hardly possible to discover where one begins and the other ends. There is something also of the manner in which Nature works, in the feeling with which the curves interlace, seeming almost to grow into each other, in a Gothic cathedral. In the perspectives of heavy round arches of Winchester and Durham, in the upward soaring of the Salisbury spire, there is the same impression-they seem to have" come" so. It is like a living organism, the parts of which are as natural and necessary to the whole as is the growth of a tree: like the recipe of old for a poet, they seem to have been "born, not made."

All these different races invented for themselves what is called a

* Now, alas! under sentence of "restoration ;" the age of creation in Italy appears to be over, and that of destruction to have begun.

"style;" that is to say, an original manner, peculiar and adapted to their special idiosyncrasies, of fulfilling those wants which every nation, as soon as it emerges from the savage state, must feel and provide for in some fashion.

Even to descend to very inferior work-there is character and expression in the old King William houses on the river-bank at Chelsea, in the pretty little Queen Anne Square in Westminster; it is too neat and pretty to be high art, with its unobtrusive moulded brick, its shallow projections, and the carved shells over the doorways; but it is not unlike the poetry of Pope in the delicate finish and adaptation of its parts, while no one can deny that it has an individuality which the smart new houses in Grosvenor Place are totally without, where costly granite and excellent stone seem to have been employed to show the moral lesson that the best materials are of little service unless mixed "with brains, sir," as Opie advised. Every capital of the columns is carved by hand, but of the poorest design and all alike—it is hardly possible to conceive the poverty of invention involved in making every house and every ornament an exact copy of its neighbour, in a situation which invited picturesque treatment-after too, it had been shown at the Oxford Museum that carving was done both quicker and better when the workers exerted their minds in such inventions as they possessed (and some of their renderings of natural forms were beautiful) than when they merely followed a stereotyped pattern.

At present we can as soon invent a new style for ourselves as a new animal; we copy, we combine-that is, under the Georgian era we added a Mahometan cupola to Roman columns in the Regent's Park; or, stilf later, we made one pediment serve for the whole side of a Belgravian square―i.e., a form intended for a nicely-calculated angle over the front of a temple with a particular number of columns, is stretched as on a rack over the roofs of an acre of houses; or we build a portico designed as a shelter against the cloudless sunshine of the Greek climate to darken a sunless English dwelling-house. Our last achievement has been to make a "pasticcio" of the high "mansarde" Parisian roofs, with hideous little debased Italian porticoes, a quarter of a mile of which may be seen in the Grosvenor Gardens district.

Also we can patch and imitate—that is, rebuild a sham antiquefrom which, however ingeniously done, the ineffable charm of the original has escaped like a gas. Why the portico of the capital at Washington, or the monument on the Calton Hill at Edinburgh, whose columns are said to be "an exact copy of those at Athens," are so utterly uninteresting, it would take too long to explain; but no one will deny that they are mere lumps of dead stone, while the Parthenon itself, ruined and defaced, wrecked and ill-used, still stands like a glorious poem in marble, which no evil treatment can deprive of its charm. There is mind and soul worked into the material, and somehow inextricably entangled into it, which no copy, however exact, can in the least reproduce.