86 Muslin curtain by J.J. Sutter of

Appenzell

A similar survey can be made of table-cloths. Here again the range goes from the scrolly Dixhuitième to the naturalistic, and here also reticence of de- 84, 85 sign is rare and represented outstandingly by Grüner. What is different from 89 carpets and possible only in a light material is the introduction of bits of landscape. 86 The Balmoral table cloth of linen damask has the castle in the centre, and in the border between thistle scrolls scenes referring to 'the healthy and manly amusements pursued by Prince Albert', as the Art Journal says. The jerky change-over from ornamental to realistic treatment, from the two-dimensional to the threedimensional does not seem to have worried the public. It is especially confusing in the centre and its border where pictures set close to each other have to be 88 viewed in four different directions.

Yet another group particularly suitable for comparison are the Cashmere shawls, an extremely popular article, it seems, imitated in Britain as well as France. The characteristic motif is what was known as the Indian pine. In original Indian work the ornamentation of the ground and the infillings of the cones all consist of small motifs of no distinguishing character in themselves.

87,90

87 Shawl by M.E. Hartwick of Paris

Matthew Digby Wyatt in his folio illustrates two of these with approval and none of the mid-nineteenth-century imitations. These use grosser motifs, often of realistic flower bouquets and interlace them with large flag-leaf or similar sprays. Grapes may hang down from behind a pine, and altogether the even surface of the cloth appears to the eye broken wherever possible. Occasionally 87 the ground suddenly reveals glimpses of park scenery.

The same ambiguity between landscape, naturalistic flowers in the border, and thick scrolls can be seen even in the ethereal medium of a Swiss muslin 86 curtain. On the whole the landscape parts on textiles are very much less attractively done than the vegetable parts. There is indeed a freshness about the flowers 91-93 and leaves on some of the dress and furnishing fabrics, woven as well as embroidered or printed, which we are only just able to appreciate once more.

93 Embroidered waistcoat by J.W. Gabriel of London

92 Furnishing damask by H.C. McCrea of Halifax

One thing with regard to the ornamentation of textiles needs special emphasis. In spite of all the realism that went into decoration, we find nowhere parallels to what printers are doing to scarves today, no Sights of London, no ballet scenes, no sailing yachts, no foxhounds. In fact the associational element is almost entirely missing. That is all the more remarkable, because we have seen amongst the exhibits several examples of the importance of the associational as against the strictly aesthetic, and there are many more. Wagner's silver table centre for instance, represents the progress of mankind to civilization under the 51 guidance of genius. At the foot of the base is man in the early stages of civilization, as a hunter and herdsman. The female figures above represent cultivation and husbandry. At the top genius is seen strangling the serpent of ignorance and standing on a palm tree rising high from within the agricultural civilization shown below. Similarly Fourdinois's walnut sideboard (France, No. 1231) is supported by six hounds. The pilasters are adorned with four figures representing the four quarters of the world. On the right is a hunter, on the left a fisherman, as brackets. On the top appears Abundance, to her left and right children reaping and gleaning. Another sideboard, by Cookes & Sons of Warwick, represents 'with sculptural relievos' the history of Kenilworth Castle. The description in the catalogue takes up a column and a half. A pretty toast-rack by Hall's of Sheffield has wheat-ears and leaves to support the slices of toast. John Thomas's fireplace has, as we have seen, a medallion of Chaucer and the figures of Dorigene and Griselda; John Bell's clock, the twelve hours around the dial. Ploucquet of Stutt- 58 gart, taxidermist, showed his stuffed animals 'in imitation of the attitudes, 96 habits, and occupations of rational creatures' and H. Fitz Cook called his papier mâché chair The Daydreamer. It is described thus in the catalogue: 'The chair is decorated at the top with two winged thoughts-the one with bird-like pinions, and crowned with roses, representing happy and joyous dreams, the other with leather bat-like wings-unpleasant and troubled ones. Behind is displayed Hope, under the figure of the rising sun. The twisted supports of the back are ornamented with poppy, heartsease, convolvulus and snowdrop, all emblematic of the subject. In front of the seat is a shell... and on either side of it, pleasant and troubled dreams are represented by figures. At the side is seen a figure of Puck, lying asleep in a labyrinth of foliage... The style of the ornament is Italian.'

One may doubt this last statement, but it is in its woolliness as typical of the date as is the elaborate allegorical apparatus built up around so utilitarian an object as an easy chair. There must have been a great need for the interesting story amongst the public to account for this. We have seen that the need for the inflated and expansive form made people put up with discomforts. The need for

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the story occasionally did the same. A. J. Jones of 135 St Stephen's Green, Dublin, for instance exhibited an armchair of Irish bog-oak and this had not only 'chivalric bustos of ancient Irish warriors' at the top of the back, but 'the arms formed by wolf-dogs-one at ease and recumbent', with the motto on the collar 'Gentle when stroked', the other irritated and sitting up, with the counter motto 'Fierce when provoked'. So here a piece of furniture even required mottos to be fully understood.

We are here, I think, close to the innermost core of mid-Victorian taste. The patrons of 1850 were no longer the patrons of 1800. A new class had come to the top and settled down smugly. The years between 1840 and 1860 or 1870 are a phase of assured possession between two phases of restlessness and revolt, in the economic life of the nation as well as the intellectual. Shelley and Byron had gone, Engels and Marx not yet gathered a following. Engels, it is true, had written on the Condition of the Working Class in 1845, Carlyle's Past and Present had come out in 1843 and Kingsley's Alton Locke in 1848. So the new socialist reform of the future, represented by two men under thirty years old when their books came out, and the old romantic idea of reform based on an unreal vision of mediaeval history, met at this juncture. But neither had very much immediate effect. Carlyle passed on much to Ruskin, whose social-reformatory work was begun only shortly before 1860, and to Morris whose firm started in 1861, and the first volume of Marx's Das Kapital came out only in 1867.

Meanwhile the decades of Peel and Palmerston succeeded in keeping the upheavals of 1848 from the English shores and in managing smoothly a nation basking in the sunshine of unprecedented prosperity. No country could touch Britain for industrial and commercial success. The imperialism of Disraeli—and also of Napoleon III and Bismarck-the new powers of a united Germany, a united Italy and a colonizing France had not yet appeared. There were in the years about 1851 few major worries for the wealthy, and there was noticeably growing wealth among the workers. The Corn Laws had been repealed in 1846. Faith prevailed in unlimited chances for the capable and the energetic to get rich, however humble their origins.

The Great Exhibition was to show the Works of Industry of All Nations. No visitor from abroad would have doubted what nation was leading in industry. In canals, in road surfaces, in steam navigation, in railway construction no one could compete with Britain. Here the first big factories had been built,

here the first industrial cities had grown. It was all enormously impressive, though much of it was not edifying to the eye. For the new masters had no time to bother about civilized appearances nor had they had a youth to make them demand what would look good. No education and no leisure, these two deficiencies explain nearly all that is aesthetically distressing about 1851. The appreciation of aesthetic values in architecture and design, of proportions, textures, harmonies of colours, requires training and time. The appreciation of the emotional values in painting and sculpture also requires a readiness to listen, to follow a lead and be captured, and this cannot be expected in one whose mind is occupied with machine and counting-house. Thus effects were bound to become louder and more obvious. A bulgy curve will be taken in more easily than a delicate one, richly glowing colours than subtle shades, and stories carved in relievo than sheer satisfying proportions. We can say that what appeals to the child, appealed to the big men with the heavy purses in 1851: Ouida's 'It did not look at all like what it was' for instance, or an Ottoman Coal Sarcophagus and a Cricket Catapulta, or indeed the Crystal Palace itself with its engineering courage and vast uniformity. Admiration for technics is easier than for aesthetics. Again accurate copying of period details could appeal strongly, and so could accurate copying of flowers from Kew. For whereas to risk verdicts on artistic merit seemed unsafe and also a little dubious, accuracy could be checked and hence evaluated. Thus the naturalism in the carving of the capitals of a Gilbert Scott church is as typical of 1850 as Ford Madox Brown's plea for meticulously correct historical costume put forward in 1850 in The Germ, the short-lived journal of the young Pre-Raphaelites, or Holman Hunt's journey to the Holy Land to paint the Scapegoat against a correct Dead Sea. The Pre-Raphaelites in this respect were exactly as High Victorian as their enemies, the popular and successful genre painters, and it is remarkable that Ruskin who valiantly defended the young Pre-Raphaelites in his letter to The Times of 1851 could have written only a few years before of Landseer's The Old Shepherd's Chief Mourner that it was 'one of the most perfect poems or pictures-I use the words as synonymous— which modern times has seen.' That passage appeared in the first volume of Modern Painters in 1843. Now Landseer's most popular pictures are of dogs, yet have such titles as Low Life and High Life, Alexander and Diogenes, Dignity and Impudence, A Distinguished Member of the Royal Humane Society. Their titles made their success, just as Wilkie's merry village subjects with their wealth of easily followed and understood incidents made him one of the most internationally famous of British painters. Waagen called him 'the first painter of our times', and Lady Eastlake wrote of the Raphael of the Cartoons now at the Victoria and Albert Museum that he appeared there to be 'as powerful as Michael Angelo, had his power stood alone; as activating as Rubens had his action taken precedence; as individual in character as Wilkie, had that been his sole object.'* The ultimate combination of a rich anecdotic interest with extreme accuracy of treatment came with Frith's Ramsgate Sands of 1854, Derby Day of 1858 and Paddington Station of 1862.

Prince Albert was a born reformer. He was high-minded enough to feel that after Raphael and Michelangelo Wilkie and Landseer were not an achievement one's conscience could be proud of. Art surely was to serve higher purposes. Had he not seen that it could be so, in the cartoons of the German Romantics at home, in Cornelius, Schnorr von Carolsfeld, in Schadow and the others? Westminster Palace had been consumed by fire in 1834. The new Houses of Parliament were built in its stead, in a national Gothic style, conscientious and decoratively sound in all the carved details, the wall-papers, the metalwork and so on for which Pugin was responsible. Painting was not to be left out of the interior decoration. In 1841 a Royal Commission was appointed 'to take into consideration the promotion of the Fine Arts of this country, in connexion with the rebuilding of the Houses of Parliament'. Prince Albert was made its chairman; it was his first appearance in such a job. He was only twenty-one years old. He took it as seriously as he was to take everything. A decision was reached quickly that the

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