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Page 10
Yet I am almost brought to a stand-still when bidding you to study
nature and the history of art, by remembering that this is London,
and what it is like: how can I ask working-men passing up and down
these hideous streets day by day to care about beauty? If it were
politics, we must care about that; or science, you could wrap
yourselves up in the study of facts, no doubt, without much caring
what goes on about you--but beauty! do you not see what terrible
difficulties beset art, owing to a long neglect of art--and neglect
of reason, too, in this matter? It is such a heavy question by what
effort, by what dead-lift, you can thrust this difficulty from you,
that I must perforce set it aside for the present, and must at least
hope that the study of history and its monuments will help you
somewhat herein. If you can really fill your minds with memories of
great works of art, and great times of art, you will, I think, be
able to a certain extent to look through the aforesaid ugly
surroundings, and will be moved to discontent of what is careless
and brutal now, and will, I hope, at last be so much discontented
with what is bad, that you will determine to bear no longer that
short-sighted, reckless brutality of squalor that so disgraces our
intricate civilisation.
Well, at any rate, London is good for this, that it is well off for
museums,--which I heartily wish were to be got at seven days in the
week instead of six, or at least on the only day on which an
ordinarily busy man, one of the taxpayers who support them, can as a
rule see them quietly,--and certainly any of us who may have any
natural turn for art must get more help from frequenting them than
one can well say. It is true, however, that people need some
preliminary instruction before they can get all the good possible to
be got from the prodigious treasures of art possessed by the country
in that form: there also one sees things in a piecemeal way: nor
can I deny that there is something melancholy about a museum, such a
tale of violence, destruction, and carelessness, as its treasured
scraps tell us.
But moreover you may sometimes have an opportunity of studying
ancient art in a narrower but a more intimate, a more kindly form,
the monuments of our own land. Sometimes only, since we live in the
middle of this world of brick and mortar, and there is little else
left us amidst it, except the ghost of the great church at
Westminster, ruined as its exterior is by the stupidity of the
restoring architect, and insulted as its glorious interior is by the
pompous undertakers' lies, by the vainglory and ignorance of the
last two centuries and a half--little besides that and the matchless
Hall near it: but when we can get beyond that smoky world, there,
out in the country we may still see the works of our fathers yet
alive amidst the very nature they were wrought into, and of which
they are so completely a part: for there indeed if anywhere, in the
English country, in the days when people cared about such things,
was there a full sympathy between the works of man, and the land
they were made for:- the land is a little land; too much shut up
within the narrow seas, as it seems, to have much space for swelling
into hugeness: there are no great wastes overwhelming in their
dreariness, no great solitudes of forests, no terrible untrodden
mountain-walls: all is measured, mingled, varied, gliding easily
one thing into another: little rivers, little plains; swelling,
speedily-changing uplands, all beset with handsome orderly trees;
little hills, little mountains, netted over with the walls of sheep-
walks: all is little; yet not foolish and blank, but serious
rather, and abundant of meaning for such as choose to seek it: it
is neither prison nor palace, but a decent home.
All which I neither praise nor blame, but say that so it is: some
people praise this homeliness overmuch, as if the land were the very
axle-tree of the world; so do not I, nor any unblinded by pride in
themselves and all that belongs to them: others there are who scorn
it and the tameness of it: not I any the more: though it would
indeed be hard if there were nothing else in the world, no wonders,
no terrors, no unspeakable beauties: yet when we think what a small
part of the world's history, past, present, and to come, is this
land we live in, and how much smaller still in the history of the
arts, and yet how our forefathers clung to it, and with what care
and pains they adorned it, this unromantic, uneventful-looking land
of England, surely by this too our hearts may be touched, and our
hope quickened.
For as was the land, such was the art of it while folk yet troubled
themselves about such things; it strove little to impress people
either by pomp or ingenuity: not unseldom it fell into commonplace,
rarely it rose into majesty; yet was it never oppressive, never a
slave's nightmare nor an insolent boast: and at its best it had an
inventiveness, an individuality that grander styles have never
overpassed: its best too, and that was in its very heart, was given
as freely to the yeoman's house, and the humble village church, as
to the lord's palace or the mighty cathedral: never coarse, though
often rude enough, sweet, natural and unaffected, an art of peasants
rather than of merchant-princes or courtiers, it must be a hard
heart, I think, that does not love it: whether a man has been born
among it like ourselves, or has come wonderingly on its simplicity
from all the grandeur over-seas. A peasant art, I say, and it clung
fast to the life of the people, and still lived among the cottagers
and yeomen in many parts of the country while the big houses were
being built 'French and fine': still lived also in many a quaint
pattern of loom and printing-block, and embroiderer's needle, while
over-seas stupid pomp had extinguished all nature and freedom, and
art was become, in France especially, the mere expression of that
successful and exultant rascality, which in the flesh no long time
afterwards went down into the pit for ever.
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