PROFESSOR JEBB ON THE AES THETIC MOVEMENT.

Mataura Ensign, Volume V, Issue 234, 2 March 1883, Page 6

PROFESSOR JEBB ON THE AES THETIC MOVEMENT.

Professor Jebb, who was one of the speakers at the Glasgow school of art and Haldane Academy, made some remarks about the aesthetic movement. Parody could sometimes destroy permanently one's pleasure in a poem. It was equally the unfortunate privilege of cant to destroy or debase the meaning of a word, and he feared that the aesthetic movement had permanently destroyed the noble and significant word, which meant what one perceived oneself, not what other people p9rceived. Now, the mistake of the aesthetic movement could be very simply defined. It consisted in leaving nature. No art could have a real life unless that life was the age to which that art belonged. They might make art live by the imitation of dead externals, whether they belonged to the Middle Age or to Ancient Greece. JEstheticism had been an evil so far as it was senseless and extravagant imitation of externals without any perception of the relation which ought to exist between such exterior things and the life of the age in which they were being reproduced. He should like to say that he absolved Mr Ruskin of any fault in relation to the aesthetic movement, for Mr Ruskin had always taught that the best art must be true and sincere, and must, if it was to be really good, spring from an earnest and noble moral motive. He did not say that Buskin had not sometimes pushed that doctrine to an extreme, still, apart from such excesses, he desired to give Mr Euskin, as all did, entire credit for the noble way in which he had asserted the truths, the necessary truths, of the sincerity of the higher art. It was not Mr Ruskin who had taught people to believe orthodoxy of art depended on the personal manifestations of sun flowers and knee breeches, (laughter.) The esthetic movement was over, and he (Professor Jebb) thought it was well over as measles were well over. (Laughter ) It was a malady that was certain to come — or something like it — in such a movement towards art as had been going on in this country. It waß a disease that was past and it was well past. It had not been taken too seriously, and no'v that it was over — thanks partly to the genial corrective administered by Punch— let them remember that it had done some good. It cast ridicule on the noble things which it burlesqued ; it also did something to kill the ugliness agaiust which it protested, and he should say that when the epitaph of the {esthetic movement was written it ought to be remembered that with all its absurdities testheticism protested against some very ugly and absurd things, and that it had done something towards killing them. (Applause.)