PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 561 
appropriate embellishments, borrowed from the art of the stone-mason. It is 
some consolation to remember that the clients for whom the engine was built 
were not of this country, and that the design itself was not a product of the 
workshop that was favoured with the contract to produce this amazing piece of 
cast-iron architecture. We have all seen wrought-iron bridges the inattractive 
features of which were concealed by cast-iron masks—in the form of panelling, 
or of sham pillars and arches with no visible means of support—that not only 
have no connection with the structural scheme, but suggest types of construction 
that could not, by any possibility, meet the requirements. Structures of this 
kind remind one of the pudding which the White Knight (with good reason 
when we remember the characteristics of his genius) considered the cleverest 
of his many inventions. It began, he explained, with blotting-paper, and when 
Alice ventured to express the opinion that that would not be very nice, he 
assured her that though it might not be very nice alone she had no idea what a 
difference it made mixing it with other things—such as gunpowder and sealing- 
wax. 
There are, and must always be, wide differences of opinion regarding what is 
good or bad in matters of taste, but we may go so far in generalisation as to say 
that we can admire the association of elements we know to be incongruous only 
in compositions that are intended to be humorous. ‘ All human excellence has 
its basis in reason and propriety; and the mind, to be interested to any 
efficient purpose, must neither be distracted nor confused.’* But to be able to 
judge of the propriety or reasonableness of any composition we must have some 
knowledge of the essential qualities and relationships of its component parts, and 
excellence cannot depend upon an appeal to ignorance, We can quite imagine 
that the White Knight’s pudding would appeal as an admirable and most 
ingenious concoction to one who lacked a knowledge of the dietetic value of 
blotting-paper and was willing to take for granted the excellence of gunpowder 
as a spice and of sealing-wax as a flavouring. No artist would be bold enough to 
include a polar bear or a walrus in the composition of a picture of the African 
desert, nor be prepared to consider as a legitimate exercise of the artistic 
imagination the depicting an Arab and his camel wending their weary way across 
the Arctic snows. He would recognise the incongruity, and might even realise 
that it is only a lack of imagination or of true inventive power that could lead 
anyone to resort to such measures for the securing of a desired colour scheme. 
These are lengths to which even artists will not go in the arrangement of 
elements in a composition. But an artist will secure a colour scheme at which 
he aims by the introduction into his landscape of a rainbow in an impossible 
position, or of impossible form or dimensions, or with colours arranged according 
to his own fancy, though in this there is a much more essential unreasonableness. 
A polar bear might be transported to the desert, and an Arab might conceivably 
find his way to the regions of snow and ice, but a rainbow cannot wander from 
the place assigned to it by Nature, nor can it have other than the ordained form 
or dimensions or sequence of colours. No artist would paint a figure holding a 
candle and make the light fall on the side of the face remote from the source; 
but he will, and usually does, paint the moon illuminated on the side remote 
from the sun. Why? Simply because he has not before his mind the essential 
absurdity of the scheme, if indeed he knows why the moon shines. Artists who 
deal with nature in any of its aspects, may be commended to ‘ mark, learn, and 
inwardly digest’ Whistler’s definition of their calling: ‘ Nature contains the 
elements in colour and form of all pictures . . . but the artist is born to 
pick and choose, and group with science, these elements, that the result may be 
beautiful.’ Whether or not we are to understand that Whistler intended to 
include an accurate knowledge of physical facts and phenomena in what he calls 
science, he cannot have meant anything less than sense. 
So in regard to the arts of construction, we may say that Mechanical Science 
provides the elements of all structures, and the craftsman—be he called 
engineer or architect—is born to pick and choose, and group with science, these 
elements, that the result may be useful—and not devoid of grace. ; 
The only valid excuse for such departures from the fit and rational in painting 
* Mr. Duppa’s Life of Michaelangelo, 
1912, 00 
