of a standard of colour, that we can apply his principles of colouring
to subjects of all kinds. Until you have had a work of his long near
you; nay, unless you have been labouring at it, and trying to copy it,
you do not know the thoroughly grand qualities that are concentrated in
it. Simplicity, and intensity, both of the highest character;--
simplicity of aim, and intensity of power and success, are involved in
that man's unpretending labour.
Finally, you cannot believe that I would omit my own favourite, Turner.
I fear from the very number of his works left to the nation, that there
is a disposition now rising to look upon his vast bequest with some
contempt. I beg of you, if in nothing else, to believe me in this, that
you cannot further the art of England in any way more distinctly than
by giving attention to every fragment that has been left by that man.
The time will come when his full power and right place will be
acknowledged; that time will not be for many a day yet: nevertheless,
be assured--as far as you are inclined to give the least faith to
anything I may say to you, be assured--that you can act for the good of
art in England in no better way than by using whatever influence any of
you have in any direction to urge the reverent study and yet more
reverent preservation of the works of Turner. I do not say "the
exhibition" of his works, for we are not altogether ripe for it: they
are still too far above us; uniting, as I was telling you, too many
qualities for us yet to feel fully their range and their influence;--
but let us only try to keep them safe from harm, and show thoroughly
and conveniently what we show of them at all, and day by day their
greatness will dawn upon us more and more, and be the root of a school
of art in England, which I do not doubt may be as bright, as just, and
as refined as even that of Venice herself. The dominion of the sea
seems to have been associated, in past time, with dominion in the arts
also: Athens had them together; Venice had them together; but by so
much as our authority over the ocean is wider than theirs over the
Ægean or Adriatic, let us strive to make our art more widely beneficent
than theirs, though it cannot be more exalted; so working out the
fulfilment, in their wakening as well as their warning sense, of those
great words of the aged Tintoret:
"Sempre si fa il mare maggiore."
LECTURE III.
MODERN MANUFACTURE AND DESIGN.
_A Lecture delivered at Bradford, March, 1859_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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