THE PLACE OF ART IN HISTORY.
IT is not wonderful that Mr. Ruskin should place high the claim of Art, for Art has been to him more than a nursing- mother. She has been mother, and father, and country, and all. We will not say no man before him has ever occupied such a position ; but certainly no critic ever did. Because he under- stands Art, and can express the thoughts generated by that comprehension in admirable words,—words which in their exquisite collocation, their perfection at once of form and of lucidity, have been rivalled in our generation only by Cardinal Newman,—he has become one of the best-known and most- appreciated figures in our generation. His older books are among the treasures of the bibliophile, his later works are purchased like scarce plates, his opinions are quoted like texts from a Holy Book, and even his wanderings,—and when he discourses of politics or economy, he does but wander, and suggests a child explaining machinery to a nurse,—are studied and collated by enthusiastic disciples, who hope to find in them precious things, and do find meaningless sentences of almost matchless form,—fragments, as it were, of a marble fit for Phiclias to carve. He has, in fact, become a master in literature as truly as any one of the Italians he loves was a master in art ; and. often pronounces, himself living, to living men, a verdict which has all the resistless, yet imponderable, weight of the verdict of posterity. We do not dream of cavilling at his place, which is justified as far as Art is concerned, not only by rare attainments, but by an instinct for the beautiful and harmonious which proves his possession of the " zig-zag lightning in his brain," as much as did ever sculptor's statue or conqueror's campaign ; nor do we question the surpassing charms of his mistress Art ; but we may ask humbly whether, in his recent Lecture, he does not exaggerate her claims beyond all reason. The reports are condensed till their meaning is half gone ; but Mr. Ruskin seems to us in many of his allusions, and especially in his choice of great cities, to be inwardly possessed with the idea that the history of Art is the history of man, and that a nation is great or otherwise according as it has developed Art capacity. That, if it in any close degree represents Mr. Ruskin's actual thought, strikes us as a melancholy exaggeration,—an exaggeration, because much. has been done for man by races with little or no capacity for Art ; melancholy, because such a faith must be accompanied with such terrible doubts of the continuous development of mankind. Save possibly in music, upon which evidence, though far from complete, seems strong, it is doubtful if man progresses in Art
at all, and certainly he does not advance at any calculable rate. Let the builders of Europe try to reproduce Luxor. No architect of our day, even when revealing the inner conceit which cynics say possesses all minds, and wiser men attribute to so many, would say that he hoped to surpass the builders of the Parthe- non, or the often unknown men who in Germany and France and England seven hundred years ago made their dreams concrete and visible in the finest Gothic Cathedrals. The little knot of wicked Attic slave-owners, whom artists call for convenience "the Greeks," remain unequalled in sculpture, and may have been unsurpassed in painting, while Mr. Ruskin himself would scarify all who said that modern Art had ad- vanced upon the triumphs of the Renaissance. All over Asia Art has been decaying for ages, till the Moor of Fez would hardly understand what his ancestor had done in Granada, till Indian Mussulmans gaze at the Pearl Mosque as if the genii had built it, till Persians buy old carpets as lavishly as we do, and till Chinese and Japanese confess with sighs that the old ceramic work cannot be reproduced. It would be melancholy to think Art the test of civilisation, even if we believed, as this writer certainly does not, that races reached their flowering period in Art after long cycles of sterility, and that Greek or Italian, Moor or Japanese, might yet again excel all former efforts ; for still there would remain the humiliating thought that while the mind is of limitless range, Art must always be perfectible, that a time must arrive when man, having in that department reached unimprovable harmony, must needs despair of advance.
At least, the mind would be melancholy were the postulate correct, and Art a never-failing index of a nation's power to benefit mankind; but is that even approximately true P No one questions,—we least of all,—what the Greek did for man ; for if we should fall below Mr. Ruskin in our reverence for architect or sculptor, painter or cutter of gems, at least we should rival him in regard for the poet and the politician ; but the Hebrew did still more, and knew nothing of Art save song. He sang the Psalm which lives for ever, and to which the cold Northerners turn, whenever they are beaten by fate, for help or the expression of their grief; but he built no building, devised fine lines for no ship, proscribed sculpture,—at least, it is our individual belief that Moses intended his order on the subject, just as Mahommed did, to be a side-blow against idolatry,— and never practised painting ; but all the same he handed down through ages the torch of monotheism, and reduced the teaching of Christ to the form in which we now receive it. The Roman, who gave to man perhaps the most beneficent of all conceptions not strictly religions,—the notion that life should be controlled by immutable law, and not by individual will, the fundamental axiom which has made orderly freedom possible,—originated little in Art, except an architec- ture, noble, indeed, and enduring, but far less truly artistic than the Greek ; while the German, who is marching to the top of the world, who has done so much for learning, and who, with his patience and his idealism, may yet solve insoluble political problems, has for Art done scarcely anything. It is doubtful if he has built much ; it is not doubtful that he has carved and painted nothing of the first rank in excellence. In music, indeed, he is a master, but not the master he is deemed ; for much of the glorious work with which he is credited is due to a race of guests belonging to another continent,—the race which, in its own land, never built or painted or carved, though it sang songs, whose sweet- ness remains still the highest expression- aliEe of melancholy and of faith. The Swiss has no art, the Scandinavian little— (might we venture to suggest that Danish art, after all, is coldly imitative, Hellenism without the Hellenic sun, Hel- lenism frozen ?)—the Slavon none at all; yet each has power in his own way. It seems to us that a race might be great and noble and most useful to mankind, might excel in thought and in science and. in laws, might teach us all deep secrets of happiness, and make us all more worthy to live on, and yet not possess that special power of at once conceiving and realising beauty, which is the condition of achievement in Art ; might, in fact, pass away, leaving, as indeed the Hebrew nation did, no record of its presence, save a land cultivated to irreparable exhaustion,, and a literature which was for ages a stimulus or a solace to mankind. There are men in the world, great men, too, who cannot comprehend the glories of form, or colour, or combination ; and many more who, com- prehending them, could not even begin to produce them ; and why not communities too? They would be brighter, no doubt, and have fuller lives, and civilise men more rapidly if they possessed the missing powers; but they may be great and worthy of all study neverthelesistill. They last, too, such communities; as those with the high artistic faculties have not always done. The Greek, whose bronze spoke and marble glowed, lasted but a few centuries ; and the men of the Renaissance, before whose work artists despair, and Mr. Ruskin stands full of what is really the poetic spirit, though it suits him to use a magically-arranged prose as his instrument, fewer centuries still. Is there not, indeed,—though we admit that here we wander into regions rather of the fancy than the reason,—something self- destructive in the highest art, as if it took out of men some virility, as if the natures which could produce it, which had reached the point where the accurate perception of harmony and the power of realising it became identical, grew first weary with their task and then barren ? The history of "Art periods" seems to suggest that, which is not true of literary periods,—at least, not in our modern world, and in the same degree. At all events, this much is certain, that if we take Art as our guide through the labyrinth of history, we shall pass over not only some of its noblest chambers, but some of the places where men are producing effective motive-power. Man is wider than Art, as he is older than science, and more enduring than culture, —is, in fact, for all his baseness, greater than the new intel- lectual idols he is setting up for himself, and which are only chips of him.
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