Myra Kelly - "Little Citizens"

John Lothrop Motley - "The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1568"

Wilkie Collins - "Antonina"

Robert W. Chambers - "In Secret"

New Philadelphia Book Publisher Highlights Local Talent
Book and Publishing News from Publishers Newswire(tm)

Looking for Child to be on Cover of a New Book, 'The Model Child'
PHILADELPHIA, Pa. -- The Philadelphia literary world will celebrate the launch of two new players today, April 10th: Kay Square Press, a new publishing company focused on Philadelphia-area artists, their stories, and their art; and Kay Square's first release, 'With the Rich and Mighty: Emlen Etting of Philadelphia' (ISBN: 978-0-9815129-0-7), a critical biography by Kenneth C. Kaleta.

FlatSigned Press Alleges Don Imus Remarks Damage Legacy of President Gerald R. Ford
NEW YORK, N.Y. -- Nathan Yungerberg, an accomplished model scout and professional child photographer is launching a nation-wide casting call to find the cover model for his highly anticipated book release, 'The Model Child: A Parents Guide to the Child Modeling Industry' (ISBN: 978-0-9817018-0-6).

Books: Lectures and Essays

G >> Goldwin Smith >> Lectures and Essays




V. _The Lamp of Purity_--I heard Thackeray thank Heaven for the
purity of Dickens. I thanked Heaven for the purity of a greater than
Dickens--Thackeray himself. We may all thank Heaven for the purity of
one still greater than either, Sir Walter Scott. I say still greater
morally, as well as in power as an artist, because in Thackeray there is
cynicism, though the more genial and healthy element predominates; and
cynicism, which is not good in the great writer, becomes very bad in the
little reader. We know what most of the novels were before Scott. We
know the impurity, half-redeemed, of Fielding, the unredeemed impurity
of Smollett, the lecherous leer of Sterne, the coarseness even of Defoe.
Parts of Richardson himself could not be read by a woman without a
blush. As to French novels, Carlyle says of one of the most famous of
the last century that after reading it you ought to wash seven times in
Jordan; but after reading the French novels of the present day, in which
lewdness is sprinkled with sentimental rosewater, and deodorized, but by
no means disinfected, your washings had better be seventy times seven.
There is no justification for this; it is mere pandering, under whatever
pretence, to evil propensities; it makes the divine art of Fiction
"procuress to the Lords of Hell," If our established morality is in any
way narrow and unjust, appeal to Philosophy, not to Comus; and remember
that the mass of readers are not philosophers. Coleridge pledges himself
to find the deepest sermons under the filth of Rabelais; but Coleridge
alone finds the sermons while everybody finds the filth. Impure novels
have brought and are bringing much misery on the world. Scott's purity
is not that of cloistered innocence and inexperience, it is the manly
purity of one who had seen the world, mingled with men of the world,
known evil as well as good; but who, being a true gentleman, abhorred
filth, and teaches us to abhor it too.

VI. _The Lamp of Humanity_.--One day we see the walls placarded
with the advertising woodcut of a sensation novel, representing a girl
tied to a table and a man cutting off her feet into a tub. Another day
we are allured by a picture of a woman sitting at a sewing-machine and a
man seizing her behind by the hair, and lifting a club to knock her
brains out. A French novelist stimulates your jaded palate by
introducing a duel fought with butchers' knives by the light of
lanterns. One genius subsists by murder, as another does by bigamy and
adultery. Scott would have recoiled from the blood as well as from the
ordure, he would have allowed neither to defile his noble page. He knew
that there was no pretence for bringing before a reader what is merely
horrible, that by doing so you only stimulate passions as low as
licentiousness itself--the passions which were stimulated by the
gladiatorial shows in degraded Rome, which are stimulated by the bull-
fights in degraded Spain, which are stimulated among ourselves by
exhibitions the attraction of which really consists in their imperilling
human life. He knew that a novelist had no right even to introduce the
terrible except for the purpose of exhibiting human heroism, developing
character, awakening emotions which when awakened dignify and save from
harm. It is want of genius and of knowledge of their craft that drives
novelists to outrage humanity with horrors. Miss Austen can interest and
even excite you as much with the little domestic adventures of Emma as
some of her rivals can with a whole Newgate calendar of guilt and gore.

VII. _The Lamp of Chivalry_.--Of this briefly. Let the writer of
fiction give us humanity in all its phases, the comic as well as the
tragic, the ridiculous as well as the sublime; but let him not lower the
standard of character or the aim of life. Shakespeare does not. We
delight in his Falstaffs and his clowns as well as in his Hamlets and
Othellos, but he never familiarizes us with what is base and mean. The
noble and chivalrous always holds its place as the aim of true humanity
in his ideal world. Perhaps Dickens is not entirely free from blame in
this respect; perhaps Pickwickianism has in some degree familiarized the
generation of Englishmen who have been fed upon it with what is not
chivalrous, to say the least, in conduct, as it unquestionably has with
slang in conversation. But Scott, like Shakespeare, wherever the thread
of his fiction may lead him, always keeps before himself and us the
highest ideal which he knew, the ideal of a gentleman. If anyone says
these are narrow bounds wherein to confine fiction I answer there has
been room enough within them for the highest tragedy, the deepest
pathos, the broadest humour, the widest range of character, the most
moving incident, that the world has ever enjoyed. There has been room
within them for all the kings of pure and healthy fiction--for Homer,
Shakespeare, Cervantes, Moliere, Scott. "Farewell Sir Walter," says
Carlyle at the end of his essay, "farewell Sir Walter, pride of all
Scotchmen. Scotland has said farewell to her mortal son. But all
humanity welcomes him as Scotland's noblest gift to her and crowns him
as on this day one of the heirs of immortality."




AN ADDRESS DELIVERED TO THE OXFORD SCHOOL OF SCIENCE AND ART AT THE
DISTRIBUTION OF PRIZES


LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,

You will not expect me, in complying with the custom which requires your
Chairman to address a few words to you before distributing the prizes,
to give you instruction about Art or Science. One who was educated, as I
was, under the old system, can hardly see without a pang the improvement
that has been made in education since his time. In a public school, in
my day, you learned nothing of Science, Art, or Music. Having received
nothing, I have nothing to give. Fortunately, the only thing of
importance to be said this evening can be said without technical
knowledge of any kind. The School of Art needs better accommodation. The
financial details will be explained to you by those who are more
conversant with them than I am. I will only say that parsimony in this
matter on the part of the government or other public bodies will, in my
humble opinion, be unwise. I am not for a lavish expenditure of public
money, even on education. It would be a misfortune if parental duty were
to be cast on the State, and parents were to be allowed to forget that
they are bound to provide their children with education as well as with
bread. But it seems that at this moment the soundest and even the most
strictly commercial policy would counsel liberality in providing for the
National Schools of Art and Science. England is labouring under
commercial depression. Of the works in the manufacturing districts, many
are running half time, and some, I fear, are likely, if things do not
mend, to stop. When I was there the other day gloom was on all faces.
Some people seem to think that the bad time will pass away of itself,
and that a good time will come again like a new moon. It is a
comfortable but a doubtful doctrine. And suppose the good time does not
come again, the outlook for those masses and their employers is dark. A
friend of mine, who is a manufacturer, said to me the other day that he
had been seeing the ruins of a feudal castle, and that the sight set him
thinking if factories should ever, like feudal castles, fall into decay,
what their ruins would be like? They would be unromantic no doubt, even
by moonlight. But much worse than the ruins of buildings would be the
ruin among the people. Imagine these swarming multitudes, or any large
proportion of them, left by the failure of employment without bread. It
would be something like a chronic Indian famine. The wealth of England
is unparalleled, unapproached in commercial history. Add Carthage to
Tyre, Venice to Carthage, Amsterdam to Venice, you will not make
anything like a London. Ten thousand pounds paid for a pair of china
vases. A Roman noble under the Empire might have rivalled this, but the
wealth of the Roman nobles was not the fruit of industry, it was the
plunder of the world. You can hardly imagine how those who come fresh
from a new country like Canada, or parts of the United States--a land
just redeemed from the wilderness, with all its untrimmed roughness, its
fields half tilled and full of stumps, its snake fences, and the charred
pines which stand up gaunt monuments of forest fires--are impressed, I
might almost say ravished, by the sight of the lovely garden which
unlimited wealth expended on a limited space has made of England. This
country, too, has an immense capital invested in the funds and
securities of foreign nations, and in this way draws tribute from the
world, though, unhappily, we are being made sensible of the fact that
money lent to a foreign government is lent to a debtor on whom you
cannot distrain. But the sources of this fabulous prosperity, are they
inexhaustible? In part, we may hope they are. A maritime position,
admirably adapted for trading with both hemispheres, a race of first-
rate seamen, masses of skilled labour, vast accumulations of machinery
and capital--these are advantages not easily lost. And there is still in
England good store of coal and iron. Not so stable, however, is the
advantage given to England by the effects of the Napoleonic war, which
for the time crushed all manufactures and mercantile marines but hers.
Now, the continental nations are developing manufactures and mercantile
marines of their own. You go round asking them to alter their tariffs,
so as to enable you to recover their markets, and almost all of them
refuse; about the only door you have really succeeded in getting opened
to you is that of France, and this was opened, not by the nation, but by
an autocrat, who had diplomatic purposes of his own. The _Times_,
indeed, in a noteworthy article the other day, undertook to prove that a
great manufacturing and trading nation might lose its customers without
being much the worse for it, but this seems too good to be true; I fancy
Yorkshire and Lancashire would say so. Is it not that very margin of
profit of which _The Times_ speaks so lightly, which, being
accumulated, has created the wealth of England? Your manufacturers are
certainly under the impression that they want markets, and the loss of
the great American market seems to them a special matter of concern. It
is doubtful whether that market would be restored to them even by an
alteration of the tariff. The coal in the great American coal fields is
much nearer the surface, and consequently more cheaply worked, than the
coal in England; iron is as plentiful, and it is near the coal; labour,
which has been much dearer there, is now falling to the English level.
Tariff or no tariff, America will probably keep her own market for the
heavier and coarser goods. But there is still a kind of goods, in the
production of which the old country will long have a great advantage. I
mean the lighter, finer, and more elegant goods, the products of
cultivated taste and of trained skill in design--that very kind of
goods, in short, the character of which these Schools of Art are
specially intended to improve. Industry and invention the new world has
in as ample a measure as the old; invention in still ampler measure, for
the Americans are a nation of inventors; but cultivated taste and its
special products will long be the appanage of old countries. It will be
long before anything of that kind will pass current in the new world
without the old world stamp. Adapt your industry in some degree to
changed requirements; acquire those finer faculties which the Schools of
Design aim at cultivating, but which, in the lucrative production of the
coarser goods, have hitherto been comparatively neglected, and you may
recover a great American market; it is doubtful whether you will in any
other way. Therefore, I repeat, to stint the Art and Science Schools
would seem bad policy. I may add that it would be specially bad policy
here in Oxford, where, under the auspices of a University which is now
extending its care to Art as well as Science, it would seem that the
finer industries, such as design applied to furniture, decoration of all
kinds, carving, painted glass, bookbinding, ought in time to do
particularly well. If you wish to prosper, cultivate your speciality;
the rule holds good for cities as well as for men.

There are some, perhaps, who dislike to think of Art in connection with
anything like manufacture. Let us, then, call it design, and keep the
name of art for the higher pursuit. Your Instructor presides, I believe,
with success, and without finding his duties clash, over a school, the
main object of which is the improvement of manufactures, and another
school dedicated to the higher objects of aesthetic cultivation. The name
manufacture reminds you of machines, and you may dislike machines and
think there is something offensive to artists in their products. Well, a
machine does not produce, or pretend to produce, poetry or sculpture; it
pretends to clothe thousands of people who would otherwise go naked. It
is itself often a miracle of human intellect. It works unrestingly that
humanity may have a chance to rest. If it sometimes supersedes higher
work, it far more often, by relieving man of the lowest work, sets him
free for the higher. Those heaps of stones broken by the hammer of a
poor wretch who bends over his dull task through the weary day by the
roadside, scantily clad, in sharp frost perhaps or chilling showers, are
they more lovely to a painter's eye than if they had been broken,
without so much human labour and suffering, by a steam stone-crusher? No
one doubts the superior interest belonging to any work however
imperfect, of individual mind; but if we were not to use a pair of tongs
that did not bear the impress of individual mind, millionaires might
have tongs, but the rest of us would put on coals with our fingers.
After all, what is a machine but a perfect tool? The Tyrian loom was a
machine, though it was worked by hand and not by steam; and if the
Tyrian had known the power loom, depend upon it he would have used it.
Without machines, the members of this School might all be grinding their
corn with hand mills, instead of learning Art. Common humanity must use
manufactured articles; even uncommon humanity will find it difficult to
avoid using them, unless it has the courage of its convictions to the
same extent as George Fox, the Quaker, who encased himself in an entire
suit of home-made leather, bearing the impress of his individual mind;
and defied a mechanical and degenerate world. The only practical
question is whether the manufactures shall be good or bad, well-designed
or ill; South Kensington answers, that if training can do it, they shall
be good and well designed.

There are the manufacturing multitudes of England; they must have work,
and find markets for their work; if machines and the Black Country are
ugly, famine would be uglier still. I have no instruction to give you,
and you would not thank me for wasting your time with rhetorical praise
of art, even if I had all the flowers of diction at my command. To me,
as an outer barbarian, it seems that some of the language on these
subjects is already pretty high pitched. I have thought so even in
reading that one of Mr. Addington Symond's most attractive volumes about
Italy which relates to Italian art. Art is the interpreter of beauty,
and perhaps beauty, if we could penetrate to its essence, might reveal
to us something higher than itself. But Art is not religion, nor is
connoisseurship priesthood. To happiness Art lends intensity and
elevation; but in affliction, in ruin, in the wreck of affection how
much can Phidias and Raphael do for you? A poet makes Goethe say to a
sceptical and perplexed world, "Art still has truth, take refuge there."
It would be a poor refuge for most of us; it was so even for the great
Goethe; for with all his intellectual splendour, his character never
rose above a grandiose and statuesque self-love; he behaved ill to his
country, ill to women. Instead of being religion, Art seems, for its own
perfection, to need religion--not a system of dogma, but a faith. This,
probably, we all feel when we look at the paintings in the Church of
Assisi or in the Arena Chapel at Padua. Perhaps those paintings also
gain something by being in the proper place for religious art, a Church.
Since the divorce of religious art from religion, it has been common to
see a Crucifixion hung over a sideboard. That age was an age of faith;
and so most likely was the glorious age of Greek art in its way. Ours is
an age of doubt, an age of doubt and of strange cross currents and
eddies of opinion, ultra scepticism penning its books in the closet
while the ecclesiastical forms of the Middle Ages stalk the streets. Art
seems to feel the disturbing influence like the rest of life. Poetry
feels it less than other arts, because there is a poetry of doubt and
Tennyson is its poet. Art is expression, and to have high expression you
must have something high to express. In the pictures at our exhibitions
there may be great technical skill; I take it for granted there is; but
in the subject surely there is a void, an appearance of painful seeking
for something to paint, and finding very little. When you come to a
great picture of an Egyptian banquet in the days of the Pharaohs, you
feel that the painter must have had a long way to go for something to
paint. Certainly this age is not indifferent to beauty. The art movement
is in every house; everywhere you see some proof of a desire to possess
not mere ornament but something really rare and beautiful. The influence
transmutes children's picture books and toys. I turned up the other day
a child's picture book of the days of my childhood; probably it had been
thought wonderfully good in its time; and what a thing it was. Some day
our doubts may be cleared up; our beliefs may be settled; faith may come
again; life may recover its singleness and certainty of aim; poetry may
gush forth once more as fresh as Homer, and the art of the future may
appear. What is most difficult to conceive, perhaps, is the sculpture of
the future; because it is hardly possible that the moderns should ever
have such facilities as the ancients had for studying the human form. In
presence of the overwhelming magnificence of the sculpture in the
museums of Rome and Naples, one wonders how Canova and Co. can have
looked with any complacency on their own productions. There seems reason
by the way to think that these artists worked not each by himself, but
in schools and brotherhoods with mutual aid and sympathy; and this is an
advantage equally within the reach of modern art. Meantime, though the
Art of the future delays to come, modern life is not all hideous. There
are many things, no doubt, such as the Black Country and the suburbs of
our cities, on which the eye cannot rest with pleasure. But Paris is not
hideous. There may be in the long lines of buildings too much of the
autocratic monotony of the Empire, but the city, as a whole, is the
perfect image of a brilliant civilization. From London beauty is almost
banished by smoke and fog, which deny to the poor architect ornament,
colour, light and shadow, leaving him nothing but outline. No doubt
besides the smoke and fog there is a fatality. There is a fatality which
darkly impels us to place on our finest site, and one of the finest in
Europe, the niggard facade and inverted teacup dome of the National
Gallery; to temper the grandeurs of Westminster by the introduction of
the Aquarium, with Mr. Hankey's Tower of Babel in the near distance; to
guard against any too-imposing effect which the outline of the Houses of
Parliament might have by covering them with minute ornament, sure to be
blackened and corroded into one vast blotch by smoke; to collect the art
wonders of Pigtail Place; to make the lions in Trafalgar Square lie like
cats on a hearth-rug, instead of supporting themselves on a slope by
muscular action, like the lions at Genoa; to perch a colossal equestrian
statue of the Duke of Wellington, arrayed in his waterproof cape, and
mounted on a low-shouldered hack instead of a charger, on the top of an
arch, by way of perpetual atonement to France for Waterloo; and now to
think of planting an obelisk of the Pharaohs on a cab-stand. An obelisk
of the Pharaohs in ancient Rome was an august captive, symbolizing the
university of the Roman Empire, but an obelisk of the Pharaohs in London
symbolizes little more than did the Druidical ring of stones which an
English squire of my acquaintance purchased in one of the Channel
Islands and set up in his English park. As to London we must console
ourselves with the thought that if life outside is less poetic than it
was in the days of old, inwardly its poetry is much deeper. If the house
is less beautiful the home is more so. Even a house in what Tennyson
calls the long unlovely street is not utterly unlovely when within it
dwell cultivated intellect, depth of character and tenderness of
affection. However the beauty of English life is in the country and
there it may challenge that of Italian palaces. America is supposed to
be given over to ugliness. There are a good many ugly things there and
the ugliest are the most pretentious. As it is in society so it is in
architecture. America is best when she is content to be herself. An
American city with its spacious streets all planted with avenues of
trees with its blocks of buildings far from unimpeachable probably in
detail yet stately in the mass with its wide spreading suburbs where
each artizan has his neat looking house in his own plot of ground and
light and air and foliage with its countless church towers and spires
far from faultless yet varying the outline might not please a painters
eye but it fills your mind with a sense of well rewarded industry of
comfort and even opulence shared by the toiling man of a prosperous,
law-loving, cheerful, and pious life. I cannot help fancying that
Turner, whose genius got to the soul of everything, would have made
something of even in American city. The cities of the Middle Ages were
picturesquely huddled within walls for protection from the violence of
the feudal era, the cities of the New World spread wide in the security
of an age of law and a continent of peace. At Cleveland in Ohio there is
a great street called Euclid Avenue, lined with villas each standing in
its own grounds and separated from each other and from the street only
by a light iron fencing instead of the high brick wall with which the
Briton shuts out his detested kind. The villas are not vast or
suggestive of over-grown plutocracy, they are suggestive of moderate
wealth, pleasant summers, cheerful winters and domestic happiness. I
hardly think you would call Euclid Avenue revolting. I say it with the
diffidence of conscious ignorance but I should not be much afraid to
show you one or two buildings that our Professor of Architecture at
Cornell University has put up for us on a bluff over Cayuga Lake, on a
site which you would certainly admit to be magnificent. If I could have
ventured on any recommendation concerning Art, I should have pleaded
before the Royal Commission for a Chair of Architecture here. It might
endow us with some forms of beauty; it might at all events endow us with
rules for building a room in which you can be heard, one in which you
can breathe, and a chimney which would not smoke. I said that in America
the most pretentious buildings were the worst. Another source of failure
in buildings, in dress, and not in these alone, is servile imitation of
Europe. In northern America the summer is tropical, the winter is
arctic. A house ought to be regular and compact in shape, so as to be
easily warmed from the centre, with a roof of simple construction, high
pitched, to prevent the snow from lodging, and large eaves to throw it
off,--this for the arctic winter, for the tropical summer you want ample
verandas, which, in fact, are the summer sitting rooms. An American
house built in this way is capable at least of the beauty which belongs
to fitness. But as you see Parisian dresses under an alien sky, so you
see Italian villas with excrescences which no stove can warm, and Tudor
mansions with gables which hold all the snow. It is needless to say what
is the result, when the New World undertakes to reproduce not only the
architecture of the Old World, but that of classical Greece and Rome, or
that of the Middle Ages. Jefferson, who was a classical republican,
taught a number of his fellow citizens to build their homes like Doric
temples, and you may imagine what a Doric temple freely adapted to
domestic purposes must be. But are these attempts to revive the past
very successful anywhere? We regard as a decided mistake the revived
classicism of the last generation. May not our revived mediaevalism be
regarded as a mistake by the generation that follows us? We could all
probably point to some case in which the clashing of mediaeval beauties
with modern requirements has produced sad and ludicrous results. There
is our own museum; the best, I suppose, that could be done in the way of
revival; the work of an architect whom the first judges deemed a man of
genius. In that, ancient form and modern requirements seem everywhere at
cross purposes. Nobody can deny that genius is impressed upon the upper
part of the front, which reminds one of a beautiful building in an
Italian city, though the structure at the side recalls the mind to
Glastonbury, and the galaxy of chimneys has certainly no parallel in
Italy. The front ought to stand in a street, but as it stands in a field
its flanks have to be covered by devices which are inevitably weak. What
is to be done with the back always seems to me one of the darkest
enigmas of the future. The basement is incongruously plain and bare, in
the street it would perhaps be partly hidden by the passengers. Going
in, you find a beautiful mediaeval court struggling hard for its life
against a railway station and a cloister, considerately offering you a
shady walk or shelter from the weather round a room. Listen to the
multitudinous voices of Science and you will hear that the conflict
extends to practical accommodation. We all know it was not the fault of
the architect, it was the fault of adverse exigencies which came into
collision with his design, but this only strengthens the moral of the
building against revivals. Two humble achievements, if we had chosen
were certainly within our reach,--perfect adaptation to our object and
inoffensive dignity. Every one who has a heart, however ignorant of
architecture he may be, feels the transcendent beauty and poetry of the
mediaeval churches. For my part I look up with admiration, as fervent as
any one untrained in art can, to those divine creations of old religion
which soar over the smoke and din of our cities into purity and
stillness and seem to challenge us, with all our wealth and culture and
science and mechanical power, to produce their peer till the age of
faith shall return. Not Greek Art itself springing forth in its
perfection from the dark background of primaeval history, seems to me a
greater miracle than these. How poor beside the lowliest of them in
religious effect in romance, in everything but size and technical skill,
is any pile of neo-paganism even I will dare to say, St. Peter's. Yet
for my part, deeply as I am moved by the religious architecture of the
Middle Ages, I cannot honestly say that I ever felt the slightest
emotion in any modern Gothic church. I will even own that, except where
restoration rids us of the unchristian exclusiveness of pews, I prefer
the unrestored churches, with something of antiquity about them, to the
restored. There is a spell in mediaeval Art which has had power to
bewitch some people into trying, or wishing to try, or fancying that
they wish to try or making believe to fancy that they wish to try, to
bring back the Middle Ages. You may hear pinings for the return of an
age of force from gentle aestheticists, who, if the awe of force did
return, would certainly be crushed like eggshells. There is a well-known
tale by Hans Andersen, that great though child-like teacher, called the
"Overshoes of Fortune." A gentleman, at an evening party, has been
running down modern society and wishing he were in the heroic Middle
Ages. In going away he unwittingly puts on the fairy overshoes, which
have the gift of transporting the wearer at once to any place and time
where he wishes to be. Stepping out he finds his own wish fulfilled--he
is in the Middle Ages. There is no gas, the street is pitch dark, he is
up to his ankles in mud, he is nearly knocked into the kennel by a
mediaeval bishop returning from a revel with his roystering train, when
he wants to cross the river there is no bridge; and after vainly
inquiring his way in a tavern full of very rough customers, he wishes
himself in the moon, and to the moon appropriately he goes. Mediaevalism
can hardly be called anything but a rather enfeebling dream. If it were
a real effort to live in the Middle Ages, your life would be one
perpetual prevarication. You would be drawn by the steam engine to
lecture against steam; you would send eloquent invectives against
printing to the press, and you would be subsisting meanwhile on the
interest of investments which the Middle Ages would have condemned as
usury. If you were like some of the school, you would praise the golden
silence of the Dark Ages and be talking all the time. And surely the
hourly failure to act up to your principles, the hourly and conscious
apostacy from your ideal, could beget nothing in the character but
hollowness and weakness. No student of history can fail to see the moral
interest of the Middle Ages, any more than an artist can fail to see
their aesthetic interest. There were some special types of noble
character then, of which, when they were done with, nature broke the
mould. But the mould is broken, and it is broken for ever. Through
aesthetic pining for a past age, we may become unjust to our own, and
thus weaken our practical sense of duty, and lessen our power of doing
good. I will call the age bad when it makes me so, is a wise saying, and
worth all our visionary cynicism, be it never so eloquent. To say the
same thing in other words, our age will be good enough for most of us,
if there is genuine goodness in ourselves. Rousseau fancied he was
soaring above his age, not into the thirteenth century, but into the
state of nature, while he was falling miserably below his own age in all
the common duties and relations of life; and he was a type, not of
enthusiasts, for enthusiasm leads to action, but of mere social
dreamers. Where there is duty, there is poetry, and tragedy too, in
plenty, though it be in the most prosaic row of dingy little brick
houses with clothes hanging out to dry, or rather to be wetted, behind
them, in all Lancashire. We have commercial fraud now, too much of it;
and the declining character of English goods is a cause of their
exclusion from foreign markets, as well as hostile tariffs; so that
everything South Kensington can do to uphold good and genuine work will
be of the greatest advantage to the English trade. But if anyone
supposes that there was no commercial fraud in the Middle Ages, let him
study the commercial legislation of England for that period, and his
mind will be satisfied, if he has a mind to be satisfied and not only a
fancy to run away with him. There was fraud beneath the cross of the
Crusader, and there was forgery in the cell of the Monk. In comparing
the general quality of work we must remember that it is the best work of
those times that has survived. I think I could prove from history that
mediaeval floors sometimes gave way even when there was no St. Dunstan
there. You will recollect that the floor miraculously fell in at a
synod, and killed all St. Dunstan's opponents; but sceptics, who did not
easily believe in miracles, whispered that the Saint from his past
habits, knew how to handle tools. We are told by those whose creed is
embodied in "Past and Present" that this age is one vast anarchy,
industrial and social; and that nothing but military discipline--that is
the perpetual cry--will restore us to anything like order as workers or
as men. Well, there are twenty thousand miles of railway in the three
kingdoms, forming a system as complex as it is vast. I am told that at
one junction, close to London, the trains pass for some hours at the
rate of two in five minutes. Consider how that service is done by the
myriads of men employed, and this in all seasons and weathers in
overwhelming heat, in numbing cold, in blinding storm, in midnight
darkness. Is not this an army pretty well disciplined, though its object
is not bloodshed? If we see masses full of practical energy and good
sense, but wanting in culture, let us take our culture to them, and
perhaps they will give us some of their practical energy and good sense
in return. Without that Black Country industry, all begrimed and sweaty,
our fine culture could not exist. Everything we use, nay, our veriest
toy represents lives spent for us in delving beneath the dark and
perilous mine, in battling with the wintry sea, in panting before the
glowing forge, in counting the weary hours over the monotonous and
unresting loom, lives of little value, one could think, if there were no
hereafter. Let us at least be kind. I go to Saltaire. I find a noble
effort made by a rich man who kept his heart above wealth, Titus Salt--
he was a baronet, but we will spare him, as we spare Nelson, the
derogatory prefix--to put away what is dark and evil in factory life. I
find a little town, I should have thought not unpleasant to the eye, and
certainly not unpleasant to the heart, where labour dwells in pure air,
amidst beautiful scenery, with all the appliances of civilization, with
everything that can help it to health, morality, and happiness. I find a
man, who might, if he pleased, live idly in the lap of luxury, working
like a horse in the management of this place, bearing calmly not only
toil and trouble, but perverseness and ingratitude. Surely, aesthetic
culture would be a doubtful blessing if it made us think or speak
unsympathetically and rudely of Saltaire. Four hundred thousand people
at Manchester are without pure water. They propose to get it from
Thirlmere. For this they are denounced in that sort of language which is
called strong, but the use of which is a sure proof of weakness, for
irritability was well defined by Abernethy as debility in a state of
excitement. Let us spare, whenever they can be spared, history and
beauty; they are a priceless part of the heritage of a great industrial
nation, and one which lost can never be restored. The only difference I
ever had with my fellow-citizens in Oxford during a pretty long
residence, arose out of my opposition to a measure which would have
marred the historic character and the beauty of our city, while I was
positively assured on the best authority that it was commercially
inexpedient. If Thirlmere can be spared, spare Thirlmere; but if it is
really needed to supply those masses with a necessary of life, the
loveliest lake by which poet or artist ever wandered could not be put to
a nobler use. I am glad in this to follow the Bishop of Manchester, who
is not made of coarse clay, though he cares for the health as well as
for the religion of his people. A schism between aesthetic Oxford and
industrial Lancashire would be a bad thing for both; and South
Kensington, which, while it teaches art, joins hands with industry,
surely does well. It is needless to debate before this audience the
question whether there is any essential antagonism between art or
esthetic culture, and the tendencies of an age of science. An accidental
antagonism there may be, an essential antagonism there cannot be. What
is science but truth, and why should not truth and beauty live together?
Is an artist a worse painter of the human body from being a good
anatomist? Then why should he be a worse painter of nature generally,
because he knows her secrets, or because they are being explored in his
time? Would he render moonlight better if he believed the moon was a
green cheese? Art and Science dwelt together well enough in the minds of
Leonardo da Vinci and Michael Angelo. In the large creative mind there
is room for both; though the smaller and merely perceptive mind being
fixed on one may sometimes not have room for the other. True, the
perfect concord of art and science, like that of religion and science,
may be still to come, and come, we hope, both concords will. One word
more before we distribute the prizes. A system of prizes is a system of
competition, and to competition some object. We can readily sympathise
with their objection. Work done from love of the subject, or from a
sense of duty, is better than work done for a prize, and, moreover, we
cherish the hope that co-operation, not competition, will be the
ultimate principle of industry, and the final state of man. But nothing
hinders that, in working for a prize as in working for your bread, you
may, at the same time, be working from sense of duty and love of the
subject, and though co-operation may be our final state, competition is
our present. Here the competition is at least fair. There can hardly be
any doubt that the prize system often calls into activity powers of
doing good work which would otherwise have lain dormant, and if it does
this it is useful to the community, though the individual needs to be on
his guard against its drawbacks in himself. In reading the Life of Lord
Althorp the other day I was struck with the fact, for a fact, I think,
it evidently was, that England had owed one of her worthiest and most
useful statesmen to a college competition, which aroused him to a sense
of his own powers, and of the duty of using them, whereas he would
otherwise never have risen above making betting books and chronicling
the performances of foxhounds. Perhaps about the worst consequence of
the prize system, against which, I have no doubt, your Instructor
guards, is undue discouragement on the part of those who do not win the
prize. And now, Ladies and Gentlemen, I wish you were to receive your
rewards from a hand which would lend them any additional value. But
though presented by me they have been awarded by good judges; and as
they have been awarded to you, I have no doubt you have deserved them
well.