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of teachers somewhat in advance of the demand, even though none obtain schools who have not first-class certificates those whose attainments are second-rate, the whole public expenditure upon them, in the capacity of teachers, is, we fear, wasted. There are several obvious reasons which render it desirable that the building grants, and a general system of inspection, should be retained by the Government; and we think that the training colleges may fairly be maintained in part by the State and in part by the pupils; but we are inclined to think that it would be preferable to make the direct pecuniary assistance afforded to schools, whether in the form of payment to pupil-teachers, or by a capitation grant, a charge upon local rates to be administered by local authorities. As long as the Government pays, the managers of schools, the parents, and the scholars have a strong common interest in extracting the largest possible amount of aid from the public purse; but in the administration of local funds by those who contribute them, there is always a powerful interest to check the excess of expenditure.

In the laudable desire to promote this great work of national education, there is a higher duty and a nobler policy than that of granting subsidies to schools out of the public taxes, or even of improving the standard of instruction by Government control. The true object in a free country, where by general consent school attendance cannot be made compulsory, ought to be to teach the country to educate itself, to imbue all classes of society with a deeper sense of the advantages of acquiring knowledge, and to lead men to regard a certain amount of mental cultivation as one of the first duties of parents and of citizens. It is an old and incontrovertible truth, that people value that which is done for them much less than what they do for themselves. The results of the Government system prove that a very large portion of the seed scattered abroad by official hands falls on a rocky and barren soil. Moreover, no code of Minutes, digested at Whitehall, and applied systematically to the whole nation, can meet the infinite variety of circumstances which exist in a widely diversified community. The rules which are excellent and necessary in a rural district are inapplicable to the crowded recesses of our great towns, in which even our parochial system too often breaks down: and the means of education which may be suitable to the habits of a great town are inapplicable to a seafaring population, to the subterranean races of our coal-pits and mines, or to the peasant boy who tends sheep or scares crows. Though it may sound paradoxical, as much true progress has been made of late years

by improvements in which the Government has taken no active part, as by the elaborate mechanism of official management. Sir James Kay Shuttleworth himself says—

The force which will ultimately transform the whole will be the result of education itself. When the people know that they have even more interest in the education of their children than their rulers have, they will more and more take charge of it. They now bear two-thirds of the burden; but that third which they do not pay has given value to what before was of little worth, and has thus created a transient power destined to pass from the Government into the hands of those who will take the charge. The transference of administrative power to the local managers and the parents will attend the gradual assumption by them of the payment of the pupilteachers, and of the whole of the stipends of certificated teachers, consequent on the effects of education on some generations of parents and on the middle classes.' (Letter to Earl Granville, p. 13.)

These are golden words, with which we cordially concur, and they are the more valuable as they proceed from the real author of the existing system. But as long as the promise and the enjoyment of State assistance continue unabated, and even extended, it is contrary to the first principles of human nature to expect that this salutary change can go on. The Government ought unquestionably to encourage that change, but the steady progress of the Government grants tends irresistibly to postpone and to prevent it. In our opinion, the time is come when the policy of the Government ought to take the opposite direction. The result of this inquiry appears to us to be, that although the Government deserves well of the country for having assumed the initiative at the time when a vigorous impulse was greatly needed, yet at the present time a more wholesome stimulus to the work of education would be given by drawing out a larger amount of local and personal effort, than by extending the Government grants, or even by continuing them on the present scale. We are fortified in this opinion by the deliberate judgment of Dr. Temple, who has had ample practical experience of the whole working of the system indeed, we believe, that those officers of the department who have retired from the service have almost all expressed similar views. The Commissioners have rendered a service to the country by placing the whole evidence before it; and although we do not anticipate that the executive Government or the Legislature will give effect to their recommendations, it is demonstrated that there is great reason to reconsider the present state of the question, and to modify the system which has hitherto been pursued.

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ART. II.-1. Reliquien von Albrecht Dürer. Von Dr. CAMPE.
Nüremberg: 1828.

2. Das Leben und die Werke Albrecht Dürer's. Von JOSEPH
HELLER. Bamberg: 1827.

3. Leben und Wirken Albrecht Dürer's. Von Dr. A. VON EYE.
Nördlingen: 1860.

Is the fifth volume of the work entitled Modern Painters,'
Mr. Ruskin has attempted, in his accustomed style, to re-
late the changes wrought by the era of the Reformation in
the history of art; and he illustrates this revolution in the
most imaginative minds of northern and southern Europe by
a comparison, or rather by a contrast, between Albert Dürer and
Salvator Rosa. The artist of Nüremberg he describes trained
'amidst the formal delights, the tender religions, and practical
'science of domestic life and honest commerce. Salvator amidst
'the pride of lascivious wealth and the outlawed distress of
impious poverty.' An interval of almost one hundred years
-an entire age of modern civilisation-elapsed between the
death of the one and the birth of the other. The German was
the contemporary and admirer of Erasmus, Melancthon, and
Luther; the Italian was a pupil of the Neapolitan Jesuits, and
a dependent of the voluptuous courts of the seventeenth century.
Yet under circumstances so various, there was doubtless some
touch of kinsmanship between these eccentric and ardent minds;
life to both of them was a hard master; a vein of fierce
irony runs through their works; and they stand apart from the
mere traditions of the schools in the annals of their art. The
true key to the works of both these remarkable men lies, in an
eminent degree, in the vicissitudes and internal history of their
lives. In Albert Dürer especially the union and the conflict of
the artist and the craftsman-of a man of lofty imagination
but of homely character-of a great destiny but a narrow life
-produce a strange and perplexing mixture, not unlike some
of the creations of his own pencil. His life is, however, as
yet, less familiar to the English public than that of many artists
of inferior originality, and we receive with satisfaction the
more recent contributions to his biography, which the affec-
tionate admiration and careful researches of his own countrymen
have laid before us.

Johann Neudorffer led the procession of writers on Dürer; his Notices of a Century of Nüremberg Painters' were pub

lished in 1546; but Karl von Mandler was the first who added any account of the artist's works to a biographical sketch. This was in 1604; the same strain was taken up later by Baldinucci, and imitated again by Joachim von Sandraat, the engraver, himself the owner of a collection in which many of Dürer's works were to be found. Vasari belongs to the same division of writers; while Hauer, though he never published a life of the painter, collected and printed many of Dürer's original writings, and added to these fragments, fac-similes of his etchings and woodcuts. Little authentic knowledge of his works can, however, be gathered from the catalogues and artistic notices of the two centuries following his death. Still he had abundance of commentators. Arend, Des Piles, D'Argensville, Descamps, have all written on the subject, following Sandraat in their plan; Doppelmayr contented himself mostly with a sketch of the painter's life, of which Melchior Adam, in his Vita Philosophorum Germanorum,' has given an accurate and interesting outline. In Spain (where several of his best works are still to be seen), the Franconian painter was not forgotten. Antonio de las Puentes refers to Dürer, and to the influence he exercised on Spanish art; but his remarks are perhaps as little appreciated by German critics as are those of Vasari, when he treats of similar results in Italy; and all these writers only preceded Roth, whose Leben A. Dürer's' was published about 1791. Since then books and authorities have multiplied, and articles on Dürer may be found in Müller, Kugler, Nagler, and Rettberg. In his native city a late remorse awakened; a statue was erected to his memory; everything bearing his name, or to which his name could be attached, received a tender homage; and the discovery of some original sketches and writings in the dusty archives of a patrician house added to the enthusiasm with which he was and is regarded. Meanwhile the most ardent of his admirers, the late Mr. J. Heller of Bamberg, determined to supply the defects of all former catalogues and annotators, and commenced a laborious account of the Works of Dürer. He did not live to complete this Magnum Opus; and the second volume (in three parts) is all that we possess of it. But this volume is fortunately complete in itself; the author claims to have there left no picture, engraving, woodcut, etching, proof, or rare example of the master, unnoticed; he furnishes an account of the origin of all the best collections of Dürer's drawings, and gives us, by his elaborate descriptions and researches, pleasant and touching glimpses into Dürer's life and studies. The task of supplying us with what Heller died too early to finish still remained; a biography of Dürer,

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compiled from the best sources, and enriched by modern criticism, was until last year a desideratum in literature, when it was undertaken by Dr. Eye, whose volume well repays perusal; and who may be congratulated on the successful accomplishment of what has evidently been to him a labour of love. Thus far we have pursued the race of critics and biographers, but there yet remains, what is of far more real interest, the authentic notice of Dürer under his own hand; it is this that Dr. Campe, the well known printer of Nüremberg, has given to the world in his 'Remains of Albert Dürer.' Here we have Dürer's life by himself: quaint fragments of an autobiography never anything but fragmentary; letters of business; letters of friendship; letters written in travel; attempts at verse, as unhappy as those of our own Turner; and last, not least, his diary in the Netherlands, kept with great regularity during the years 1520 and '21.

We

Except in greatly abridged or garbled forms, these MSS. have never been made known to the English public.* therefore propose to follow Dr. Campe's arrangement, by introducing our readers at once to the short memoir Dürer wrote of his family in the year 1524. He prefaces it with these words:

'I, Albert Dürer, the younger, have gathered from my father's writings and papers what was his parentage, from whence he came, how he lived, and how he drew to his end in peace. So may God have mercy on him and us. Amen.

'Albert Dürer, the elder, was by reason of his birth a native of the kingdom of Hungary, and of the village called Eytas, in which he was born. It is not far from the little town of Jula, or Kula, lying eight miles below Wardein. His family had maintained themselves by rearing horses and cattle; but my grandfather, one Antony Dürer by name, came as a boy to the above-named town of Jula to a goldsmith's, and there under him learnt his trade.'

Already we see in the bucolical mind some strugglings towards the exercise of the mechanical arts. This Antony Dürer had three sons, of whom the first-born was the father of the painter, likewise a worker in gold and silver, and a blame'less and ingenious man.'

'Item.—It was not till later than this my dear father, Albrecht Dürer, came into Germany. He had been for a long season in the Netherlands among the great masters there, and did not arrive in Nüremberg until the year, as reckoned from the birth of Christ, 1455; it

Some use was made of them in Mr. Ottley's History of En'graving,' and in Mr. Jackson's History of Wood Engraving,' p. 314. The Diary was published by Murr in the seventh volume of his Journal.

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