INSTINCTIVE CAPACITY FOR. ART.
THE Archbishop of Canterbury on Saturday distributed the prizes given at an industrial exhibition in Bromley, Kent, and made, as the custom is, a little speech to the competitors and the audience. It was an excellent little speech, principally directed against the practice now pursued by the best artisans of abandoning provincial homes to lose themselves in the London wilderness ; but it contained an odd remark which deserves comment. Dr. Benson has an idea that civilisation in certain respects diminishes artistic perception, and that in particular the perception of colour degenerates as men's minds become faller and more occupied. "Many," he said, "had noticed, and all must recognise, the very singular fact, that almost all uncivilised tribes had a very perfect eye for colour. It was the same if they looked at the work of the Hindoos, of oat of the way Indian tribes, of the ancient Japanese ; they saw it in the wonderful colours of the Scotch tartans, in the way in which the colours were arranged in the knitting of the Spanish women, in the magnificent ribbons produced in the little villages of Italy, with their remarkable arrangement of brilliant colours. And wherever they went they found that almost in proportion as education and book-learning came in, the eye for colour disappeared." That opinion, once almost universal, has, if true, this consequencethat education destroys taste, or, at least, destroys that taste which, arising rather from the natural organisation than from any serious thinking, may colloquially be called "instinctive." Such a fact would be a serious set-off to our many gains from civilisation, and would seem for one thing to impair the value of Industrial Exhibitions ; but, then, is it a fact ? We venture to think, with all deference to the Arch- bishop, that it is the very reverse ; and that if he had reflected on the history of his subject, instead of repeating a conven- tionalism, he would have given a widely different opinion. To begin with, he is confusing the savage eye for colour with the Asiatic eye for colour. Savage manufactures, with scarcely an exception, are glaring in colour, though when they use shells, or stones, or woods, nature puts a sharp restriction on them, and savages universally delight in gaudiness. Nothing seems to them so grand as a strip of scarlet uniform ; they delight in bits of green glass, and they order from our manufacturers striped cottons of the most hideous kind. Has the Arch- bishop ever seen savage manufactures in whi211 the colours were artistically blended, or in which there was any charm except—a considerable exception—a certain barbaric originality or whimsicalness, as if a mind had been at work which was divided from the mind of the observer in kind as well as degree ? It is interest which such works really excite, not admiration ; just as the work of monkeys or elephants would,—an interest depending largely on unexpectedness. That Asiatics, such as the Hindoos, Japanese, and Persians, have pro- duced work wonderfully perfect in colour is, of coarse, true ; but then, were either the artists or the buyers uneducated savages ? On the contrary, the best specimens of such work were always produced when the artists had enjoyed for ages the benefit of hereditary culture in their arts, and when the peoples from whom they sprung had just reached the culminating point of their spontaneous civilisation. The old lacquers and porcelains of Japan, the old carpets of Persia, the old fabrics of Hintleo weavers, were not produced by savages, but by men living among a civilisation just growing over-ripe. That these arts decayed is, of course, true ; but they did not decay from a growth of intelligence, but from a change of circumstances, which indisposed the artists to give to their work the exaggerated amount of time, and therefore of labour, which was the con- dition of perfection. The Japanese of fifty years ago was no more civilised than the Japanese of a thousand years, but he could not produce such work ; and the Cullman% of to-day is as much behind his ancestor in intelligence, as witness his buildings and his tanks, as he is in the colour of his shawls. The truth 'teems to be that the native of hot climates, feeling pain from the sun's glare, but having only bright colours to use, learns to subdue them by combination ; and that having so learned, he never loses the secret, though he often loses the skill and the patience to make his work, as formerly, perfect. The "degradation of his eye" only comes to him when he tries to please the European, whose perception has not been trained by centuries of unendurable glare. The Archbishop quotes the Italian ribbon-makers with their traditional patterns ; but he would hardly contend, we feel sure, that they surpass in culture or education, or even book- learning, the artists of the Renaissance, when the human mind seemed stirred to its depths, and men thought even too strongly, yet produced unapproachable marvels of colour. We are not going to bring all Scotland down on us by questioning his Scotch illustration, though we think most tartans detestable —just imagine a tartan curtain !—but Dr. Benson would acknowledge that the highest period of Greek art coin- cided with the highest period of Greek thought, and that, though we cannot prove it, the probability that the eye of Pericles rested always on well-combined colours is very great indeed. It was while the Arabs were simplifying arith- metic, and studying chemistry and medicine, that they built and adorned Granada, not while they were lingering in the desert ; and the Roman understood nothing of art until his Greek slaves opened his eyes.
Moreover, if the Archbishop's proposition were true, races evidently advancing in intelligence would decline in their per- ception of colour ; and where is the evidence for that ? We should say that during the last thirty years the middle-classes in England had increased amazingly in intelligence ; and certainly the most marked advance average Englishmen have hitherto made in art is their perception of colour. Vulgarity has not gone out of them—far from it ; but no one can look into the shops of London, or watch the stuffs Englishwomen buy, or the china and carpets they admire, without seeing the enormous advance which has been made since 1851. The more advanced in cultivation they are, the more their eyes are trained to true colour, till a system has come in of imitating and cheapening the old Indian and Japanese combinations, and popular dealers will sell you carpets at low prices which, except their texture, have not a defect in them. We should say, in- deed, that so far from education and thought degrading the eye for colour, every man's taste improved with age and mental occupation, and that we would trust the Archbishop to-day to choose, say, a set of curtains, with much more confidence than we should have trusted him at the age of twenty. Yet, if that proposition is correct—and we have not a doubt of it—is it not fatal to the central thought of his whole argument P l. and
not ride off by saying that he only appreciates, but does not make, for the ultimate law to the manufacturer is the buyer's taste, not his own.
We confess we have little confidence in the artistic instinct of savages. They are constantly compelled by paucity of means to use materials which they cannot spoil; and an Otabeitan belle, who covers herself with garlands of flowers, of course looks picturesque, and suggests to Europeans that she has taste. We doubt, however, very greatly whether, if she could make gar- lands, she would not make them, and whether they would not be when made as vulgar as the outrageous bunches of flowers which some European modistes stick upon their customers' bonnets. The savage's fancy, as all travellers report, is for glaring colours ; and we do not see, if his eye for colour, such as it is, is the result of anything but circumstance, why he does not show that eye when be makes his purchases, which he undoubtedly does not do. Instinct is not an explanation in that case, nor is education an explanation of a race's degra- dation in art—one of the deepest puzzles we know of in history. Not to quote far away instances like the decadence of Japanese pottery, there is no more perplexing phenomenon in the whole history of the human mind than the decay of the power of painting among Italians. There is nothing to account for it. Nearly four hundred years ago they could paint marvellously. and now they paint badly,—worse, almost, than any European people. Why ? The race has not changed ; the climate has not changed; the knowledge of method and technique, if it has changed, has slightly improved ; the artists are just as free as they were and just as bound, there having been no substantial change in their position. Good pictures, if they painted them, would sell to all Europe just as well, and they would be at least as much honoured over a wider area. They simply cannot paint as they once did, any more than rich and cultivated Arabs can build a new Taj, or think out the delicate tracery of a new Alhambra; but no man tells us a reason that will stand ten minutes' investigation, except the sentence that "the impulse has died away," which is merely "we do not know" in another form. All we can say is that we see the same thing occur in individuals, and that a race may exhaust its power of artistic production just as a man may ; but the explanation leaves us discontent. That one race should possess a gift and not another, seems natural enough, for one family has a gift and not another ; but why a race, having once possessed the gift of art, and manifested its possession, should lose it, is so far unexplained. Nothing has happened in Italy to prevent the production of Raphaels, and yet we no more expect another Raphael to arise there than another Julius Omar. The Arch- bishop would say it is because Italians read and think ; but we only wish we could believe it, and sorrowfully proclaim an utter incredulity. If ignorance is the source of skill in colour, Italian artists who are not as educated as Raphael can, un- happily, be counted by whole brigades.
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