1819.] 



THE CIVIL ENGINEER AND ARCHITECT'S JOURNAL. 



73 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE AND ART. 



rContinued from page 49J 



Our review of Mr. Fergusson's work* has now brought us to a 

 part which will be held of immediate interest to many of our 

 readers — that wherein he begins a History of Architecture and the 

 Arts. To this he has prefixed a note, in which he explains that he 

 has, as far as may be, brought all the drawings to a common scale 

 — at least, one scale for plans, and one scale for elevations : a care 

 much needed in a critical work on art, but which is very seldom 

 shown. 



Egypt, as might be looked for, comes first before us, and Mr. 

 Fergusson having given much time to it, it makes a leading fea- 

 ture in the book, though we hardly know whether all will be alike 

 pleased with the way in which he has treated it. It is the writer's 

 endeavour, not to give a technical description of the buildings as 

 his great and only end, but to draw from monuments a true theory 

 of art : h)oking on monuments not as limbs of a skeleton, or as 

 boulders broken from a rock ; not as a pile of stones without 

 meaning, — but as the bodily expression of the mind and thought 

 of the day in which they were made ; deail, it is true, dead now, 

 but having formerly breathed, and in which tlie workings of the 

 breath of life are to be followed out. To understand this, how- 

 ever, to give new life to the relics of olden art, a man must forget 

 or blot from his mind the views which he has taken of modern art, 

 and even of that which he has looked upon as classic art. He 

 must put away the trammels of all schools, and be willing to look 

 for beauty, — to see it and acknowledge it wherever it may be, and 

 in whatever shape it may come before him. 



These are the passwords which Mr. Fergusson gives out; and he 

 does this fairly, for without them his work would seem empty, and 

 without any right bearing, as in his writings he has not followed 

 the beaten track, but struck out a new one— or rather a way very 

 much unlike the common one; and unless the reader knows where 

 he is and whither he goes, he must needs be bewildered : and he 

 will hold the writer to blame, instead of himself, who thought he 

 was going one way and finds he is going another. We neither 

 uphold Mr. Fergusson for striving to do something new, nor do we 

 say that he is always in the right; but we warn the reader that he 

 is reading a book written not according to his views, but those of 

 the writer, and which must be borne in mind tliroughout. The 

 reader must, indeed, think for himself; he must not be led away 

 by Mr. Fergusson, nor must he be led against him : and we think 

 it no mean tiling that Mr. Fergusson has brought out a book 

 which, whether right or wrong, is not to be scrambled through, but 

 must be well thought about ; for most strongly do we feel that as 

 Art is the brightest offspring of the mind, so is it well worthy of 

 all the thought and all the work that can be bestowed upon it. It 

 is not the toy of idlers, the pastime of wealth, or the calling of 

 brainbound twaddlers, but a link in the great chain of knowledge, 

 not one link of which can be severed without a common hurt — 

 not one link of which can be left to rust, without weakness to the 

 whole chain. Therefore we say again, we welcome any endeavour 

 in the field of art; and the more sd, that tliis is the sere and yellow 

 time in which the harvest droops for want of the husbandman. 



If we have said we do not give our belief to Mr. Fergusson, we 

 have withlield it that we might the more straightly lay down the 

 groundwork on which he has a right to the good feeling of our 

 readers, whatever their schooling may be. The Greekist, the Pu- 

 ginist, the Italianist, are bound, it seems to us, to give ear to any 

 man who takes the trouble to think before he writes, and who 

 thinks so well of art as to hold it worth thinking about. AVe, 

 however, go a great way with him, for, as we have already said, we 

 have upheld in this Journal the same teachings that he has done in 

 his book, as to the need of a truthful study of art in its widest 

 bearings, and the still greater need of freeing art from the bonds 

 of schoolmen and of schools, from the blind following of blind 

 leaders, and the swinish worship of the great and the little, — by 

 which the many have been misled, and the best meaning have been 

 thwarted in their endeavours. As we do not hold any one school 

 as the only lawful one, so we can the more freely blame the wan- 

 derings of all. 



Mr. Fergusson says that the groundwork of all true knowledge 

 of olden art rests on the fact, that before the sixteenth century, 

 architecture and all the arts were followed with only one end — that 

 of bringing forth the best building or work of art that could be 

 made with the best means the artists had, and without ever looking 



* "An Historlial Inquiry into the True Principles of Beauty in Art, more especially with 

 reference to Archl ectuie." By JAMES FERGUSSON, Ksq., Arctiitect , author of •' An 

 Es.-*iy on Ihe Ancient Topoer.iphy of Jerusalem," " Picturesque Illustrations of Ancient 

 Architecture in Hodostun," Part the First. London; Longmans, 184y. 



back on foregone works, unless to learn how to make up for their 

 wants and to go beyond their beauties. It was, he says, an earnest 

 struggle forwards towards perfection. He holds, however, that 

 since that time, the law has been to give the best possible imitation 

 of some foregone style in building, without looking to the end for 

 which the model was made, or the climate or manners that gave 

 rise to its peculiarities. In this saying there is unhappily too 

 much truth. 



When monuments come to be looked upon as the expression of 

 the times in which they were raised, they have a higher meanintr, 

 and give to architecture and architectural antitpiities a higlier 

 place in the scale of knowledge. Mr. Fergusson is right in saying, 

 that with the same ease a geologist reads the history of creation in 

 a fossil print or in a bone, does the archEeologist tell from a few 

 broken stones the age of a building, the names of the people by 

 whom it was raised, whence they came and what their kindred with 

 others, and even what bearing other people who had gone before 

 them, or who then lived, had on them ami on their civilization. 

 We go with him fully when lie dwells on the great worth of art in 

 all ethnological investigations. Language is, it is true, of much 

 weight, and is a clue which has been most followed; but it is never- 

 theless right that there is more true history built into the walls ot 

 the temples of Egypt and Greece, and into the Gothic cathedrals, 

 than is to be fountl in all the chronicles or year-books that were 

 ever written. Neither is it less ably said, that if those do not go 

 beyond the written book in fulness, they do in brightness and 

 truthfulness of painting; and that the books were often written 

 by strangers or those who understood little of what they were 

 writing about, wlio may have garbled what they knew, or whose 

 tales may have been since corrupted. Of the great eastern writers 

 and of Homer, we have not only no security that their words are 

 as they spoke them, but we ha\'e the full knowledge that they were 

 tampered with by otliers, and we cannot say how far. The temples 

 and tombs of Egypt are, however, free from such doubts. Such 

 buildings and works of art are brought forth by a people of them- 

 selves, to tell their own tale, and "neither are nor can be falsified 

 by time or the errors of copyists ; but stand as left by those that 

 made them, with the undying impress of their aspirations or their 

 shortcomings, stamped by themselves in characters of adamant." 



Mr. Fergusson carries out these principles in his investigation of 

 the monuments of Egyjtt, though much time is given to the deter- 

 mination of points in chronology ; but which it is fair to say are 

 brought to bear on the history of other lands, to throw light on 

 them, and to settle the system of ancient chronology, as bearing on 

 art. 



The writer sees a great likeness between Egypt and China, and 

 draws it as it seems to him; but we think he would have been 

 more in the right as to an unlikeness between the two. Even in 

 what he says as to hieroglyphics and Chinese characters, we cannot 

 go along with him. On his own showing, the Egyptians had 

 little book-learning — the Chinese have thousands of books, writings 

 of history and of fancy; and he has well said, that the monuments 

 of the Egyptians were their books, speaking in a way more lasting 

 than the words of the poet or the numbers of the historian. In- 

 deed, he says that the history is written on the walls of the tem- 

 ple : there we find the scenes of tlie war, the numbers of the slain, 

 the names of tlie nations, the taxes that they paid, their sum, their 

 kind ; and the tale is tlie fuller, inasmuch as there was no book in 

 which the pen could set down what the chisel and the brush were 

 made to record. Nothing, too, can be more unlike than the love 

 of shipping shown by the Chinese, their travels abroad in olden 

 times and in these, and the spread of their settlements in every 

 island of Australasia; — nothing can be more unlike than this to 

 the stay-at-home Egyptian. How unlike, too, are the wars of 

 both. 



The first thing which Mr. Fergusson sets down as marking the 

 Egyptians is the very great length of their civilization, which 

 lasted for not less tlian four thousand years, — but little wrought 

 upon by the rise or fall of the nations around them, and as un- 

 shaken by time as the monuments which now bear witness to these 

 truths. 



It will be seen that Mr. Fergusson is one of those who give a 

 long time to the earlier dynasties of the Egyptians; and so far as 

 we yet know, there is no good ground against it, though it cannot 

 be looked upon as settled either way. 



In the table which he has given of the dynasties, he has used 

 the era which he calls the Decimal Era, by others called the His- 

 toric Era: Decimal Era is, however, a better name for it. He 

 adds to the European or Christian Era, 10,00a years, so that the 

 dates before and after the birth of Jesus Christ can be more rea- 

 dily reckoned. Thus his date of Alexander the Great is 966S, and 



11 



