7 AUGUST 1858, Page 18

ENGLISH SCULPTURE AND THE WELLINGTON MONUMENT.

"I CANNOT build a public institution," said Punch, in the cha- racter of " John Ball"; "I cannot make a statue," he remarked in one of the wittiest little poems ever published, dpropos to the statue which surmounts the arch at Hyde Park Corner. How- ever " fast " our days have become,—although we have seen a constitutional kingdom developed, with Turin for its capital, in seven or eight years,—we, the great English people, have not made the same advance in art which the Italians have in consti- tutionalism We have arrived at another Wellington monument, the national one, which is to be set up in St. Paul's ; and before it is begun we have it stated on official authority that everybody is dissatisfied, and it cannot be helped. We have tried the routine methods of testing the ability of the artist, and all without suc- cess. "The exhibition of designs for the Wellington monu- ment," says Sir Benjamin Hall, who got up the exhibition, "was a failure." No fewer than eighty-three designs were sent in ; but, with all deference for Lord John Manners, the judges did say that not one was worthy of being executed ; for though, as he says, "they left this point in the dark," they more than im- plied that something better was decidedly wanted before any de- sign should ultimately be chosen. Lord John Manners, in his present administration, has set aside the judgment of Sir Benja- min Hall's Commissioners, and has selected one of the prize-hold- ers though not the chief; but has selected him under peculiar conditions. Mr. Stephens, the young man who is reputed to have made the most pleasing design, is, as Lord John Manners tells us, "ready to make such alterations on his model as the altered site might render necessary"; so that the genius of sculpture succumbs to the Department of Public Works. The British Michel Angelo, the London John of Bologna, consents to be edited by Lord John Manners or Lord John Manners's clerks. If we look back to the ancient days of Sir William Molesworth, who came after Lord John Manners's previous reign of 1852, we find no better results. Sir William invited four sculptors to send in designs, Mr. Baily, Mr. Foley, Mr. Gibson, and Baron Marochetti ; but two of the four considered themselves to be excluded by the humiliating condition that they should compete ; and the other two, Mr. Baily and Mr. Foley, were not considered to have produced designs worthy of the occasion—at least that was the official judgment. This certainly amounts to universal failure. Com- petition may serve to test contracts for army clothing, or chimneys for steam-ships and factories—though even there it is not by itself a certain test ; but in this matter of monuments it ob- viously reduces Art to the level of a contract system ; we obtain not works of art, but goods; and though they may be "equal to pattern " they are not equal even to the Downing Street or Whitehall estimate of art. The Phidias or Michel Angelo of that rfigime cannot rise to the blue-book level.

Mr. Stuart Wortley, has come to the rescue and has made a hopeless attempt to lead the Government and Parliament in a new path. This kind of mechanical competition which excludes the Marochetti, baffles the Bally, disgusts the Gibson, and ham- Litre even the Stephens, is unworthy of employment in such be- lf, and Mr. Wortley would replace it by the higher stimulus of emulation. Invite designs, he says, from a given number of artists, pay each man for the work that he does, and let the representatives of the nation, who is the purchaser of those works, Choose that which seems best, Here is emulation, but not com- petition; and it is at all events a more generous appeal to Art. But it surpasses the comprehension of Lord John Manners to see in what respect this emulation would be different from competi- tion; and when all is done, we should still have to leave the choice to "the judge " : now who is the judge? The mob as- sembling in Westminster Hall to look at an exhibition of designs gives no distinct utterance, and could scarcely guide us if it did ; the mob having a very indifferent school in the sculptures and buildings of the metropolis. The creator of the commission, Sir Benjamin Hall, declares that the whole thing is a failure. Even a Sir William Molesworth does not feel such confidence in his awn discrimination or in the public taste, us to select the sculptor whom his own preference or general fame points out as the best ; he chooses something less than a half dozen of those who are thought to be best, and damps the genius of all by mortifying conditions. If Mr. Stuart Wortley asks for a better mode of judgment, Lord John Manners tells him that there are "other gentlemen who are at least as competent as himself to form a judgment " ; and while everybody is confessing that Mr. Ste- phen's pleasing design is undoubtedly susceptible of improvement, Coningham declares that "any one who has examined it must have been struck with its superiority in point of conception and execution."

Now what does all this mean? Are we to confess, as the facts indeed seem to imply, though we are slow to admit it, that Eng- lish genius is totally incapable of handling art with mastery ? fit sculpture we might account for the fact, if a fact, by obvious

reasons. In the classic climates of Greece and Italy, where high public considerations justified public games, where the Firemen contended unencumbered by any species of clothing, under tZit genial sky, viewing the model with the keen eyes of Greek art, the sculptor grew up in the very habit of seeing the human form

in every attitude of agile exertion, while the mind was intent upon the object of pursuit ; the gesture, the attitude, the expres- sion being entirely unstudied and animated by the very freshness of life and motive. Under such circumstances, the aspect of the human face divine, the pose of the body, the composition of the limbs, the ever moving contour of the outline, became as familiar to the sculptor's sight as the flash of the gun to the soldier's; for be it observed, the aspect of form and expression is, in all cases of energetic action, as transient as the flash of the gun. The swell of the muscle in the contraction that precedes the move- ment is gone almost before the action commences ; no model can exhibit it, but it must be abiding in the thoughts of the sculptor if he is to reproduce it in the living stone. There is another rea- son why the modern sculptor is trammelled in his art. In our highly- civilized day, with the A division pervading the West End, with polite society keeping a moral check upon the more lively manifesta- tions of human nature, we seldom see passion, or its child, action, in any heightened aspect ; and the sculptor grows up literally un- familiar with those aspects of human nature which strike upon the instincts and command the recognition of mankind. For art which is to be immortal must draw its inspiration from feelings that are superior to manners ; but in our day when "manners make the man," where is the artist patronised by good society and rising in his profession who can, even in his studio, break away from controul, and escape that moral A division ? Third reason —the critic who might correct, controul, or reanimate the sculp- tor, is himself doubly under the incubus of this anti-sculpturesine spirit; for while he sees not the original of sculpture around him, e con verso, he learns a bad lesson from the schools. Failing to obtain living material, the sculptor looks back to the pm-Ada- suite age of Art,--disentombs the creations of Phidias or Praxiteles, and tries to adapt them to modern purposes by a compromise which he makes—a statue of Peel, for instance, is a sort of cross between a wooden fac-simile of Sir Thomas Lawrence's portrait and the undressed Germanicus of the Greek School. But this attempt to coax coat and trowsers and great coat into having the air of the toga and no trowsers proves, as we might anticipate, a clumsy failure ; and Sculpture, which pursues its vocation in the attempt to accomplish this impracticable compromise, breaks its own head against the intractable block of stone ; for marble has too much solid sense to aid in the ridiculous joke. Yet we might deny that the sense of life, the perception of physical action, the ix:aver to descry passion or the capacity to reproduce it, have disappeared from British genius. There are still on the stage countrymen and countrywomen of Shakspeare, who, if they do not exactly_ vie with Edmund Kean or the greatest actors of the past, still show that they understand what is emotion of the highest and liveliest kind, and can reproduce it in its outward aspect. Imagine a dark-eyed woman of Spain ; one who has known the full enjoyment of life, but who now stands with her infant in her arms, suffering those pangs of hunger that show themselves in a haggard fall of her magnificent face, yet trouble her heart still more for the sake of her infant, who asks charity of the hard heart of pompous priesthood, and asks in vain ; who stands erect with the sense of suffering, ennobled with the unaffected dignity of well-developed form, graceful in pose and even in drapery under the coarse blanket cloak,—take such a creation of nature, breathing life and passion, and you will find, as John Philip can witness, that the English artist can appropriate that living figure, with its every pas- sing trait of organic life, and fix it immortally on the canvass. The same powerful sympathy, the same trained eye, and the same disciplined hand, using the mallet and chisel upon the stone, could reproduce that model of life as well as it has been reproduced with the pencil and pigments upon the canvass. Nay, the photograph, which is daily multiplying a vast gallery of Art snatched from the very face of Nature itself, is soon appreciated and understood, even by the million who, if the proposition be put to them, have sufficient insight to admit that the mirror of nature confirms the organic art of Titian or Raphael, Phidias or Praxiteles. Indeed there are works by Marochetti himself, not, perhaps, in the very " highest " style of classic repose, which show that he can teach the stone to live. We have the materials, therefore, and we have the possibility of the artist; the impos- sibility seems to lie in the judge. And one reason we truly believe is nothing more than this, that those who affect to be cognoscenti, who get appointed on Com- missions and are consulted by the public departments, speak in vague words about "Art," and its "design, conception, and ex- pression," "grace," "composition," and all that sort of thing ; when there is not an action or a passion to be delineated, not a trait of Art itself, that cannot be reduced to a test of the plainest matter of fact, the most tangible lineaments of physiology, and explained in the simplest of living languages. Let us tell the artist what we want in the model, and what we want it for, and if he knows that he shall be judged by these matter-of-fact tests, which regulated the work of painters and sculptors in the greatest school of Italy or Greece, "the demand," under those conditions, is likely enough to produce "the supply."