FINE ARTS.
ARTS AND MANUFACTURES.
IN a former paper under this head, written before the Parliament and the Elections turned people's minds on other topics,* we noted how our manu- factures are debarred from the absolute perfection on which they have so long abutted, because the artist who bestows the consummating beauty is absent from the manufactory: we now seek to suggest to the artist the in- terest which he might create for himself in being there.
Two cries are for ever in the mouth of the English artist: one is "patronage"; the other is "patronage especially for native talent." Both are as absurd as they are humiliating. No art or craft ever yet flourished by mendicancy, and it is not reserved for the fine arts to do so in England at this day. The craving in that begging tone for patronage is tantamount to a confession, either that the artist is offering his wares in the wrong quarter,—that is, where no want or taste for them is fel t,—or that he has not the talent which commands the market that exists. Either the English public has no taste and appetite for art, or the English artist lacks the ability to satisfy the taste, and wants to eke out his rights as a chapman by some kind of eleemosynary appeal. There is a partial truth in both positions, and much fallacy. The English people have a widespread taste for art, but it is imperfect and crude: the artists produced from among the English peo- ple have a considerable share of natural ability, but their conception not only of particular ideas but of art in general is crude and imperfect. They are perpetually straining after something beside the spirit and want of the time: they direct all their efforts to get into a region which does not belong to the people from whom they emanate and for whom they work. With a notion of being more exalted and more original, they do not obey the promptings of their own minds, use up the resources to their hands, and appeal to the actual wants of their countrymen; but they are for ever trying to do some- thing, to attain to some position, and to supply some demand, which be- longed to other ages, other countries, and other peoples. Hence we have produced in art no such original workmen as we have in all branches of literature. Our most original, substantive, and powerful workman in his way, Hogarth, lacked some of the great essentials of real art, and among them that of which he wrote so narrowly—beauty. But he worked upon real materials, such as he thoroughly mastered; his conceptions were real products of a genuine imaginative process—a process of intellectual as- similation analogous to that by which the bee converts pollen into wax; that is, the materials patent to all were taken into his own mind, digested, and reproduced in a form peculiar to him, consistent in itself, complete for its purpose.
That process of assimilation is essential to all true genius: it is over- looked by the spurious artist. He sees the master workman take his model, he sees the picture in which the model reappears he does not dis- cern the intermediate process, and scarcely detects his own omission; though all recognize it when the model is crudely transferred to the canvass without having been really conceived by the artist's mind—absorbed into the body of his thoughts and reproduced, not straight from the raw mate- rial, but from among those organized thoughts.
That process, however, is not peculiar to " high " art; it is essential to all art. In the most mechanical, the true master of his craft forms in his own mind the perfect idea of what he has to produce. It is that which distinguishes the process of art from mere mechanism—which confers the superior variety and freedom, of art; it is that which evinces the kind of skill that appeals to human sympathy. Hence, true art is not at all limited to those which are called the "highest walks." On the contrary, your truer artist may be of an humbler line: Ruyadael or Wouvermanns is a greater painter than West, because either of those two could understand and re- produce living ideas. West grasped at higher ideas, but could not truly conceive any: his designs are mechanically contrived; they follow pattern; they are constructed, not merely according to rule, but by rule alone and on a recipe. They are mechanical copies of a canto of external objects, not embodied thoughts. He was, as all poor workmen are in any art, a Frankenstein of painting, not a true parent. Art is scarcely limited in the material on which it works. Burns con- verted Scottish rustics into creations of poetry as genuine as the heroes of Homer. Benvenuto Cellini the goldsmith was a great sculptor, and he did not disdain to make you a salt-cellar to order. Some of Rapliaers finest Works were patterns for tapestry.
True art, therefore, is not excluded from the "lower" branches of plastic handicraft. It is not debased by becoming usefuL The greatest artists of the greatest period of art were journeymen. It is true that they had a reverence for their vocation as a sacred one: they would not prostitute it for gain—they would not knowingly violate its laws. There is probably not one of the greatest who would not have refused to damage a work of art by some falsehood prepense for the sake of profit. But they did not scruple to make their own working industry a matter of trade. They seem to have viewed their craft in much the same light as the tree surgeon of our day views his: they had a science which nothing induced them to de- grade or betray; but their own honest industry was at. the command of • See Speclafor for April 10.
any customer who could pay for it. And, like all lovers of science or art, they were generous: the work, or the happiness it excited, or the reverence it attracted, was often their reward.
The artists of the great Italian schools did their best to supply what was wanted by their customers, and to make every work which they produced the means of extending the true principles of art. In some respects the artist of our own day and country has peculiar facilities for such a mission. The materials that court his plastic hand are innumerable; the works which should be works of art, but are only pattern-moulded, are endless; and they multiply every day. If the testhetical mis- sionary desires to instil into the popular mind feelings of beauty, propor- tion, moral meaning conveyed in material substances, the occasions baflle computation. There is the whole class of stuffs for wearing apparels, in which the scientific knowledge of the artist might introduce order and har- mony of colours and colour-patterns. There is the whole class of domes- tic dwellings, into which the artist (becoming an architect according to the wants of the time) may introduce proportion, strength, and beauty. There are the countless varieties of furniture,—cabinetmaking, with its demands of proportion; wood-carving, with its varieties of application and execution, from real sculpture down to the moulding of chairbacks; crockery and earthenware, their scope for invention of forms according to the uses, their surface for pictures; glass-making, from the wine-glass to the chandelier, from the stained window to the palace of Aladdin which we have imagined; house-painting and papering, from its borders to its fresco-pictures; iron- mongery, with its capacity for every sort of sculpture, from the grotesques and tracery of an iron gate to the special architecture of a large fire-grate; papier-mache, with its brilliant tints and changeful shape courting the fancy of faory; "chimney ornaments," bronzes, and the like materials un- . appropriated by the artist; the plaster-cast trade, as yet mai:waded by any original designer except the caricaturist, but offering a direct medium be- tween the sculptor and the people at large. To continue the catalogue, would be an index to the London Directory.
There is no lack of employment for artists. What there wants is an adequate conception of the capacities of art, a higher spirit than the stupid pride which makes artists of any pretensions think working for trades a degradation; and most of all, perhaps, the cultivated knowledge and inven- tion which would fit artists for these innumerable avocations. The varie- ties of minds and capacities are many, and our artists would not only find profit, but many more chances of developing their faculties by turning to the many paths which court their steps. Mr. Hay has introduced scien- tific inquiry into house-painting--or "decoration," if the term be prefer-. red. Mr. Adams's Polychromatic Ornament of Italy may serve as a hint on a cognate branch of workmanship, and shows what a field there is for the true artist in house-painting; besides reminding the English painter that the most playful and wilful fancy may be combined with geometric exact- ness.
One step to a better state of opinion on these subjects will be an en- largement of the Schools of Design, in respect of their scope and objects. In this country there has been a foolish attempt to restrict their utility, by admitting only students contemplating employment in mere handicrafts; a restriction which tends to exclude the youth who possesses a true spirit of emulation and taste in art--the very student most desirable. There is no sueh distinction in art. The art of handicraft is identical with the art of historical painting; it is always a knowledge of the proportion, relation, beauty, and moral significancy of visual attributes. The desirable state of things would be that which obtained in Italy, when a colour-grinder like Luca Gior- dano became a painter, or a dyer like Tintoretto; when a Cellini was goldsmith, and a Raphael furnished patterns for hangings. Could Raphael and Cellini be recalled—could Giovanni da Udine, or any of Raphael's many apprentices, be introduced to the immense field of British manufac- tures, the barren space of English walls, or our bald streets—is it to be supposed that they would have turned away with a sneer, or would have been animated by any spirit but the ambition to show the world what could be done by such workmen on such materials! What a magic transform- ation would then have come over the whole scene of domestic life—ani- mating every place and every object with fancy and beauty!
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