LECTURE V

THE FIRESIDE

JOHN LEECH AND JOHN TENNIEL

(Delivered 7th and 10th November 1883)

124. THE Outlines of the schools of our National Art which I attempted in the four lectures given last spring, had led us to the point where the, to us chiefly important, and, it may perhaps be said, temporarily, all important questions respecting the uses of art in popular education, were introduced to us by the beautiful drawings of Miss Alexander and Miss Greenaway. But these drawings, in their dignified and delicate, often reserved, and sometimes severe characters, address themselves to a circle, which however large, or even (I say it with thankfulness) practically infinite, yet consists exclusively of persons of already cultivated sensibilities, and more or less gentle and serious temper. The interests of general education compel our reference to a class entirely beneath these, or at least distinct from them; and our consideration of art-methods to which the conditions of cheapness, and rapidity of multiplication, are absolutely essential.

125. I have stated, and it is one of the paradoxes of my political economy which you will find on examination to be the expression of a final truth, that there is no such thing as a just or real cheapness, but that all things have their necessary price:1 and that you can no more obtain them for less than that price, than you can alter the course of the earth. When you obtain anything yourself for halfprice, somebody else must always have paid the other half.

1

[See, for instance, Munera Pulveris, § 62 n. (Vol. XVII. p. 185).]

But, in the sense either of having cost less labour, or of being the productions of less rare genius, there are, of course, some kinds of art more generally attainable than others; and, of these, the kinds which depend on the use of the simplest means are also those which are calculated to have most influence over the simplest minds. The disciplined qualities of line-engraving will scarcely be relished, and often must even pass unperceived, by an uneducated or careless observer; but the attention of a child may be excited, and the apathy of a clown overcome, by the blunt lines of a vigorous woodcut.

126. To my own mind, there is no more beautiful proof of benevolent design in the creation of the earth, than the exact adaptation of its materials to the art-power of man.1 The plasticity and constancy under fire of clay; the ductility and fusibility of gold and iron; the consistent softness of marble; and the fibrous toughness of wood, are in each material carried to the exact degree which renders them provocative of skill by their resistance, and full of reward for it by their compliance: so that the delight with which, after sufficiently intimate study of the methods of manual work, the student ought to regard the excellence of a masterpiece, is never merely the admiration of difficulties overcome, but the sympathy, in a certain sense, both with the enjoyment of the workman in managing a substance so pliable to his will, and with the worthiness, fitness, and obedience of the material itself, which at once invites his authority, and rewards his concessions.

127. But of all the various instruments of his life and genius, none are so manifold in their service to him as that which the forest leaves gather every summer out of the air he breathes. Think of the use of it in house and furniture alone. I have lived in marble palaces, and under frescoed loggie, but have never been so comfortable in either as in the clean room of an old Swiss inn, whose

1

[On this subject, see Vol. VI. p. 143, and the other passages there noted (especially Vol. XII. p. 200).]

walls and floor were of plain deal. You will find also, in the long run, that none of your modern æsthetic upholstery can match, for comfort, good old English oak wainscot; and that the crystalline magnificence of the marbles of Genoa and the macigno of Florence can give no more pleasure to daily life than the carved brackets and trefoiled gables which once shaded the busy and merry streets, and lifted the chiming carillons above them, in Kent and Picardy.

128. As a material of sculpture, wood has hitherto been employed chiefly by the less cultivated races of Europe; and we cannot know what Orcagna would have made of his shrine, or Ghiberti of his gates, if they had worked in olive wood instead of marble and bronze. But even as matters now stand, the carving of the pinnacled stalls in our northern cathedrals, and that of the foliage on the horizontal beams of domestic architecture, gave rise to a school of ornament of which the proudest edifices of the sixteenth century are only the translation into stone; and to which our somewhat dull respect for the zigzags and dog-teeth of a sterner time has made us alike neglectful and unjust.*

129. But it is above all as a medium of engraving that the easy submission of wood to the edge of the chisel,—I will use this plain word, if you please, instead of burin,and the tough durability of its grain, have made it so widely serviceable to us for popular pleasure in art; but mischievous also, in the degree in which it encourages the cheapest and vilest modes of design. The coarsest scrawl with a blunt pen can be reproduced on a wood-block with perfect ease by the clumsiest engraver; and there are tens of thousands of vulgar artists who can scrawl with a blunt pen, and with no trouble to themselves, something that will amuse, as I said, a child or a clown. But there is not one artist in ten thousand who can draw even simple

* Compare Bible of Amiens, ch. iv. § 10, "aisles of aspen, orchards of apple, clusters of vine" [above, p. 131].

objects rightly with a perfectly pure line; when such a line is drawn, only an extremely skilful engraver can reproduce it on wood; when reproduced, it is liable to be broken at the second or third printing; and supposing it permanent, not one spectator in ten thousand would care for it.

130. There is, however, another temptation, constant in the practice of woodcutting, which has been peculiarly harmful to us in the present day. The action of the chisel on wood, as you doubtless are aware, is to produce a white touch on a black ground; and if a few white touches can be so distributed as to produce any kind of effect, all the black ground becomes part of the imagined picture, with no trouble whatever to the workman: so that you buy in your cheap magazine a picture,-say four inches square, or sixteen square inches of surface,-in the whole of which there may only be half an inch of work. Whereas, in line engraving, every atom of the shade has to be worked for, and that with extreme care, evenness and dexterity of hand; while even in etching, though a great quantity of the shade is mere burr and scrabble and blotch, a certain quantity of real care and skill must be spent in covering the surface at first. Whereas the common woodcut requires scarcely more trouble than a schoolboy takes with a scrawl on his slate, and you might order such pictures by the cartload from Coniston quarries, with only a clever urchin or two to put the chalk on.

131. But the mischief of the woodcut, considered simply as a means in the publisher's hands of imposing cheap work on the purchaser, is trebled by its morbid power of expressing ideas of ugliness or terror. While no entirely beautiful thing can be represented in a woodcut, every form of vulgarity or unpleasantness can be given to the life; and the result is, that, especially in our popular scientific books, the mere effort to be amusing and attractive leads to the publication of every species of the abominable.1 No

XXXIII.

1 [Compare Aratra Pentelici, § 101 n. (Vol. XX. p. 267).]

microscope can teach the beauty of a statue, nor can any woodcut represent that of a nobly bred human form; but only last term we saw the whole Ashmolean Society1 held in a trance of rapture by the inexplicable decoration of the posteriors of a flea; and I have framed for you here, around a page of the scientific journal which styles itself Knowledge, a collection of woodcuts out of a scientific survey of South America,2 presenting collectively to you, in designs ignorantly drawn and vilely engraved, yet with the peculiar advantage belonging to the cheap woodcut, whatever, through that fourth part of the round world, from Mexico to Patagonia, can be found of savage, sordid, vicious, or ridiculous in humanity, without so much as one exceptional indication of a graceful form, a true instinct, or a cultivable capacity.

132. The second frame is of French scientific art, and still more curiously horrible. I have cut these examples, not by any means the ugliest, out of Les Pourquoi de Mademoiselle Suzanne, a book in which it is proposed to instruct a young lady of eleven or twelve years old, amusingly, in the elements of science.

In the course of the lively initiation, the young lady has the advantage of seeing a garde champêtre struck dead by lightning; she is par parenthèse entertained with the history and picture of the suicide of the cook Vatel; somebody's heart, liver, and forearm are dissected for her; all the phenomena of nightmare are described and pourtrayed; and whatever spectres of monstrosity can be conjured into the sun, the moon, the stars, the sky, the sea, the railway,

1 [The Ashmolean Natural History Society of Oxfordshire.]

[The examples described in § 131 are in the Ruskin Drawing School at Oxford, Reference Series No. 164 (Vol. XXI. p. 42). The frame of "French cuts" (§ 132) is no longer in the school. "I shall place them," said Ruskin in the lecture as delivered, "next to some scientific studies by Tintoret, in which you can see all that is graceful in form, true in instinct, and cultivated in capacity" (Pall Mall Gazette, November 8).]

[By E. Desbeaux, with preface by Xavier Marmier of the Académie Française, Paris, 1881. For Ruskin's references here, see pp. 242; 34, 35; 69, 70, 72; 213; and (e.g.) 93, 112, 179.]