WHY THE CAR WAS BAD.
THE passing objection which we made to the cumbrous funeral- car is justified by Mr. Henry Cole, when speaking at the de- partment of Practical Art, in a passage which indicates the prin- ciple for testing the design. "Although essentially a reality in its materials," says Mr. Cole, it was perhaps less a reality, viewed on true amthetic principles, than a simple bier borne by soldiers would have been, and less impressive than the Duke's horse with the dangling boots." A design of the kind should be conceived with the view of embodying a simple truth in a very simple and symme- trical form, so that the spectator may see the thing which embodies the feeling in his own mind. As a matter of simple composition, the superstructure was too great for the vehicle ; a fault which violates that canon of constructive art that the sup- ports of any structure should be obvious and sufficient for the purpose. It is not paradoxical to say, on the other hand, that an- other canon of art was violated in the obtrusion of auxiliary means. The over-cumbrous oar was helped on its course by men's shoul- ders; and at the end, the machinery caused delay in a cere- mony that ought to have proceeded without a diverted attention to trivialities.
There is some confusion as to the nature of reality. The parts of the composition were "real,"—that is to say, there was a real coffin, there were real arms, and accessories real in themselves ; but as a whole the composition departed from the reality which was needed. That reality should have been, a car sufficient to bear a coffin, adorned if it were necessary with such arms as be- longed to the profession of the dead, but the coffin and the ear forming the principal part of the whole. It was not so. Between the ear and the coffin was a vast pile, covered with drapery, which might have been a four-post bedstead, or any other disguised mystery • with the sleeper unaccountably raised, like the :High- land laird upon the tester, as the more dignified position. The ac- cessories occupied a large share of the pile. The whole might have served better if it had been intended for a stationary composition ; but a heap of the kind was ill fitted to pass along the uneven road without swaying and tottering,—disastrous incidents to any species of art-composition.
And in connexionwith the character of the dead man, this species of false upholstery was peculiarly unsuitable. The Duke was plain in his habits, and especially in his furniture ; his bedroom was like a tent on the field, and the simplest bier would indeed have been the proper representative of the bed of his active life. His splendour lay in the orders with which he was loaded, in the armies which he commanded ; and those orders might have been borne around his body, as the army marched around it, in magnifi- cent contrast with the stern simplicity that belonged to his cha- racter.
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