BOOKS BY PROF. JOHN C. VAN DYKE
| Art for Art’s Sake. University Lectures on the Technical Beauties of Painting. With 24 Illustrations. 12mo | $1.50 |
| The Meaning of Pictures. University Lectures at the Metropolitan Museum, New York. With 31 Illustrations. 12mo | net $1.25 |
| Studies in Pictures. An Introduction to the Famous Galleries. With 40 Illustrations. 12mo | net $1.25 |
| What is Art? Studies in the Technique and Criticism of Painting. 12mo | net $1.00 |
| Text Book of the History of Painting. With 110 Illustrations. 12mo | $1.50 |
| Old Dutch and Flemish Masters. With Timothy Cole’s Wood-Engravings. Superroyal 8vo | $7.50 |
| Old English Masters. With Timothy Cole’s Wood-Engravings. Superroyal 8vo | $8.00 |
| Modern French Masters. Written by American Artists and Edited by Prof. Van Dyke. With 66 Full-page Illustrations. Superroyal 8vo | $10.00 |
| Nature for Its Own Sake. First Studies in Natural Appearances. With Portrait. 12mo | $1.50 |
| The Desert. Further Studies in Natural Appearances. With Frontispiece. 12mo | net $1.25 |
| The Opal Sea. Continued Studies in Impressions and Appearances. With Frontispiece. 12mo | net $1.25 |
| The Money God. Chapters of Heresy and Dissent concerning Business Methods and Mercenary Ideals in American Life. 12mo | net $1.00 |
| The New New York. A Commentary on the Place and the People. With 125 Illustrations by Joseph Pennell | net $4.00 |
PALMA VECCHIO, Santa Barbara (detail) S. M. Formosa, Venice.
THE MEANING OF PICTURES
SIX LECTURES GIVEN FOR COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
AT THE METROPOLITAN
MUSEUM OF ART
BY
JOHN C. VAN DYKE
AUTHOR OF “ART FOR ART’S SAKE,” “NATURE FOR ITS OWN SAKE,” ETC.
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1911
Copyright, 1908, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
───
Published, February, 1908
To
WILLIAM CRARY BROWNELL
PREFACE
Just how we should look at pictures, just how we should judge of them, is not for any one person to say. We all have our different ways of estimating art; and art is capable of being estimated in different ways. In these lectures I have endeavored to set forth the various points of view. The painter’s conception has received perhaps the primary attention, but I have given the public’s conception of the picture also. Nor do I mean to apologize for arguing both sides of the case. Art might be better understood, if there were less special pleading and theorizing about it. It is so largely dependent upon the individual make-up of the artist, that any precise theory about it must fall short of the mark. Instead of quarrelling over terms and trying to put the opposition in the wrong, it would be better frankly to examine the product in the light of the producer’s intention and draw our conclusions from that. We should not always agree, but that is all the more reason for tolerance and liberality.
J. C. V. D.
Rutgers College,
November, 1902
CONTENTS
| Chapter I. Truth in Painting.—Theory of realism—The old masters as realists—And the Dutch painters—Absolute realism impossible—The real and truth defined—Art a series of signs—Recognizing the convention—In poetry, music, and painting—Grasping the artist’s intention—Realism merely the elaboration of the sign—Millet vs. Meissonier—Attitude of the realists—Kinds of truth—The camera vs. the human eye—Individual truths—National truths—Universal truths—Great art universal in scope—Greatness as shown in Rembrandt, Titian, and Velasquez—Art truths both great and small—Millet vs. Gérôme—Truth by suggestion—Michael Angelo and Shakespeare—The truth of history—And of archæology—The truth of art—The law of sacrifice, Velasquez vs. Bonnat—Realism not the sum-total of art—But its value not to be denied | [1] |
| Chapter II. Individuality or the Personal Element.—The personal equation—Variations in handwritings—Different points of view—Different views of landscape—Sketches of the model in the class-room—Variations in portraiture—Difference between the camera and our eyes—Individual styles in literature—And in art—Personal qualities of the painter in his work—Carpaccio and Bellini—Michael Angelo in the Sistine—Rembrandt in his pictures—Giorgione, Correggio, Corot, Raphael, Titian—Dürer’s “Christ on the Cross”—The disagreeable personality in art—Vulgarity, brutality, and insipidity—Conceit in painting—The insistent personality—Eccentricity vs. individuality—The lost individuality—The copyist and the realist—The academic pattern—Impersonal art—Great art above laws and formulas—Something more to painting than individuality and realism | [31] |
| Chapter III. Imagination of the Artist.—The act of seeing—Perception—Unconscious seeing—Colors as seen by the ancients—Seeing the model—Necessity of imaginative seeing—The imagination as ordinarily employed—As employed in portrait painting—The distorted view—The camera vs. the eye of the artist—Michael Angelo in the Sistine again—Tintoretto’s distortions—Claude Monet’s lights—Impossibility of creating anew—The imagination separating a part from the whole—In poetry and painting—In coins, marble, and bronzes—The combining imagination—Inspiration vs. composition—All the great masterpieces have been composed and labored over—Goethe’s “Faust”—“The Ancient Mariner”—Turner’s marines and Venetian scenes as flights of imagination—Imagination of Paolo Veronese—Tintoretto’s “Ariadne and Bacchus”—His Scuola San Rocco pictures—Ruskin’s explanation of them—Fancy—The serious vs. the clever in painting—The fantastic—The bizarre—Caricature and the grotesque—The bombastic and baroque | [60] |
| Chapter IV. Pictorial Poetry.—The argument for poetry in art—Ideas suitable for different arts—Confusion of mediums of expression—Pictorial poetry not literary poetry—Painting deals with forms and colors, not sound—Millet’s “Angelus”—The division of the arts—The time limit in painting—The picture cannot disclose time—What is pictorial poetry—Literary and pictorial themes—Writers who paint with words—Spenser, Shakespeare, Scott, Matthew Arnold—Limits of pictorial expression—“Feeling” in art—Sentiment and emotion, how suggested—Feeling in literary poetry and in music—Also in painting—Religious feeling of early Italians—Fra Angelico, (Benozzo) Gozzoli, Botticelli—Sincerity of Carpaccio and Bellini—Feeling for life, light, and color with Giorgione and Correggio—The pathos of Rembrandt—And of Millet—The peasants of France and Holland—Their beauty of character—The poetry of landscapes, of sea views, of interiors—Indefiniteness of the pictorial thought—The picture not a good vehicle for abstract ideas—But well fitted for emotional expression—Poetry in the means of expression | [87] |
| Chapter V. The Decorative Quality.—Disagreement between the painter and the public—The “average person” in the gallery—The painter in the gallery—Art as representation vs. art as decoration—The artist devoted to the decorative—Art has always been decorative—Origin of painting—In the Stone Age—Primitive man as artist—The artist in Egypt—In Assyria and Greece—Filling of space on Greek coins—The Gothic Age and decoration—Giotto, Masaccio—Line-composition with Raphael and Michael Angelo—Light-and-shade composition with Leonardo, Correggio, Giorgione—Color-composition with Titian and Paolo Veronese—Art history explained on purely technical grounds—Titian and his ideas in art—The Decadence and why it came—Lack of technical skill—Why art flourished in the Seventeenth Century with Rembrandt, Rubens, and Velasquez—The decorative in modern art—Revision of technical methods by Millet, Manet, and Monet—Advance of painting with new discoveries—The spontaneity of art—Materials and the craftsman in literary art—Absence of the decorative in Walt Whitman and Holman Hunt—The lasting value of the decorative—The “Venus of Milo” and Titian’s “Sacred and Profane Love”—And Shakespeare again | [114] |
| Chapter VI. Subject in Painting.—Art for the artist—The voice of the public in the work of art—The old masters working for the Church—Various views of art held by artists—Partisan views and their advocates—Extravagant views in literature—Mr. Whistler on painting—Advocates of the decorative only—The meaning of pictures again—The subject cannot be omitted—Mr. Whistler’s marines—“Patriotism” in painting—Velasquez, Rembrandt, Frans Hals all show it—All painting must illustrate something—Historical painting—Whistler and Monet illustrating the social history of their time—The illustrative quality of Italian art—Whistler’s “White Girl” vs. Palma Vecchio’s “Santa Barbara”—The Dutch as subject painters—The historical landscapes of Claude and Turner—The story in painting—Titian’s “Sacred and Profane Love” once more—The silly incident and the degradation of painting—How the old masters worked upon given subjects—The subject in the “Sistine Madonna”—The subject in painting to be treated illustratively—Catholicity of taste—Education—Many elements united in “great art”—Conclusion | [139] |
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
| Palma Vecchio, St. Barbara (Detail). | [Frontispiece] |
| PAGE | ||
| I. | Holbein, Portrait of a Man, | [8] |
| II. | Benozzo Gozzoli, Adoration of Kings (Detail), | [12] |
| III. | Van Dyck, Cornelius van der Geest, | [16] |
| IV. | Millet, the Gleaners, | [20] |
| V. | Paolo Veronese, Marriage in Cana, | [24] |
| VI. | Carpaccio, St. Ursula and Prince of England (Detail), | [28] |
| VII. | Bellini, Madonna and Saints, | [36] |
| VIII. | Correggio, Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine, | [40] |
| IX. | Corot, Landscape, | [48] |
| X. | Dürer, Christ on the Cross, | [56] |
| XI. | Turner, the Fighting Téméraire, | [64] |
| XII. | Antonello da Messina, Portrait of a Man, | [70] |
| XIII. | Velasquez, Innocent X., | [74] |
| XIV. | Paolo Veronese, Venice Enthroned, | [80] |
| XV. | Tintoretto, Miracle of the Slave, | [84] |
| XVI. | Daubigny, Spring, | [88] |
| XVII. | Benozzo Gozzoli, Adoration of Kings (Detail), | [92] |
| XVIII. | Van Dyck, Jean Grusset Richardot, | [96] |
| XIX. | Gainsborough, Mrs. Siddons, | [100] |
| XX. | Gérôme, Napoleon before the Sphinx, | [104] |
| XXI. | Michael Angelo, Delphic Sibyl, | [108] |
| XXII. | Hals, The Jolly Man, | [116] |
| XXIII. | Bonifazio Veronese, Moses Saved from the Nile, | [120] |
| XXIV. | Giorgione, Madonna and Saints, | [128] |
| XXV. | Reynolds, Lady Cockburn and Family, | [132] |
| XXVI. | Claude Lorraine, Flight into Egypt, | [136] |
| XXVII. | Tintoretto, Marriage in Cana, | [140] |
| XXVIII. | Raphael, Sistine Madonna, | [148] |
| XXIX. | Botticelli, Allegory of Spring, | [152] |
| XXX. | Poussin, Shepherds in Arcadia, | [156] |
THE MEANING OF PICTURES
THE MEANING OF PICTURES
CHAPTER I
TRUTH IN PAINTING
Those people who go out into the highways of art crying, Haro! Haro! in the name of realism, would certainly gain their cause could numbers give them a verdict. They have always been in evidence; they have always made themselves heard. There never was a time when the mob was not hungry for realities, when artists were not harping upon “truth to nature,” when critics were not concerned about “the realistic tendencies of the age.” The interest in things as things and the art that hinges upon facts as facts were from the beginning. For did not Apelles paint horses so realistically that other horses neighed at the sight of the picture? And did not Zeuxis deceive the birds with his painted grapes, and was not he himself deceived in turn by the painted curtain of Parrhasios? Admitting the stories to be greatly exaggerated, does not their very existence prove the liking for the realistic motive?
Indeed, the Greeks were accounted very good realists in the days of their late power. The Pergamon frieze, the “Samothracian Victory,” the “Dying Gaul” give the proof. And in earlier times they modelled and chiselled the Parthenon marbles so true to life that William Hazlitt based a theory of art upon them, maintaining that the aim of art was the imitation of nature and the finest art was simply the imitation of the finest nature. It was the realistic Roman marbles, founded upon those of Greece, that gave the first breath of inspiration to the painters of Italy. The Renaissance nature-study that went hand in hand with the study of the Greek was largely to enable the painters to reveal the model more completely, to draw a leg or arm or face more exactly, to place figures in an atmospheric envelope, to reproduce a likeness of the landscape background. If we examine the works of Fra Filippo, Botticelli, or Mantegna, we shall find that there was more of the earthly in their painting than the mystic face of the Madonna or the religious pathos of saints would disclose. They were intent upon the reality before them and evidently for the reality’s sake. They delighted in drawing a foot and placing it firmly upon the ground, in giving bulk, body, and weight to the figure, in painting flowers, leaves, and fruits with precision, in adjusting the exact relations of light-and-shade, in catching the right tone of color. It was all a close following of the model—a representation of nature itself or as near to it as they could attain.
But the Dutch painters of the seventeenth century were far more rigid sticklers for the fact than the Italians. Their work was essentially a portrait of Holland and its people, as Fromentin has said, wherein faithfulness to the model was a primary consideration. From Hals and Rembrandt down to Van Mieris and Schalken every Dutchman considered an object as a plastic fact—a something not to be juggled with, but to be rendered as truthfully as possible. Indeed, it was the Dutchmen who set the pace for all the moderns in what is called realism. It was the five days upon a lady’s hand—a day to each finger—of Gerard Dou that suggested the ten days to a shoe-buckle of Meissonier. All the modern contingent of genre painters and students of still-life who paint things that “stand out” are but a growth from the Dutch. The tradition has been handed down unimpaired, losing none of its ancient positiveness, but rather gaining some latter-day exactness in the process of transmission.
For just now realism in art seems more of a desideratum than ever. And from the way the word “truth” is bandied about studio and gallery, one might think it the only thing worth having in artistic equipment. But we need not necessarily become either brow-beaten or bewildered by all this volume of talk about the real. For, bluntly stated, there is no such thing as absolute realism in art. The “real” is nature itself, and “truth” is merely the report of nature made by man. Some cattle and horses standing under a tree in a meadow are a reality, and your description or report of the scene, either in words, lines, or colors, would be the truth of the scene—that is, provided your description was accurate. Under no circumstances is the report made by producing the real things in evidence. It is practically impossible to do that in art. Any close attempt at doing it, or misleading one into thinking he sees reality, generally results in absurdity or repulsiveness. What, for instance, could be more hideous than the wax figure in the museum? Or what more dull than the modern battle-panorama where dummy-figures and painted figures mingle to make up the scene?
Art is far removed from such attempts. Instead of producing the real it merely implies or suggests the real by certain signs and symbols which we have agreed among ourselves to recognize as its equivalent. If, for instance, we attempt to bring to the mind of another the thought of water we do not get a glassful of it and place it upon the table to show what we mean. We simply say or write “water”—a word of five letters which bears no likeness or resemblance whatever to the original, yet brings the original to mind at once. This is the linguistic sign for water. The chemical sign for it, H2O, is quite as arbitrary, but to the chemist it means water again. And only a little less arbitrary are the artistic signs for it. The old Egyptian conveyed his meaning by drawing a zigzag up or down the wall; Turner in England often made the few horizontal scratches of a lead pencil do duty for it; and in modern painting we have some blue paint touched with high lights to represent the same thing. None of these signs attempts to produce the original or has any other meaning than to suggest the original. They are signs which have meanings for us only because we agree to understand their meanings beforehand.
Now this agreement to understand the sign is what might be called the recognition of the convention. All art is in a measure conventional, arbitrary—unreal if you please. Everyone knows that Hamlet in real life would not talk blank verse with his latest breath. The drama (and all poetry for that matter) is an absurdity if you insist upon asking: Is it natural? It is not natural; it is very artificial. And unless you accept the artificial as symbolizing the natural, unless you recognize the convention of metre and rhyme, you are not in a position to appreciate verse. The name of those who “do not care for poetry” is legion, because they have not the proper angle of vision, because they are out of focus. And this is equally true of music. Tristan and Isolde singing their loves at each other is sheer insanity from a realistic standpoint. Everyone knows that love in real life may do a good deal of sighing and sobbing, but it does not burst forth into song. The opera is a most palpable convention, and the flow of music, which so beautifully suggests the depths of passion and the heights of romance, is but an arbitrary symbol of reality. Recognize this and you have taken the first step toward the understanding of art; fail to recognize it and art must always be a closed book to you. You will not perceive the artist’s intention.
As a matter of fact we all do accept the convention in one form or another. If a child standing at the blackboard should draw a horse with four chalk-lined legs and a chalk-lined body and head we should have no trouble in making it out as a horse. And should we know it as a horse because of its truth to nature? Is a horse flat, hairless, colorless, shadowless? And has he a chalk line about him? Not at all. The representation is but a sign or symbol which we have agreed to recognize as a horse. It is a child’s representation, and it differs from a painter’s representation of the same animal largely in the matter of trained skill and imaginative conception. The fine portraits of Holbein—than which there is nothing finer in painting—have that same rim about them (Plate [1]). We call it Holbein’s “clear outline,” but it is substantially the same thing. And the etched landscapes of Rembrandt—what could you have more arbitrary? Merely a few lines drawn with a swift hand, a few scratches in a copper plate to represent sunlight, and some cross-hatchings to represent shadow; but how quickly we recognize their meanings! If you will look closely at the wood engravings of Timothy Cole you will see the modelling of the faces brought out sometimes by long, waving, diagonal lines, sometimes by dots and sometimes by checks and squares. Again could anything be more conventional? But we have no trouble in making out the artist’s intention. We accept the convention from the start.
So it is that we do not necessarily grasp the intention by the fulness or elaborateness of the sign. The painter, from long experience, from being more expert of hand, is perhaps better able to exploit the sign than is the child; but we do not fail in understanding the meaning of the childish outline. There is a difference in sign making, to be sure, and that may make a great difference in art; but there is little or no difference in the intention—the meaning of the sign. The flat figures upon the Greek vases are not quite like the outlined figures of Raphael and Ingres, and still less like the figures of Manet; but they are all signs nevertheless. Manet used the patch of color instead of the rim or outline, which is supposed to be a very fetching piece of realism; but none of the representations is to be mistaken for reality. The real is one thing; the sign or symbol for it, quite another thing.
What then is realism in art—this drawing of eyes that follow you about the room, lips that seem parted as if to speak, and hands that you could shake? What is this painting of pots and pans to be picked up, and cows that walk out of the canvas? Can we not define it as merely the adding-to, the rounding, the perfecting of the sign? Is it anything more than the telling of all the truths, both great and small, so that the veriest dunce in conventions shall not fail to recognize them?
I.—HOLBEIN, Portrait of a Man. Belvedere, Vienna.
To revert to our former illustrations, perhaps Ingres’s rigid outline contains less truth—less important truths—than Manet’s color patch. Why? Because the figure in full light really has no rim about it. It looks more like a patch of color relieved against other colors. The rim or outline is childish, primitive, and originally came, not from a direct study of the model but from studying the model’s shadow or silhouette. People of childish intelligence, like the Egyptian fellaheen, for instance, understand it very readily because of its simplicity and its arbitrary utterance; but the more complex sign that deals with sunshine rather than the flattened shadow contains the greater truth. Therefore as regards the whole truth there is more of it in Manet’s figure than in Ingres’s. Additions to the sign, such as effects of light-and-shade, of color, of surface texture, of contour, may tell us more about the object and add to the sum of truth and the perfection of the sign; and yet these may not change in any way the significance of the sign. The most elaborate human being that a Meissonier could paint would still be only the individual symbol of a man, and in that respect would not be different from the incised outline of Rameses the Great upon a Theban wall.
You will understand, of course, that there are painters who use the sign to convey a meaning—use it as one might words and sentences. Millet, in writing to a friend, said: “All art is a language and language is made to express thoughts.” Of that I shall have something to say later; but just now I wish to call your attention to the fact that the realist does not agree with Millet, that he is not concerned with ulterior meanings, that in fact he rather despises them. For realism, broadly speaking, means a pot for a pot’s sake, or a cow for a cow’s sake, which is to say a sign for a sign’s sake. The Gerard Dous and the Meissoniers rather plume themselves upon being expert sign-makers. Their art usually goes no farther than excellent craftsmanship. They draw and paint skilfully, decoratively, telling everything about the model before them, from an eyelash to a boot-strap; and there they stop. They give forth an official report which may be true enough from their point of view and yet contain not an idea worth the contemplating, not a thought worth the thinking. But that does not in any way disturb the poise of the realist. He is ready to answer you that “beauty is truth and truth beauty”—an aphorism that sounds like argument and yet is only assumption. But let us look into the matter a little farther and ask: What is the truth which they claim to have? Is it the vital truth or the only truth, and are there not varieties, grades, and degrees of truth in painting as in the other departments of art and life? I have no wish to deny that realism, so-called, makes up one kind of art; but let us push our inquiry farther afield and find out if possible what is the basis of the realistic picture.
“Truth,” we have already affirmed, “is the report of nature made by man.” We may cast out the child’s report about the horse because it is incomplete, immature. It is made up of all the errors of the untrained hand and eye, and though it has a certain personality about it, and gives us a child’s idea of a horse, yet it cannot be considered as an entirely truthful record. The report of the camera, if it be true or false we do not know. Light flashes and the horse’s silhouette is instantly caught and fixed upon the plate; but I need not tell you that light does not flash into the human eye, and the silhouette is not instantly fixed upon the human retina in the same way. Nor need I tell you that eyes vary more widely in the way they see than do cameras. Which then tells the truth? That the camera always records the same does not prove that it always records truly. It may always record falsely. At least the human eye sees differently from the camera, and the ultimate decision as to truth must be referred back to the eye. It may not be an infallible register, but it is the best we have. For all human knowledge must base itself upon human sensation.
The horse of the child being incomplete and that of the camera misleading, we return to the work of the painter and ask: What of the horse of Apelles? Can that stand as the final truth? The story of its deceiving other horses we may put aside as pure romance, but undoubtedly the picture was emphasized in its modelling—pushed hard in its high lights—to make the horse “stand out.” Granted a truth of relief and perhaps a truth of surface, are these the only truths about the horse? And do they make the standard to which art and artists must bow? Not necessarily. We have had hundreds of painters since Apelles’s time who have painted hundreds of horses, perhaps quite as true to nature as his, but never a one of them saw or painted a horse in just the way Apelles did.
And now we are confronted with the fact that if there are many men of many minds in this world of ours there are also many men with many eyes. No two pairs of eyes see alike. Are we to infer then that any one pair of eyes or any one race or its school of painters sees truth and all the others see only error? Is truth on one side of the Alps and falsehood on the other? Titian in Italy made a different report of nature from Rembrandt in Holland—which told the truth? Does truth abide exclusively in the Orient or the Occident? A landscape in Japan by Hokousai, how very different from a Seine landscape by Daubigny! But is either of them false? And after all does not something of truth—I do not say the whole of it—consist in the fidelity with which the point of view is maintained? We must cultivate liberality in this matter. For Creation ordained that there should be a Babel of eyes, all seeing differently, and consequently there must be a standard of truth peculiar to each individual.
II.—BENOZZO GOZZOLI, Adoration of Kings (detail). Riccardi Palace, Florence.
Does “truth to nature” then mean to each man what his eyes tell him and to each painter what the sincerity of his make-up enables him to record? Yes, certainly; but, mind you, it may be a very limited truth, not necessarily an absolute truth, not a world-embracing truth applicable to all classes and conditions of men. The child with his chalk-lined horse may be maintaining his childish point of view with the utmost fidelity, but it is apparent from his drawing that he does not fully comprehend his subject, does not see the object in its entirety. The horses by Spinello Aretino, shown in his Campo Santo pictures at Pisa, are not very different from the child’s conception. They contain more truths without by any means being exhaustive. They are still crude, but true enough as regards the maintenance of the point of view. The fine horses of Benozzo Gozzoli, in the Riccardi palace fresco (Plate [2]), are an improvement upon those of Spinello without being complete, and the Gattamelata horse of Donatello, the Colleoni of Verrocchio, may make us enthusiastic about the special truth of their pushing power, and again not make a full report of the horse. Perhaps when we reach the height of realism and come to a horse as seen by Gérôme or Rosa Bonheur we are not so pleased with it as with Benozzo’s square-framed beast; but that may be for a cause which we shall discuss hereafter. The completeness of the truth, the fulness of the report, may not be denied, however wearisome it may be as art.
Now we must add to this individuality, which everyone possesses in measure and which must warp the vision somewhat, a further influence or bias which the individual takes from his race and his country. I have already asked Pascal’s question about truth being on one side of the Alps and error on the other side. Applied to the arts it is pertinent to inquire: Is a Siena landscape by Pintoricchio false because it does not look like a Vosges landscape by Courbet? Not at all. They are both true—that is, not only true to locality but true to that native flavor which makes a pine-tree in Japanese art look “Japanesey” and a pine-tree in Norwegian art look Norwegian.[[1]] Moreover, each landscape is true in exhibiting its time, its country, and its race. The Pintoricchio shows the attenuated purist landscape of the Tuscan country—the landscape admirably suited to serve as a background for the sensitive, sentimental saints he depicted. It speaks truly enough for a portion of Italy during the Early Renaissance, that portion which lies in the Tuscan country; but it goes no farther. Giovanni Bellini at Venice was Italian, too; but he was at this very time producing quite a different landscape—one that spoke for the mountainous country lying to the north of Venice, but not for Tuscany. The landscape by Courbet is not so limited. It is nineteenth-century work and has the advantage of the great advance made in landscape work since the Renaissance; and yet no one could fail to see that it was French, that it depicted a French country in a French way. With all its large truth of appearance it shows its localized Parisian point of view. To be sure Paris in Courbet’s day was very cosmopolitan. His vision was broader, his grasp of truths greater than the sculptor who carved, in bas-relief, Sargon feasting with his wives; but nevertheless the local truths of France and of Assyria are each apparent in each.
[1]. “If we will take the trouble to look at the wood-cuts illustrative of some given celebrity as they appear in the illustrated newspapers of various nations, we shall see that, though copied very mechanically from the same photograph, Mr. Gladstone becomes a Frenchman in France, a Spaniard in Spain, and, though less visible to us, in the same way the Continental, the Spaniard, or the Frenchman becomes English in the engraving of an English magazine. Even in the handling of the tool called the graver which cuts the wood there is, then, a nationality.”—John La Farge, in International Monthly, Nov., 1900.
Is every artist then biassed in his conception of truth by his race and age; and is every art significant of its environment? Certainly. Thus far in the world’s history all art has been provincial—expressive at least of a nationality if not of a locality. The art of Holland in the sixteenth century never travelled beyond the dikes and dunes except in the case of a genius like Rembrandt. As a truth for universal application a roystering party by Jan Steen would go no farther to-day than a garden party under the cherry blossoms by Hiroshighe. Both are peculiarly provincial and belong in their own lands with their own peoples. Outside of their own countries they meet with appreciative understanding only from the artistic few. A century ago no one in the Anglo-Saxon or Teutonic world cared very much for Dutch art, and not fifty years ago Japanese art was regarded as little more than an interesting absurdity because of its unfamiliar perspective. Neither of them at this day has any world-wide reach. They have not travelled to us, but the cosmopolitan art-lover has gone out and discovered them. Transportation may eventually make us all cosmopolitan—make all art kin; but it has not done so as yet.
Of course all painting is not so strictly local as the pictures of Jan Steen and Hiroshighe would suggest. A work of art, in subject and in method, appeals more strongly perhaps to its own people than to any other—an Osiris to an Egyptian, a Zeus to a Greek, and a Madonna to a Christian. But the carved Buddha, seated with crossed legs, open palms, and a vacant stare into space appeals only to a Buddhist. It will not travel elsewhere except as a curio. Nor will the Osiris or the Madonna go very far. But what of a Zeus! what of a Hermes by Praxiteles! what of the Greek ideal! Have they not a universal quality about them—a grasp of universal truths—that carry them beyond the frontier lines of Hellas? Think for a moment of the “Venus of Milo.” Has it not something supremely true about it that a person of any nationality cannot choose but see? And think for a moment of the “Ariadne” of Tintoretto. Again is there not something here that compels the admiration of the Asiatic as well as the European and the American? There is individual and local and racial truth in all these works, but there is also universal truth—truth applicable to all humanity.
III.—VAN DYCK, Cornelius van der Geest. National Gallery, London.
And now, if we stop to consider the great men in the arts, we shall invariably find that each one of them is marked by some quality of universal significance. There is something about them all that overleaps the provincial, the accidental, the small, and the trifling. They disregard in a measure the local truths and aim at the general truths—at things essentially true for all humanity. Our Shakespeares and Platos and St. Pauls survey the world from mountain tops. From these vantage points their perspective is far-reaching, their view of the world expansive. They see and grasp the essentials, the basic elements, the foundations of things. It is this, for one thing, that makes the art of Titian so superlatively great. What wonderful men and women people his pantheon! What types they are of manhood and womanhood! What embodiments of loftiness, dignity, and nobility! And are they not universally admired? No matter what a man’s nationality, he cannot choose but be interested in “The Man with a Glove” or the “Charles V.” at Madrid. There is something in them of that truth seen from mountain heights which every one will recognize as the nobler part of his little valley-world.
Just so with the art of Rembrandt. His type is essentially of the Low Countries; his costumes, landscapes, light-and-shade, and methods are all localized in Holland. But a sadder painter you cannot find in all the reach of painting. His emotional nature had been wrung by trial and suffering and his sympathies were with the down-trodden and the grief-stricken. There never was a painter who painted so much of sorrow in the faces of his people as Rembrandt. The “Christ at Emmaus” is, in form and figure, only a poor emaciated Amsterdam Jew; but in emotional truth it is the one Christ of all painting. That face appeals to Christian, Mahometan, Jew, and infidel alike, not because of its divinity but because of its intense humanity. Should we bring up the names of the other great masters of painting we should find that each one of them is remarkable for some quality of universal significance—Michael Angelo for his great command of form, Rubens for his great splendor of effect, Velasquez for his sense of vitality in the physical presence (Plate [13]), Raphael for his unity and his harmony.
The great men are remarkable for their breadth—the wide angle of their vision. They see, not differently from others, but they see more. Yet it is only a point of view, a limited outlook, and not by any means the total sum of truth. The report of nature made by man, which we have defined as “truth,” is always a report of some sort whoever makes it. The difference between the great minds and the small ones consists in what is seen and reported. A Rousseau who sees and tells of the solidity of the earth, the volume of the forest, the great luminous expanse of the sky, does not think to tell everything that may be in the landscape. He sees the great truths, those truths that are of universal permanence in all landscape, and emphasizes them at the expense of the smaller details. A man of narrower vision would perhaps overlook the sky and earth, and fail to see the forest for the trees. He might centre all his interest in blades of grass, in dew-drops and spider-webs and opening buttercups—the infinitely little things in the landscape.
In portraiture men like Gerard Dou and Denner emphasize the small skin-facts of a man’s face with such minute workmanship that you may study them with a magnifying-glass. You will never see anything like this in the portraits by Titian, Rembrandt, Velasquez, Van Dyck (Plates [3], [13], [18]). They waste no time on small truths. They are intent upon giving the large physical presence, not the petty deformities of the epidermis.
Again in drawing a hand and arm you will observe that men like Gérôme give every curve and break of light along the arm, every accidental contortion of muscle, every wrinkle and twist of flesh; but somehow, when all these features are put down, the arm fails to live, fails to move. It is a petrified arm. For an opposite statement of truth look at the arm of Millet’s “Sower.” There is nothing absolute or minute about the drawing. The arm is generalized, summarized, synthetized as it were. The wrinkles in it are not apparent, the covering of it is vague, the hand is not articulated in the muscles or even definite in the drawing of the fingers. In short the whole arm and hand are cut down to a few elementary lines, so that they appear to the uninitiated somewhat sketchy and peremptory. But looked at for those qualities which Millet thought more important than surface texture, looked at for bulk, mass, weight, motion—particularly motion—and there is a larger view apparent. The arm and hand certainly have motion and life. And these are precisely what Gérôme’s arm and hand have not. Can it not be claimed then that the truth of life and motion is a greater truth than the truth of momentary rigidity? Is it not a fact that Millet has seized upon a general and universal truth characteristic of all arms and hands—that is, the truth of life and movement—whereas Gérôme has seized upon an accidental truth of light-and-shade which may be something local and peculiar to that one hand and arm?
IV.—MILLET, The Gleaners. Louvre, Paris.
If one shows us a snap-photograph of breaking waves, what do we see if not the highest and most brittle wave the camera man could catch? Does this give us a general or a particular truth of the sea? Do waves stand rigidly in air, petrified from base to crest, as we see in the photograph, or do they roll and keep on rolling indefinitely and ceaselessly? Does not the very essence of truth about a wave lie in its restless heave and toss, its breaking and reforming, its eternal indefiniteness of form? How many sea pictures have we seen with every wave in place—pounded into place like hammered steel—with every facet shining like a mirror, and not a possibility of motion in anything? Perhaps we have rather enjoyed them and fancied, in crossing the ocean, that the waves looked like that. Perhaps they did; perhaps we were content to see only the small truths of the ocean; but a study of the marines by Courbet, Manet, and Monet may convince us that there are larger truths of the ocean than those relating to its mirror-like sparkles—larger truths in the ocean’s depth, power, and its restless, ceaseless motion. These painters have discarded small things on the surface of the water, as Frans Hals the small spots on a man’s face, in order to give the sense of form back of it (Plate [22]).
In the same way you will often find painters discarding the exact drawing of objects such as wood or cloth or stone or metal in order that they may give the weight, the elasticity, or the density of these objects. A feather or a leaf may be an epitome of floating, dancing lightness, but if you draw its complete anatomy and paint all its surface texture you will have something that is as heavy as wrought iron. It does not follow either, because Desgoffes gives us the sheen and flash of brasses, china, and satins, that he has told all or the most vital truths about those articles. Vollon may paint the same things in a fuller manner, showing us something of structural character which is just as important and just as true as surface appearance. Moreover, the broader method leaves something to implication and suggestion, where the other method buries under an accumulation of fact.
Please note the word “suggestion,” for it is by suggestion that the greatest truths of art are brought home to us. The realist, whom we have been hastily considering, does not care for this method of approach. He is bent upon realization. He is analytical in his statement of each and every fact and makes a full report. All painters do this in some degree during the early stages of their career, but as they advance in years and experience there is a tendency to a broader treatment, a return to the simple line of the child, to the synthesis of a Millet, as shown in the arms, hands, and backs of the women in “The Gleaners” (Plate [4]), to the implication and suggestion of a Corot, as shown in the sky of the “Biblis.” Facts are summarized. A mere charcoal outline drawn by Degas gives us the reliefs, proportions, weight, and bulk of a human figure; a shadow with Giorgione or Rembrandt sums up the series of facts beneath it, and becomes suggestive by its very mystery and uncertainty; a blended blur of color by Whistler may bring to mind a heaving wave in mid-ocean better than all the drawn and tinted and “realized” waves of all the realists.
It is not the heaping of fact upon fact that flashes the truth upon us—at least not in art, though it may in logic or in law. Indeed, the accumulation of evidence often confuses. It is common studio experience that a sketch of a picture is frequently better than the picture itself. The attempt to “finish” (that is, to put in all the details and minutiæ) makes it dull and unsuggestive. The unfinished marbles of Michael Angelo, do they really suffer much by being unfinished? I have sometimes thought that the figure of “Day” in the Medici Chapel gained by its incompleteness—that it was better than the “Night” upon the opposite side of the tomb because the sculptor’s intention is perfectly obvious and yet the spectator’s imagination is not stifled. There, like a fallen god, he lies, half embedded in his matrix of stone with a suggestion of mighty power, never so strongly felt in any other marble in this world. The lack of finish, the mystery, the uncertainty, help on the imagination. One may fancy, as many have done, that the figure symbolizes the loss of Florentine freedom, and that the grand captive, with his massive brow and sunken eyes, half-rises wearily to view the morning light shining for him in vain. And again one may imagine he is a new Prometheus bound to the rock; one of the Gigantes; or perhaps a conquered Titan lying along the hills of Tartarus in the drear twilight, brooding in melancholy silence over the loss of Olympus. To whatever the mind may conjure up regarding the figure, the element of reserved strength will lend assistance. Cut the captive from his bed of stone and the strength falls short, lacking the foil of resistance; finish the marble and an existent fact precludes the possibility of wide imagination.
The great English master of art, how well he knew what to leave out! The lovers Lorenzo and Jessica are in the still, evening air, and with what consummate skill Shakespeare paints the landscape with that one suggestive line:
“How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank.”
Not a word about the trees or grasses or ponds or meadows; not a word about the stillness of the night, the hushed winds, and the shining stars; but do you not see them all? Do they not rise up before your eyes as by magic? Your realist would have put us to sleep with dreary descriptions of grass and groves and glittering dew-drops instead of the moonlight. And Shakespeare himself might have written a volume of description and still not roused us to his meaning so quickly as with that one suggestive line. The value of the sign in art, whether it be pictorial, sculptural, or literary, lies in its suggestive quality; and the “Sower” of Millet, the “Day” of Michael Angelo, and the moonlight of Shakespeare are merely so many suggestive signs.
V.—PAOLO VERONESE, Marriage in Cana. Louvre, Paris.
Thus far our inquiry has extended no farther than the truth of nature—the truth of appearance as shown in realistic art. But there are other truths with which the picture has to do that perhaps call for a moment’s consideration. The truth of history for which the public contends so valiantly need not detain us long. That Paolo Veronese and his contemporaries chose to garb the sacred characters of the “Marriage in Cana” (Plate [5]) or “Moses saved from the Nile” (Plate [23]), in Venetian costume, is matter of small importance. And it is of still less importance whether Christ and the Apostles show the Semitic cast of countenance or not. The intense reverence for local and ethnographical truth possessed by the Holman Hunts and Alma-Tademas of the art world would seem somewhat misplaced. No matter what care is bestowed upon the archæology, there is always something not quite true to the fact. And moreover, all art in all times has pictured its own race, costume, and country. It would not be worth much unless it did. The marble gods of Greece are all Greek, the painted Madonnas of Italy are all Italian. How otherwise would you have it? Marlowe’s Mephistopheles talks English, and Goethe’s Mephistopheles talks German. What language should they talk? When art deals with the past it translates it into the present. It could not possibly do otherwise. No Anglo-Saxon could feel, think, or work like a Greek, simply because he is an Anglo-Saxon.
There is another truth of far more consequence than historical accuracy, and that is the truth of art. This comes in here opportunely enough, for art-truth is produced by the suggestive method of dealing with facts which I have just been illustrating. The method is absolutely essential to all strong work in all departments. It is usually known in painting as the “law of sacrifice”; and you will find it in literature under the name of “dramatic force.” We should never have had such characters as Faust and Macbeth had all the other characters in the plays been treated with an importance equal to that of the heroes. Hamlet is an elevated Hamlet simply because the other characters are subordinate characters, just as Corot’s light is light, because everything else in the picture is sacrificed to it. There is no quarrel with truth to nature in this truth to art. Great art seldom falsifies, but it always selects, emphasizing some features and subordinating other features. It usually gives the large truths and merely implies the small ones. Millet in his “Sower” has no notion of telling you more than a few prominent facts about the man and his work. He shows a peasant, working under the shadow of a hill, working late in the evening, swinging and sowing with rhythmic motion of foot, hand, arm and body. It is matter of no importance whether he wears linen or woollen or cotton, whether his blouse has buttons upon it or not, whether his face is clean or not. The all-pervading truth of the picture lies in the swinging form of the sower, and to keep your attention upon that he omits everything else. The figure is but a suggestion, a something that stands as an equivalent for that man whom Millet thought should be recognized for his patience and fortitude of spirit, his nobility and dignity in the hard labor of life, his fine pictorial qualities as seen against the background of his native heath. That is the ulterior meaning which he would show us. The sign is true to the great truth of a sower, the meaning is true within the limits of pictorial creation, and finally the recording of it is true to the truth of art.
This method of procedure, wherein suggestion becomes such an important factor, implies two people in the work of art rather than one. The spectator must do his part as well as the artist. The latter suggests, the former takes up the suggestion and builds upon it. When Velasquez painted Christ on the cross, hanging there alone in the night, the head bowed forward on the breast, and the long dark hair tailing over the face and half covering it, he did not think to obliterate the face—to take it out of the picture completely. He knew very well that the imagination of the spectator would go behind the veil and picture that face more vividly than he could paint it. What painter ever yet produced a wholly satisfactory face of Christ? Velasquez was wise in leaving it to the imagination of the spectator. How wise he was you can perhaps gather by contrasting his “Christ on the Cross” with the same subject by Léon Bonnat—one of the noblest of the latter-day realists. Bonnat simply took a dead body from the morgue and hung it upon a cross in the court-yard of the École de Médecine, and painted it exactly as he saw it. But it is not Christ; it is the dead body he took from the morgue. There is strain of arm and leg and torso, the anatomy is wrenched, the muscles are contorted, the veins are swollen. But there is no suggestion of anything that had been noble or exalted in the living. In fact there is not a suggestion of any kind. Everything is told and the spectator’s imagination is not called upon. Realism has been pushed into the last ditch, and yet has produced only a sign standing for Christ on the cross, and not the real thing—a sign which, in gaining an elaborate truth to fact, has lost its truth to art and its power of suggestion.
VI.—CARPACCIO, St. Ursula and Prince of England (detail). Academy, Venice.
We may as well conclude then, without further illustration, that the exact portrayal of nature known as realism falls somewhat short of its mark. It may report and report, but it cannot realize. Light, air, hills, mountains, human beings and their habitations cannot be reproduced, but they may be translated through the medium of pigment and thus rendered intelligible to us. You may translate them “realistically” or you may translate them suggestively, but in either case it is the translation that you will have, and not the original. Each art—music, poetry, painting—has its peculiar method of translation, and we have called the result in each case a sign—a convention which we have agreed to recognize as meaning thus and so; but of course the signs in painting are not quite so arbitrary as in language or chemistry. The painting of a wave certainly looks more like a wave than the word “water,” or the symbol H2O. The sign has a certain resemblance to the original which gives a reason for the existence of realism and also adds to the confusion of those who would spin a theory of art; but the resemblance should not mislead us. The sign is still a sign, though in the one case it is representative and in the other case symbolic. Its meaning has not changed in any way. The all-seeing eye of Osiris is not like those speaking eyes in Van Dyck’s portrait of “Cornelius Van der Geest” (Plate [3]). One is more conventional than the other, but both are conventions.
It is not necessary that we should deny value to this realistic art, even though we do not wholly accept it. The very endeavor to make the work faithful to the original in every detail, though it may hurt its deeper sentiment, cannot but result in good workmanship; and that in itself is always acceptable and pleasurable. Indeed, bald realism, with nothing else back of it, is seldom seen in art. The man, the material, and the method are inextricably mixed together, so that the product always has more or less individuality about it, or is decorative in form or color, or expresses some thought or feeling of the painter, or stands for something in subject. In any event the well-made sign—even as a sign—is not to be scorned. We shall see hereafter how it is distorted by the personal element, how it is twisted by the imagination, how it is warped by the decorative instinct; but we are not to forget at any time that it is but a symbol, merely a means of suggesting reality, and not reality itself.
CHAPTER II
INDIVIDUALITY OR THE PERSONAL ELEMENT
The fact that “the report about nature” which we have called “truth” varies with the reporter is of vital importance to us in comprehending the measure of exactness in the result. It is something that must be reckoned with in every thought, deed, and utterance, for its presence is potent in all human endeavor. Two astronomers, to use the accepted illustration, taking the time of the passage of a series of stars over the same meridian, will not precisely agree in their arithmetical results. However accurate, unbiassed, and mechanical in action they may seek to be, it happens that one takes the time earlier or later than the other. Consequently there is always a variation in the product, which has to be rectified by adding a constant. This is what is called the personal equation—a something we have heard about in literature and art as well as in science.
Perhaps you may remember that in the writing class of our youth when the motto, “Evil communications corrupt good manners,” was given us as an example to copy, we all wrote the motto, and we all tried to follow the exact form of the copper-plate pattern before us; but somehow our performances differed one from another. In some the letters were large, in others they were small; the angle was flatter, the line was firmer, or the shading heavier. We used to think it merely a matter of practice, and fancied if we kept at it long enough we could ultimately write exactly like the copper-plate pattern. But I wonder if we thought quite correctly about that. Certainly there are thousands of people who have been writing all their lives and have had practice enough, but these are the ones that show the most marked variations from the model. Each one writes in a manner peculiarly his own. And these handwritings that vary so radically interest us very much. We see all sorts of striking peculiarities in them suggestive of their authors, and we even have so-called scientists who read character out of them, or into them, I will not say which. The cause of the variation is not far to seek. It is the personal element appearing in the work and influencing it. If we would get the same result in all handwritings we must eliminate the personal element or, if you please, reckon with the personal equation.
This quality which creates the variance in handwriting is met with even more positively in painting. For painting is, after all, only an elaborated picture-writing, more flexible, perhaps, than letter-writing, and, therefore, more easily bent by a personality; but in the main influenced by the same principles as regards the variation of the characters. We all write the letter “A” and they are all “A’s,” but each is different from the other, just as all landscape painters paint hills and trees and they are all hills and trees, yet each is different again. If three painters, say Turner, Rousseau, and Claude Monet, could be brought together and induced, each for himself, to paint a given tree, there can be no doubt that all three of the paintings would represent the tree and be true enough representations into the bargain; but they would not be at all like one another. The Turner would undoubtedly give the height, the branching outline, the grace and grandeur of the tree; but in flattened form, perhaps in silhouette against a yellow evening sky. In any event and under any circumstances we may be sure that it would be a Turnerian tree. And the Rousseau would be correspondingly true to Rousseau’s peculiar point of view. It would probably have an emphasis of mass and volume; it would be as deep through as broad across, it would be firm in its rooting, massive in its trunk and branches, heavy in its foliage, rich in its coloring. But Claude Monet, painting the same tree, would not see the things that appealed to Turner and Rousseau, or if he did he would disregard them. He would overlook form and line and body, perhaps lose them entirely in studying the sunlight falling upon the foliage, in painting the colored reflections cast by sky and ground and water, in surrounding the tree with colored air and giving it a setting in an atmospheric envelope. Undoubtedly we should be able to recognize the original tree in any one of the three counterfeit presentments. Each would differ from the other and yet no one of them be false. There would be three different truths about the one tree—three different phases of the one fact. And undoubtedly we should be able to say just which painter painted each picture. How? Because we should recognize in each the point of view peculiar to its maker—we should recognize the individuality of the painter.
If we consider this same tree as part of a landscape—consider it in connection with foreground, background, and sky—we shall see that the chance for the display of individuality is even greater. The choice of the painter as to how the tree shall be seen determines at the very start the character of the representation. If it is placed in the foreground and spreads in a pattern of branches and leaves high up against the sky, we have one phase of tree-truth, one kind of picture which may perhaps resemble, in a way, the work of Harpignies, if it is placed in the middle distance, a shadowy form against a pale morning sky, with a feeling of heavy air and rising mists, we have another phase of truth, something which may represent Corot; if it is seen in the far background against a yellow twilight sky, tall, dark, motionless, we have still another phase of truth which may stand for Daubigny. Any change in the position of the tree, any change in foreground or sky-line, in light or reflection or atmosphere, would represent a new angle of vision and hence a new truth. And the preference of the painter for any particular phase of the manifestation, any particular truth, would exhibit what we have called his individuality.[[2]]
[2]. This matter of personality and choice is well illustrated by Mr. La Farge in his “Considerations on Painting.” He says (p. 71): “I remember myself, years ago, sketching with two well-known men, artists who were great friends, great cronies, asking each other all the time how to do this and how to do that! but absolutely different in the texture of their minds and in the result that they wished to obtain, so far as the pictures and drawings by which they were well known to the public are concerned.
“What we made, or rather, I should say, what we wished to note, was merely a memorandum of the passing effect upon the hills that lay before us. We had no idea of expressing ourselves or of studying in any way the subject for any future use. We merely had the intention to note this affair rapidly, and we had all used the same words to express to each other what we liked in it. There were big clouds rolling over hills, sky clearing above, dots of trees and water and meadow land below; and the ground fell away suddenly before us. Well, our three sketches were in the first place different in shape; either from our physical differences, or from a habit of drawing certain shapes of a picture, which itself usually indicates—as you know or ought to know—whether we are looking far or near. Two were oblong, but of different proportions; one was more nearly a square: the distance taken into the right and left was smaller in the latter case, and, on the contrary, the height up and down—that is to say, the portion of land beneath and the portion of sky above—was greater. In each picture the distance bore a different relation to the foreground. In each picture the clouds were treated with different precision and different attention. In one picture the open sky was the main intention of the picture. In two pictures the upper sky was of no consequence—it was the clouds and the mountains that were insisted upon. The drawing was the same—that is to say, the general make of things—but each man had involuntarily looked upon what was most interesting to him in the whole sight; and though the whole sight was what he meant to represent, he had unconsciously preferred a beauty or interest different from what his neighbors liked.
“The color of each painting was different—the vivacity of colors and tone, the distinctness of each part in relation to the whole; and each picture would have been recognized anywhere as a specimen of work by each one of us, characteristic of our names. And we spent on the whole affair perhaps twenty minutes. I wish you to understand again that we each thought and felt as though we had been photographing the matter before us. We had not the first desire of expressing ourselves, and I think would have been very much worried had we not felt that each one was true to nature. Of course there is no absolute nature, as with each slight shifting of the eye, involuntarily we focus more or less distinctly some part to the prejudice of others. And not only would this result have been the same if we had gone on painting, but had we made a drawing, had we made a careful representation or rapid note of what we saw by lines (that is to say, by an abstraction of the edges of the surfaces that we saw), anyone could have told the names of the men who had done it.”
This preference for a peculiar point of view crops out very early in the painter’s life. The students in an art class, drawing from the living model on the platform, and each one striving to follow that model literally, all show it. The sketches indicate by the placing of the figure upon the paper, the size of the figure, the height or depth of the shadows, the clearness or vagueness of the outline, that the personal element—individuality—is present, influencing and practically dominating the work of everyone in the class-room. And this, too, in charcoal work, where the color problem is eliminated. Moreover, there are features of these charcoal sketches, aside from mere technique, that are equally interesting as indicative of the peculiar temperament behind the pencil. You cannot fail to be struck with the mood or spirit that creeps into each one of the drawings. On one paper the model looks pleasant, almost jovial, on another he will appear sad-faced or morose, on another, romantic as you might conceive a Wagner hero, or classic and insipid like a Canova marble, and on still another, gross, brutal, or perhaps foolish-looking. It is not possible that the model could exhibit all these different moods. The variation is not in him. He presents the same stolid, tired front common to all models; the mood is added to him by the personality holding the charcoal.
VII.—BELLINI, Madonna and Saints. S. M. dei Frari, Venice.
We see the same variation among the works of older people—full-fledged artists, in the world of art. Nowhere is it more apparent than in the portrait, the one thing which might be thought to call for the elimination of the painter and a close fidelity to the facts of the original. But such is the power of preference that the painter almost invariably emphasizes certain features at the expense of others less interesting to him; or such is the warp of the vision that certain qualities appear abnormal, certain prominences appear unduly accentuated. There are portraits of the Duchess of Devonshire and of Mrs. Siddons (Plate [19]) by both Reynolds and Gainsborough, but how very different they are! With Reynolds both of the characters are healthy, robust, good-natured, somewhat loud and stormy; with Gainsborough they are both delicate, subdued, refined, even melancholy. And think of the portraits in the Louvre of Francis I. by different hands, where only a slight thread of resemblance holds them together; or, better still, the portraits of Napoleon I., painted by the classic painters of his reign who believed in the utter effacement of the artist in favor of the facts before him. How very different in form, feature, mood, and character Napoleon appears in each picture. He is classic; he is romantic; he is thin, fat, amiable, moody, fiery, dreamy. David, Delaroche, Gros, no matter what their theories in art, could not keep themselves out of the representation. All that any one of them could do was to give his individual impression of the model before him. Necessarily each was tinctured by a predilection or a bias. It could not have been otherwise.
What is the cause of the variation in results to be seen in the portrait? Why, for instance, do the photographs of Queen Victoria show substantially the same thing, while the portraits of her by painters show different things? Because the cameras are all made of practically the same material, have the same sensitiveness, and receive light in the same way; whereas men are not made of the same material, have not the same sensitiveness, and receive varying degrees of light according to their lucidity or absorbent power, which is sometimes called genius. No two people are fashioned precisely after the same pattern. They vary in intellectual, emotional, and physical make-up. And let a painter strive as he may to record an exact fact before him, he cannot escape the action of his inherent faculties. These may be brighter, clearer, keener, than those of other painters, or they may be duller and feebler; but at least they are different, and he must use what nature has given him. He was equipped originally to see with his own eyes, think with his own brain, and work with his own hands. Is it not very apparent then that the eye may warp the vision and report peculiarly to the brain, which in turn may tell the hand to work thus and so? And the result in art is what? Why, the individual view of one man; or nature passed through the alembic of that man’s personality.[[3]]
[3]. “Our eyes, our ears, our sense of smell, of taste, differing from one person to another, create as many truths as there are men upon earth. And our minds, taking instructions from these organs, so diversely impressed, understand, analyse, judge, as if each of us belonged to a different race. Each one of us, therefore, forms for himself an illusion of the world; and the writer (the painter, too) has no other mission than to reproduce faithfully this illusion, with all the contrivances of art that he has learned and has at his command.”—Guy de Maupassant, Fortnightly Review, March, 1888, p. 366.
VIII.—CORREGGIO, Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine. Louvre, Paris.
How shrewdly Coleridge discerned the truth in that definition of art which I am so very fond of quoting because of its exactness. He says that painting is of “a middle quality between a thought and a thing—the union of that which is nature with that which is exclusively human.” That is it, precisely. Art is an illusion of nature produced by a personality. Human individuality must be in it because it cannot very well be kept out of it. Whatever we do, we speak ourselves. For a time we may act a part—copy someone else—but sooner or later the mask falls and we stand revealed in the form and manner nature designed for us. We are all peculiar in our make-up physically, mentally, and æsthetically. To the European all Chinamen look alike, and possibly to Chinamen all Americans look alike; but we know there is a variation. We may seem as like as peas in a peck measure, but we differ in the conformation of a wrinkle. Out of a hundred acquaintances on the street how easy it is to recognize each one apart from his fellows. There is a peculiarity in look or walk or bearing that betrays the man. And of those hundred acquaintances each one, as we have already noted, writes in an individual way and you are able to distinguish the handwritings by the variations in the muscular action of the hands. Suppose you should have read to you extracts from a hundred famous authors, do you think you would have much difficulty in recognizing Shakespeare from Victor Hugo, Carlyle from Cardinal Newman, or Walter Scott from Swinburne? Could you possibly mistake an essay by Bacon for an essay by Macaulay, or could you by any chance confuse a sermon by Canon Liddon with a sermon by Spurgeon? I think not, for the individuality of mind and thought is even more positive and assertive than the individuality of the physical presence.
If you are acquainted with pictures you can enter a gallery in which you have never been before, and standing in the middle of the room you can pick out at a distance the Corots, the Diazes, the Monets, the Millets, the Delacroixs—yes, the Rubenses, the Van Dycks, the Holbeins, and the Titians. And this, too, with a large degree of accuracy. You are very likely to be right in your ascriptions. Why? Because you know the artistic individualities of each one of those painters—know just how they see, think, feel, and paint—as you know the personal appearance of an acquaintance upon the street, or recognize his handwriting upon the face of an envelope. When the question of a picture’s attribution comes up, when it is of moment whether a work is by a Raphael or a Perino del Vaga, by a Velasquez or a Mazo, there is an unconscious appeal made to the spirit of the picture. And this quite aside from a question of technique, aside from any Morellian theory of tools or methods or models. Does the work reflect the spirit of Raphael? Is the impress of his individuality to be felt in the canvas? If it is genuine, yes; if by a follower, no. The sugary little “Reading Magdalene” in the Dresden Gallery, so long attributed to Correggio, gives not the slightest hint of that great painter’s individuality; the alleged portrait of Raphael by himself in the Louvre shows all the blundering stupidity of Bacchiacca. Whether master or follower, the painter cannot disguise himself effectively. Back of the work we feel the presence of the worker. The great artists fashion their art after their own thoughts, and that which they love the best or feel the deepest speaks out from the canvas until at last we recognize the poet in his poem, the sculptor in his marble, the painter in his picture.
These qualities of individuality in art are much like the same qualities in real life, and we may perhaps fancy in the picture that which we find admirable in the personal acquaintance. For instance, the traits of frankness and straightforwardness which we all love in a friend, are they not just as apparent in Carpaccio the painter? And just as lovable? The way in which Carpaccio tells the history of St. Ursula or St. George—so frank in spirit and yet so cunning of hand—reminds one somehow of a chapter from Sir John Maundevile or Roger of Wendover. How naif he is with his gorgeously robed Venetians (Plate [6])! How earnest he is about the dignity of the types, the nobility of the faces, the sobriety of the action! His sincerity is as great as that of Giotto, and his absolute unconsciousness—his lack of egotism—as apparent as that of Fra Angelico. At the foot of the “Presentation” in the Venetian Academy is that little angel playing upon a lute which you have all seen in reproductions so many times. You must have noticed that the angel was not playing for public applause, but for the glory of the Madonna standing above. There is no thought of you or of me, or anyone outside of the Madonna and the group of saints. That quality of unconsciousness we need not attribute to angels. It is no characteristic of theirs so far as we know; but it was a quality of Victor Carpaccio, the Venetian painter.
Think for a moment of the “Madonna and Saints” in the sacristy of the Frari by Giovanni Bellini (Plate [7]). How absolutely honest and unabashed she looks! This is not the Madonna of Sorrows, not the pathetic Madonna of Botticelli; but a purely human mother, proud of her boy—a mother and not ashamed. And the little cherubs playing on musical instruments at the foot of the throne, how child-like they are with their serious faces, their little fat cheeks and round childish legs! Everything in and about the picture tells you of the sane, healthy mind and art of Giovanni Bellini. The Madonna’s honesty is Bellini’s honesty; the view of the cherubs as merely beautiful and graceful children of this earth is Bellini’s view; yes, the gorgeous coloring of the patterned background, the superb architecture, even the rich ornamentation of the framing are Bellini’s taste. We cannot, if we would, escape the man. He is omnipresent in his work. Why should he not be? The story in literature becomes fascinating through the personality and skill of the story-teller; why should not the theme in art be beautiful through the individuality and skill of the painter?
Those of you who have been in Rome and have studied in the Sistine Chapel know with what a feeling of awe the great figures on the ceiling inspire one. You feel the presence of a mighty spirit within the walls, hovering about the vaulted space, in the very air of the chapel itself. What is it? Surely, nothing in the architecture or the lighting of the chapel; nothing in the subjects of the frescoes, for they are familiar subjects in art. It is the impress of a commanding individuality that you feel. Michael Angelo lives here in his pictures. Those great forms of the Prophets and Sibyls lost in thought, brooding over the evil of their days, isolated in their grandeur, living on in gloomy solitude, how very like they are to what we know of Michael Angelo himself! Notice the fore-shortened hand and arm of the “Delphic Sibyl” (Plate [21]) and how symbolic of strength it is, how like to the power that lay in the arm, hand, and mind of the master himself! Follow the outline of the figure of the newly created Adam—perhaps the grandest piece of drawing in all pictorial art—and how that summarized, synthetized line speaks the comprehensive grasp, scope, knowledge, and plastic feeling of the great draughtsman.
So it is that individuality creeps into the work of art and tinges the whole character of it. Of the thousands of pictures we pass before in public galleries the great majority of them are merely records of individual tastes, beliefs, aspirations, emotions. In other words they are partial autobiographies of the painters, showing countless moods of human nature. Some of them are grave, some gay, some refined, some fierce, some grandiloquent, some resplendent. Almost every shade of sentiment and feeling, almost every quality personal to the man, can be recorded in art. And this, without premeditated thought, without extravagant effort, without conscious action. The note of a bird discloses its kind not more unconsciously than the hand of the artist tells the quality of the man.
If all the lives of Rembrandt were swept out of existence we should still be able to reconstruct his individuality from his pictures. His must have been an intensely emotional nature. For not in the “Supper at Emmaus” alone do we find the sorrow-stained face. The portraits of himself are only too often sad-eyed and passion-wrung; and there is in the National Gallery, London, one of his portraits of an old woman with a lace cap and a white ruff (No. 775 of the Catalogue) that shows a mouth and chin quivering with emotion, and eyes that seem red with weeping. The man was tragic in his passionate power. He could not suppress it. Even when he laughs you feel that he is doing so to avoid a moan. We have little record of the life of Giorgione, but from two or three of his pictures we know he must have been quite the reverse of Rembrandt. His “Madonna,” at Castelfranco (Plate [24]) and his “Concert,” in the Louvre (in Giorgione’s style if not by his hand), tell us his Theocritean nature—loving life for its pastoral beauty, revelling in sunshine, shadow and color, careless of everything but the pure joy of living. We know still less about Correggio, but his pictures (Plate [8]) say to us that he was of a similar faun-like nature—a man who grew eloquent over the grace and charm of women and children, and cared little or nothing for the religious themes of his time.
And so we might go on down the long line of paintings, recognizing in each picture the note that harmonized with the painter’s individuality. What, for instance, is more apparent than the charm of Corot as seen in his landscapes (Plate [9])? His pictures delight us by their alluring qualities of calmness, radiance, unity. They are fair dreams of splendor in which dawn and twilight glow through a silver veil of atmosphere, in which the winds are hushed and the waters are stilled and that peace that passeth understanding, that joy which is beyond price, have fallen upon the dwellers in Arcadia Charm in its various manifestations has been the possession of not a few painters. Many of the Italians—Leonardo, Filippino, Lorenzo Costa, Sodoma—possessed it; the eighteenth century Englishmen—Wilson, Gainsborough, Romney—were not without it; and the modern landscape painters—Daubigny (Plate [16]), Cazin, Homer Martin, Tryon—have shown it in almost all their work. Serenity is a quality allied to charm in that it is restful and hence an attractive feature. All the great men possessed it. Raphael was primarily its exponent in Rome as Giorgione in Venice. The superb repose of Titian and Velasquez is akin to it; and the calm of the Parthenon marbles is part of the same spirit. Refinement is another characteristic that may be shown in painting as readily as in print. It has nothing to do with fine furniture, fine clothes, and a pretty face. A picture may possess all the elegance of the latest fashion and still be the epitome of vulgarity. Refinement in art means the delicacy, the distinction of feeling that a painter may possess and show in his work. Terburg made it apparent in so simple a thing as the drawing of a chair leg or a table-cloth, Chardin showed it in his pots, pans and dishes, and it is obvious to the most obtuse in Van Dyck’s portraits of men, women and children. (Plate [18].) A tenderness of feeling as well as of touch has been exhibited many times in painting. Dürer shows it in his “Christ on the Cross” (Plate [10]), and Botticelli suggests it in almost every picture he ever painted, whether sacred or profane (Plate [29]). Just so with sensitiveness, which we see so beautifully shown in the portraits by Lorenzo Lotto, or impetuosity as revealed in the great dramatic canvases by Tintoretto, or liveliness as seen in the garden scenes of Pater or the soubrette figures of Fragonard. The words describe the spirit of the pictures and they also suggest the nature of the painter.
IX.—COROT, Landscape. Louvre, Paris.
And note too, if you please, that the disagreeable and unpleasant qualities of the individual crop out in painting as in social life. How many modern painters do we know whose works exhale the atmosphere of the Folies-Bergères and the Bal Bullier. Their subjects may be pure enough or refined enough; they may picture decent people, high life, and fashionable surroundings, and yet do it with an unwholesome mind and a tell-tale brush. There are painters (their names need not be mentioned) who cannot paint a lady without showing the cocotte, nor a gentleman without showing the blackguard, nor a child without showing a certain sophistication—a precocious knowledge of evil—altogether unhappy. The coarseness of Jan Steen or Brouwer may be passed over as incidental to his time. It is coarse, but neither vulgar nor immoral. But not so the brutality of the modern cosmopolite who boasts so openly in his pictures that he has no faith in the virtue of women nor the respectability of men.
And what vulgarity we see in every modern exhibition, whether held in Chicago, London, or Paris! Painters there are, born and bred no one knows where or how, who depict Oxford professors or statesmen with the air and attitude of flunkies, or duchesses with the smirk of shop-girls. And painters there are, too, who, assuming for their characters the elegance of luxury, paint pictures that seem to reek of perfumes, scented soaps, and manicured finger-nails. Such men seem to leave an unhappy impress upon the trees and mountains, and their point of view vulgarizes the blue sky. They may be very brilliant handlers of the brush—indeed they are often excellent craftsmen—but their vision is sadly warped and their minds are tainted. There are, for instance, few workmen more fascinating in craftsmanship than Goya. He could paint beautifully and convincingly, but when you go to Spain and see the mass of his painting you will be surprised at the blood and flame and brutality of it. The man’s mind, at times, was hideous, unearthly, poisoned with bitterness. On the contrary take the work of Carlo Dolci or Sassoferrato and you meet with super-saturated sentimentality and mawkishness. Neither was a bad painter for his age and people, but his mental attitude was lacking in force—perhaps had not enough brutality about it.
And human conceit exudes as readily from the painter’s brush as from the writer’s pen. You have no trouble in recognizing conceit in a book. It is only too apparent. And yet all that clever painting, that bravura of the brush, that elaborate flourish of the little men who try to make a great noise and attract attention to themselves, is mere pictorial conceit. And there is so much of it in modern painting. It seems sometimes as though the exhibitions were more than half made up of flippant displays of dexterity, which have no other aim than to show how very clever the painter can be and still avoid seriousness.
But I need not stop longer to discuss disagreeable characteristics in art. They are not our quest in any sense and they are referred to here merely to suggest anew that the man—be he weak or strong, good or bad, noble or ignoble, serious or flippant—eventually appears in his work. Individuality will speak out though the individual may not be aware of it.
And this is as it should be. The disagreeable personality misleads for only a short time. Eventually it is ignored in art as in social life. And that which is really good in painting is the better for the strong individuality behind it. The frank statement of personal feeling or faith, the candid autobiography, has added more to the real knowledge of life, and has done more to show people how to live, than all the long volumes of scientific history, of which we have enough and to spare in every library. When a person speaks of himself he knows his subject at least, and can speak of it truly; but when he speaks of dead-and-gone Alexanders and Cæsars, he is speculating in “perhapses” and “possiblys.” And so in painting, when a person paints what he individually sees and is impressed by, he is likely to produce something worthy of attention; but when he takes up some formula of truth laid down by a school or a camera he is merely repeating a something he has not seen, and simulating a feeling he has not known.
Even the positive assertion—the insistent assertion—of one’s own view is often welcome in art. I think we all like the self-reliance, the steadfastness of belief of the individual—assuming, of course, that he is right and not therefore merely obstinate. When Delacroix was opposed by the classic painters of his day because he saw nature in patches of color and light, instead of in outlines and linear extensions, he declared defiantly: “The whole world cannot prevent me from seeing things in my own way.” He insisted upon it that his “way” was a right way, even if different from that of Ingres. He was seeking to picture something peculiar to himself, in a manner entirely his own. Listen to him again: “I am at my window and I see the most beautiful landscape; the idea of a line never comes into my head. The lark sings, the river glitters, the foliage murmurs; but where are the lines that produce these charming sensations?” There you have the individual point of view, and in the 1840’s it was a very unusual view. It was the self-reliant quality of the man, which enabled him to discard the outworn conception of his contemporaries and create a something new; and it is largely by the creative faculty arising from the desire to say something new, that we distinguish genius from mediocrity or eccentricity.
For you know that people whom we call “queer” can be just as individual as others, and yet not accomplish anything of importance. There is an individuality of genius which consists in original impression and statement; and there is an eccentricity of foolishness which produces only the bizarre. It is not difficult, however, to distinguish between them. For, as we have already noted, true individuality is always creative. It builds up, has a definite aim, proceeds to a definite goal; whereas, eccentricity is disordered, disposed to be meaningless, inclined to produce brilliant fragments that have no connection with each other. We see the same qualities exhibited in the social characters of real life, and gossip says that such a man is a “genius” or that another is “eccentric.” It is by some outward manifestation or action, akin to expression in painting, that gossip arrives at its conclusion; and it is usually a correct conclusion.
Then, too, there are painters who lose their individuality—throw it aside to take up with the view of some other person who seems to have achieved more popularity. The majority of men break down in their ideals long before they are old. They may have possessed talent, and given voice to it in early years; but it has been unnoticed, perhaps unheard. They may have had impressions of their own; but perhaps they have not proved attractive to the masses, or have not received the immediate recognition to which their producers perhaps thought them entitled. Then they make the irretrievable mistake of trying to follow someone whose impressions seem to be in public demand. It may be that they follow Raphael or Titian or Velasquez; but no matter how good a painter they may choose for a model, they have already committed artistic suicide. No one in this world of ours ever became great by echoing the voice of another, repeating what that other has said. Are there not countless illustrations of this—illustrations by whole schools of painters and sculptors in the history of art? What was the art of Rome, following as it did the art of Greece? What was the art of those who followed Michael Angelo, Raphael, and Correggio? What was the seventeenth-century art of France, following that of Italy? What was David and classicism, following ancient Rome? What is to-day the value of all these French peasants and Seine landscapes for which Millet and Corot set the patterns, and in the imitation of which America has contributed her modicum of strength? It is all a vapid and somewhat meaningless copying that may furnish canvases to hide a break in the wall-paper of a drawing-room, but as original art counting for naught. And why? Simply because it lacks in individuality—lacks in originality of aim and statement.
That last statement may be almost as fittingly applied to those who literally imitate nature as to those who imitate some other painter. It adds nothing to our store of knowledge, nothing to our appreciation of beauty, to have the painter reproducing line upon line and shade upon shade and color upon color the exact scene from nature. “A mere copier of nature,” says Sir Joshua, “can never produce anything great; can never raise and enlarge the conceptions or warm the heart of the spectator.” The insistence upon fact crowds the man out of the picture. Individuality does not appear, except perhaps in a manner of handling which shows the artisan rather than the artist. The Denners and Meissoniers and Gerard Dous have no individualities that you can trace in their pictures. You know they were workmen and that is about all. Realism with them, as with all devoted followers of the “truth to nature” theory, is an attempt at eliminating the personal element, an attempt at approximating the working of a machine. Of course the attempt is never fully realized, but it may be carried far enough to destroy whatever might have been stimulating or exalted in the picture.
X.—DÜRER, Christ on the Cross. Dresden Gallery.
And just so with those painters who produce academic art or, as it has been known for many years, classic art. It is based upon an abstraction, an ideal taken from memories or remains of Greek art; and it is produced, in a scholastic way, according to an unwritten canon of academic proportions. Bouguereau and Lefebvre are the last notable exponents of it in France, and excellent craftsmen they are, too; but somehow their pictures always remind one of the book-keeper’s handwriting. They are very good as official handicraft—excellent drawings after a model—but they seem to lack character. They have no more force than the pretty girl on the outside of the handkerchief box, for whose existence, indeed, they are largely responsible. The want of stamina and vitality in their pictures may be accounted for readily enough, because again the man is absent. The work is mapped out by rule and done by academic precept. As for the feeling and the enthusiasm of the painter they are not apparent, and the product is accordingly colorless, mechanical, somewhat insipid.
This academic art is just as impersonal as the so-called realistic art, but, of course, neither of them is impersonal through the ignorance of their producers. It is a part of their creed that the painter should be absolutely “wiped out of the canvas,” and that the picture is complete only when the means of its production (including the painter) are no longer apparent in the work. The realist believes that nature is above all, the most beautiful of all beauties, and that the best the painter can do is to copy her in all humility of spirit. The academician believes that the academic rule—the consensus of tradition as to what constitutes beauty in art—is better than any one painter’s eyes and hand, and that the best the moderns can do is to follow the greatest of the ancients, namely, the Greeks. But we have seen the impossibility of absolute realism in art and we can imagine the futility of copying an art of the past to be applied to a people of the present. In practice neither kind of art has proved satisfying. The insistence upon academic and realistic formulas has always led to denials and revolts. The bitterest quarrels in art have hinged upon whether painting should be personal or impersonal, whether a man should follow a model, a rule, an inexorable law, or whether he should create and be a law unto himself. We have been told many times that the struggles and neglect of the Delacroixs, the Corots, and the Millets were due to the stupid public that refused to recognize them; but on the contrary, it was the stupid academicians of the École des Beaux Arts who would not understand them and denounced them. The protestants did not conform to the academic standard—they did not recite by rote.
Great art never has admitted a law; it will not be bound down to a model or a formula; it will not tolerate a rule if it can gain by breaking it. It is primarily the expression of man’s delight in what he sees or feels, and every man must express himself in his own way and in his own language. Indeed, the longer we ponder over the subject the surer we are to agree in substance with Véron that “of every work of art we may truly say that its chief value consists in the personal character of its author.”
These different kinds of art—realism, classicism, individualism—we frequently hear spoken of in metaphysical terms, which one hesitates to use for fear of producing confusion. When a person begins talking about “the real” and “the ideal,” “the objective” and “the subjective,” we are at once all at sea; because those words seem to have been used to define everything in the art world, and no two definitions mean quite the same thing. But as we may consider impersonal art hereafter, perhaps it is as well to say that it is often referred to as objective art. That is to say, it is as much as possible a realization of the object or thing painted. It is the outer view, seeing things beautiful in external nature. Personal art, on the contrary, is usually referred to as subjective art. It is the inner view, seeing things beautiful in the mind’s impression or the heart’s emotion. The interest in the one case centres in the representation of the model; in the other case it emanates from the expression of the painter himself.
Of course, the work of art does not necessarily hinge upon this question of personality or impersonality in the picture. There is the decorative quality that counts for much; there is something in subject that may be of importance; and there is, too, the style of the work, which may be strong enough to overcome other and perhaps detracting features. We have not yet finished with our consideration of the picture, and are not yet ready to draw a conclusion. It may be that conclusions in art are the better for not being “drawn” too rigidly. The arts which depend so largely upon varying personalities and temperaments cannot be summed up and proved with the exactness of a mathematical problem. Sometimes from a mass of illustrations one may extract a few general principles, and if we succeed in doing that we shall be taking at least one step forward in the appreciation of art.
CHAPTER III
IMAGINATION OF THE ARTIST
In our consideration of the varying points of view held by painters we have been placing the responsibility for the variations upon the human eye. The argument has been that people see differently one from another; and from that you have perhaps inferred that there is a difference in the construction of eyes. It is true that there may be a physical difference through imperfections of sight, as when one is near-sighted or has some astigmatism or is color-blind. But defective vision does not account for the individual view and is not a factor in the present consideration. The physical make-up of the eye may be assumed as practically the same with all men. The retina is merely a mirror which receives an impression of a scene or object. But the reception of the impression is not the beginning and the end of seeing. The complete act requires a mental recognition of what is seen—requires perception. The word “seeing” then should be understood as meaning not only the mirror-work of the retina, but the perception of that work by the mind.
In the matter of perception there may be differences among men and still be no great display of what we have called individuality. Some people perceive much while others seem almost blind. You know that the eyes of an unconscious person may be wide open, with the retinas mirroring everything, and yet the mind perceiving nothing. And so people who are quite conscious may look at things and not see them. The blue shadows cast upon the snow were, no doubt, seen centuries ago, but not perceived until the very recent time of the impressionists; and the Hebrews must have seen the difference between the blue sky and white light as the Greeks the difference between the hues of yellow and orange without being aware of what they saw.[[4]]
[4]. A most interesting discussion of what the ancient peoples knew of lights and colors is to be found in Franz Delitzsch, Iris, Studies in Color, etc., Edinb., 1899.
The eyes of the workmen who select the skeins of colors for the Gobelin tapestries are physically not different from other eyes, but they recognize scores of tints and shades that your perception and mine cannot grasp at all. This is usually assumed to be the result of the training of the eye; but the eye cannot be trained like the hand. It is passive and receptive; not active. The training is that of the mind to note the sensations of the eye. So far as keenness and clearness of vision are concerned, I know of no people more remarkable than the Papago and Yuma Indians, and yet in the Colorado Desert I have frequently called their attention to the lilac shadows upon sand-banks, to the pink and yellow hazes of sunset, to the blue-steel glow of mountain walls at noonday, without ever finding one of them to nod an affirmative. They know form, outline, movement, and crude color in large masses, but the refinements of hue, the subtleties produced by light-and-shade, though doubtless seen by the eye, are not recognized by the mind.
Much of the fumbling with the paint brush found in present-day pictures is no doubt due to an inadequate perception of the model. In the studios you will often hear painters declaring that they can see things clearly enough, but their “technique bothers them;” they cannot get their fingers or canvases or colors or brushes to work properly. But the trouble is really more fundamental. It is their lack of perception that bothers them. Whenever a person in art or in literature knows his subject thoroughly there is no difficulty about words or lines or colors to express it. Men like Leibl and Meissonier, who see acutely every feature before them, are not worried by a want of technical expression. That their work, with all its cleverness of hand and keenness of vision, is somewhat mechanical—lacking in inspiration—may suggest that clearness of view is not the only requisite of art. It is, no doubt, a valuable accomplishment with any painter, and yet if the picture tells only a tale of facts it has fallen short of the highest aim. Keen eyes and a clever hand will not take the place of that vital quality of all great art—the imagination of the artist. For the imagination is, perhaps, the very essence of artistic seeing.
In the ordinary acceptation of the word the imagination is little more than the image-making power—the ability to see a thing in the mind’s eye. We all of us have the power in some degree and can summon up scenes out of the past at will, travelling fair lands that we have not known for years, and seeing faces that have long been shut away in the grave. In boyhood, when the imagination is active and disposed to build air-castles, you doubtless saw yourself many times as the hero of imaginary deeds of daring, carrying off the beautiful princess from the enchanted castle, just as older people like Dumas saw the adventurous D’Artagnan, and painters like Rossetti saw the Blessed Damosel leaning from the gold bar of Heaven with eyes far
“Deeper than the depth
Of waters stilled at even;
She had three lilies in her hand,
And the stars in her hair were seven.”
Such flights of the imagination as these, you will understand, are connected and associated with “memories,” of which we shall have something to say further on; but they are not the less connected with the image-making power.
When the object or the cause is present before us instead of far back in the past, the process of image-making is not radically different. We see and comprehend by an image in the mind. A portrait painter, to take an example at once from pictures, does not exercise his imagination upon a sitter by conceiving him as a great lawyer, a great poet, or a great general. He does not think of him in connection with what he has done or has been. Nor does he eliminate the Mr. Hyde from his appearance, and give only the good Dr. Jekyll part of him. That would not be pictorial imagination so much as pictorial falsehood, the popular belief to the contrary notwithstanding. What he really does is to look over his sitter with an eye to his exterior appearance; then he imagines him as he would look upon canvas, and finally he takes up a brush and tries to paint the image he sees in his mind. That image in his mind is his conception, his idea—yes, his ideal, if you choose to use that badly misused word. His imagination has rounded and shaped the appearance, and just as is the weakness or the strength of his image-making power so will be the weakness or strength of his portrait, the execution, for the present, being disregarded.
XI.—TURNER, The Fighting Téméraire. National Gallery, London.
But now observe, if you please, that the painter, in looking over his sitter, does not necessarily see him as the lens of a camera might see him. The imagination may insist upon his seeing less accurately and more positively—perhaps abnormally. The man before him may have a peculiar breadth of forehead, an unusual width between the eyes, a hollowness in the cheek, a pinched look in the nose and mouth; or it may be he has a foxy eye, a puffed cheek, a flabby, vicious-looking lip, and a sensual-looking hand. These may be the very features that the imagination seizes upon and emphasizes. Then when the painter takes up his brush he paints these features strongly because they appeal to him strongly. And what is the result? The look—perhaps in the one case scholarly and thoughtful, like Van Dyck’s “Cornelius Van der Geest” (Plate [3]), or in the other case crafty-looking like Velasquez’s “Innocent X” (Plate [13])—the look that betrays the character of the sitter appears in the picture, appears more strongly emphasized than in the original; and all through the proper exercise of the imagination.
The pictorial imagination almost always lays emphasis upon prominent features, and may at times distort them without falsifying them as art. The very first act, the seeing of things pictorially—that is, as they would appear in a picture rather than as they appear in real life—is necessarily a translation if not a free rendering. Everyone knows that George Morland, who saw English tavern-life cut up into beautiful pictures and hanging upon the walls, did not see accurately or scientifically; but he certainly saw pictorially and imaginatively. The actual would have left us cold, where the imaginative excites admiration.
We can see something akin to this even in the work of the camera. The ordinary photograph of a flock of sheep is prosaic enough, but we have all seen photographs of sheep taken when the camera was a little “off-focus,” when some of the sheep at the side did not get into the line of light and were somewhat distorted and magnified in bulk. In this “off-focus” view the sheep immediately become pictorial in appearance, and we notice how much like Millet’s sheep they look. Of course the unusual appearance is caused by a perversion of light in the camera, but I do not know that Millet’s sheep are not caused by a perversion of sight in the man. Genius is supposed to be closely allied to insanity; and imagination may be allied to distortion.
Certainly there is in the pictorial view something of the distorted view. A modern athlete in the gymnasium is a very different athlete from those that writhe upon the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Did not Michael Angelo’s imagination see the model abnormally, and thus persuade his hand to emphasize all the powerful attributes? A running horse as seen by the instantaneous camera is no doubt accurate enough in all respects, save the sense of motion. He does not run. The camera arrests his flight, holds him poised in air momentarily. But Fromentin’s imagination, as shown in his pictures, saw the horse running, saw him distorted, drawn out in body from head to tail. You know from the report of the camera, again, how human beings fall through the air in jumping, diving, plunging; but what a different report you get from Tintoretto’s fall of the damned in his “Last Judgment.” There is a tremendous rain of elongated bodies falling from heaven to hell. The exaggeration of the imagination is here most apparent, but the result is wonderfully effective. We are made to feel that the bodies are really falling.
The reason for the pictorial distortion in the instances cited must be obvious enough. There is no great attempt to present things precisely as they are in nature. We have already arrived at the conclusion that this would be impossible. The object presented to the imagination is sought to be represented by the sign or symbol, and it requires the radical translation, possibly the distortion of the sign or symbol to show the imaginative conception. What was the actual bulk of the battle-ship Téméraire I do not know, but I feel quite sure that Turner in painting that vessel (Plate [11]) saw it in exaggerated proportions, saw it lifted high out of the water, its height additionally emphasized by the smallness of the towing tug. In the same way Claude and Poussin saw trees and groves of phenomenal height and thickness (Plate [26]), as Courbet saw sea waves of astounding bulk, and Claude Monet saw exaggerated lights and colors upon the towers of Rouen Cathedral. The exaggeration is quite within the province of the imagination—quite necessary to all imaginative art. It is more apparent in some painters than in others, and yet is not the less existent in almost all pictorial expression. From the caricature of the child to the conception of the skilled artist there is apparently only a step. The boy in school who draws the face of a companion on the fly-leaf of his book, giving it perverted features and a wide smile of countenance, is distorting the sign to convey a certain ludicrous impression; but the Egyptian sculptor who carved the mysterious smile upon the face of the Sphinx—that face which under burning suns and midnight stars has looked out across the silence for so many centuries—was using the distorted sign, too, using it imaginatively to tell people his idea of the majesty and serenity of the sun-god Harmachis.
But however the imagination may distort, it cannot originate anything entirely new nor create anything outside of human experience. We are sometimes led to think, by the common use of the word “imagination,” that it can
“Body forth the forms of things unknown,”
as Shakespeare has put it; but it must be apparent that “out of nothing, nothing comes,” and that it is impossible to make a body from things unknown. All the originality of all the great originals in the world’s history goes no further than the dividing up or the adding to of things already known. You may make a novel landscape perhaps by shutting out the sky with a high sky-line, or you may make an angel by adding bird wings to a human form; but you cannot make an absolutely new form or create one thing that has not some basis in human life or experience. To be sure, you may bring to mind the image of a character in fiction or poetry—Sir Galahad or Roland of Brittany or Amadis de Gaul, for instance—but after all your image is based upon some previous memories of knights in armor. Just so with the likeness of Christ. There is no authentic record of how he looked, either in picture or worded description, and the type of Christ which we accept to-day has been derived from Italian art, which in turn received and blended together two types—one from the Eastern Church at Constantinople and one from the Western Church at Rome. As for the abnormal creations that seem at times quite original—the witches of “Macbeth,” the fairies of “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” the water babies of Kingsley, the elves and gnomes and dwarfs of Grimm—they are all founded upon the distortion of the human figure. The wonders of the “Thousand and One Nights,” the City of Brass, the diamond windows, the hanging gardens, the genii of the clouds, are not different as regards the manner of their construction. Animal life too, is made monstrous by the quips of the fancy, but again the dragons are all snake-formed and the goblins all bat-winged; the centaur is a combination of man and horse, and Ariosto’s hippogriff is the familiar winged Pegasus of Greece translated into Italian.
XII.—ANTONELLO DA MESSINA, Portrait of a Man. Louvre, Paris.
In the first exercise of the imagination (that is, by division) we shall find that the mind conceives a part of an object, for instance, as of sufficient value to stand by itself. This is separated from the whole, magnified by emphasis, and finally handed forth as an entity—a new creation, if you please. We can see this well exemplified in poetry, where Keats, for instance, not wishing to describe the entire winter landscape on the Eve of St. Agnes, isolates a few features of the scene and makes them do service for all.
“Ah, bitter chill it was—
The owl for all his feathers was a-cold,
The hare limped trembling through the frozen grass,
And silent was the flock in woolly fold.”
Here we have an owl, a hare, and a flock of sheep magnified out of all proportion as regards their importance in the landscape, and standing by themselves as symbols of a cold winter night. But the suggestiveness of these features is very effective, very complete—much more so than if an elaborate description had been given of snow and icicle, moonlight and sleigh-bells. Claude Monet, when he wishes to show a winter morning on the Seine, does it with very few objects. There are silent ranks of trees, a foggy air congealed to hoar-frost, the swollen river with floating ice crunching and jostling its way; and that is all. But again what an effective winter morning! The heat of summer he describes just as summarily by cutting off a square of vivid sunshine falling on a wheatstack, exaggerating it in brilliancy of color and light, and allowing it to stand in lieu of a whole landscape. Corot is not different in thought and method. He throws all his strength upon light along the hills of morning or evening, and every detail of grass and tree and human being is sacrificed to it (Plate [9]).
There are many ways in which the dividing imagination deals with the figure in painting. The model may be treated as part of a group, as an object in landscape, as a whole-length portrait in a room, as a knee-piece, as a half-length, as a bust, or as a head alone. Nothing could be further removed from the actual than a man’s head shown in profile on a coin, but what imaginative art the Greeks made of their coinage! And what superb heads—superb in their character—the Pisani put upon their medals! How well each head suggested the whole man! And was there ever a more virile, living personality, ever a man with a more lion-hearted look, than Antonello da Messina pictured in the head and shoulders of that unknown Italian in the Louvre (Plate [12])? Byron’s ghost portrait of Nimroud as he appears to Sardanapalus in a dream is more colossal, but it is not more intense or forceful than Antonello’s, save as language is always more definite than pigment. Here it is:
“The features were a giant’s and the eye
Was still yet lighted; his long locks curled down
On his vast bust whence a huge quiver rose
With shaft-heads feathered from the eagle’s wing
That peeped up bristling through his serpent hair.”
To match in bulk such an imaginative picture, we should have to go back to the great king-headed bulls that flank the portals of the Assyrian palaces, or the colossal pharaonic figures in granite that symbolize the Egyptian kings.
Sculpture affords many good illustrations of parts detached from the whole and magnified by the imagination into separate creations. The Colleoni statue at Venice comes to mind instantly. The great commander and his horse have been taken out of battle and placed upon a pedestal, yet, isolated as it is, how the statue tells the irresistible strength, the pushing power of both man and horse! The “Water Nymphs” of Jean Goujon are separated again in panels, they tell no connected story; but the serpentine grace of the figures, the rippling flow of the draperies, how inevitably they bring to mind the native element, the home of the water people! The Greek youths that ride along the Parthenon frieze, the wounded lionesses that roar defiance from the Assyrian bas-reliefs, the Japanese fish that swim in bronze, though cut off from their background or environment, yet again how perfectly each suggests its habitat through the magnifying imagination of the artist!
The combining imagination (the building up by additions which enhance and enliven) is just the reverse of the process we have been considering. It has to do with associations, with memories; and the combination is brought about by images from hither and yon, that gather and join in the mind. There is some confusion just here between what is imagination in painting and what is mere composition, which Mr. Ruskin has tried to clear up by asserting that the former is intuitive and the latter is labored, that one works by genius and the other by laws and principles. But the distinction itself is somewhat labored, and in its practical working it seems to have small basis in reality. A gathering together of antique pavements, marble benches stained with iron rust, ideal figures clad in Greek garments, with various museum bric-a-brac illustrative of Greek life, such as we see in the pictures of Alma-Tadema, is certainly composition. It may be good or bad composition, it may be academic or naturalistic, it may have been put together laboriously, piece by piece, or flashed together by a momentary lightning of the mind; but, whatever the method or however brought about, one thing seems very certain, and that is, the work, in the hands of Alma-Tadema, contains not one spark of imagination. The same method of combining in the mind or working on the canvas with Delacroix or Turner or even J. S. Cotman would have almost certainly resulted in the imaginative.
XIII.—VELASQUEZ, Innocent X. Doria Gallery, Rome.
It is a fond fancy of Mr. Ruskin, and also of ourselves, that genius despises laborious composition and does things with a sudden burst of inspiration. We think, because the completed work looks easy or reads easy, that it must have been done easily. But the geniuses of the world have all put upon record their conviction that there is more virtue in perspiration than in inspiration. The great poets, whether in print or in paint, have spent their weeks and months—yes, years—composing, adjusting, putting in, and taking out. They have known what it was to “lick things into shape,” to labor and be baffled, to despair and to hope anew. Goethe may have conceived “Faust” intuitively, but it took him something like fifty years to record his intuitions. He composed laboriously, and yet was no less a man of superlative imagination. Listen a moment to his Prologue to “Faust”:
Raphael.
“The sun-orb sings in emulation
Mid brother-spheres his ancient round:
His path predestined through creation
He ends with step of thunder-sound.
The angels from his visage splendid
Draw power, whose measure none can say;
The lofty works, uncomprehended,
Are bright as on the earliest day.
Gabriel.
“And swift, and swift beyond conceiving,
The splendor of the world goes round,
Day’s Eden-brightness still relieving
The awful Night’s intense profound:
The ocean-tides in foam are breaking,
Against the rocks deep bases hurled,
And both, the spheric race partaking,
Eternal, swift, are onward whirled!
Michael.
“And rival storms abroad are surging
From sea to land, from land to sea,
A chain of deepest action forging
Round all, in wrathful energy.
There flames a desolation, blazing
Before the Thunder’s crashing way;
Yet, Lord, thy messengers are praising
The gentle movement of thy Day.”[[5]]
[5]. The original German lies open before me, but I prefer to give the quotation in a language which will not fail to be understood by all American readers. It is Bayard Taylor’s translation, and so far as the imaginative conception is concerned it reproduces the original fairly well.
Here is the imagination presenting us with a great cosmic picture that in sublimity I venture to think has no superior in either poetry or painting; yet it cannot be doubted that it was built up thought by thought, line upon line; torn down perhaps a dozen times to be modelled anew with something added or omitted. In other words it has been composed, not flashed together by intuition.
The combining imagination in painting does not work differently from this. The picture is built up; and memories often play a prominent part in the process. One may mingle lines from Greece with colors from Japan and an atmosphere from Holland if he will. The result might be something heterogeneous and incongruous, but it would nevertheless be a true enough display of the imagination. But such a gathering from hither and yon, such a mingling of many foreign elements, would not be necessary or essential or even usual in art. Pictures are made in simpler ways. Here, for example, is a sea-piece from the “Ancient Mariner,” imagined and composed again, but brought together as a homogeneous whole.
“The western wave was all aflame,
The day was well-nigh done,
Almost upon the western wave
Rested the broad bright sun.”
There the marine would seem to be quite complete, but Coleridge has yet to heighten the effect of the sunset by introducing a memory of an impression received perhaps in boyhood. His imagination, having conjured up the image of the phantom ship, combines it with the burning sunset:
“When that strange shape drove suddenly
Betwixt us and the sun.”
“And straight the sun was flecked with bars
(Heaven’s Mother send us grace!)
As if through a dungeon grate he peered
With broad and burning face.”
The introduction of the “dungeon grate” still further increases the effect. We now have the flaming sky, the sea, and the skeleton ship through which the sun mockingly peers, as through dungeon bars, at the dying crew. The effect is weird, uncanny, unearthly, just what Coleridge intended it should be. This, I should say, was the imagination adding and combining. And so far as I can see it is also the intelligent mind composing.
It would be difficult to find a parallel in painting to this picture from the “Ancient Mariner.” One thinks at once of Turner’s “Ulysses and Polyphemus” as resembling the Coleridge conception, because of the sea and the sun; but the likeness is superficial. In the Turner the spread of the sea, the golden waves in the foreground, the heave of the mountains out of the water, the spectral figure on the mountain top, the far distance of the ocean with the sun on the uttermost verge, are all highly imaginative; but the real glory of the picture is its decorative splendor rather than its expressive meaning. The “Fighting Téméraire,” as we have already noted, is imaginative in the magnitude of the bulk and there is something of the Coleridge effect in the glare of the red setting sun that peers through clouds, taking its farewell look at the old war-ship being towed to its last berth; but the imagination is not so clear-cut here as with Coleridge (Plate [11]).
In some of Turner’s “Approaches to Venice” there is perhaps a better example of the combining imagination, for Turner never hesitated about “composing”—putting things into the picture that were not there in reality; and in the Venetian pictures he sometimes did this with startling results. I have in mind one of these pictures, where Venice is seen a mile or more away; but the domes of the Salute and the tops of the campaniles have been so shifted about to suit Turner’s views of composition that I have never been able to determine whether the city is seen from the east or the west. And apparently Turner did not care anything about geography or topography. His imagination brought up out of the blue-green sea a city of palaces, builded of marble and hued like mother-of-pearl, with distant towers shining in the sun—a fairy city floating upon the sea, opalescent as a mirage, dream-like as an Eastern story, a glamour of mingled color and light beneath a vast-reaching sky glowing with the splendor of sun-shot clouds. It is most beautifully unreal, and yet by dint of its great imagination and suggestion it is more Venetian than Venice itself. It is that kind of distortion by the imagination which sacrifices the form to gain the spirit of things.
Here at Venice one can see the work of the combining imagination very well in some of the old Venetian pictures. Paolo Veronese, for instance, has upon the ceiling of one of the rooms in the Ducal Palace, a towering majestic figure, clad in silks and ermines, crowned with pearls and sceptred with power, seated under a gorgeous canopy in a chair of state, and representing the glory of Venice. She is a magnificent type of womanhood, splendid enough in herself to symbolize the splendor of Venice, but Paolo’s imagination adds to her importance still further by placing her upon a portion of a great globe representing the world, while below at her feet are two superb figures representing Justice and Peace, offering the tributes of the sword and the olive branch (Plate [14]).
XIV.—PAOLO VERONESE, Venice Enthroned. Doge’s Palace, Venice.
Another Venetian, Tintoretto, had possibly more imagination than any other of his school—yes, any other Italian in art-history; and yet it is not always possible to say just how his ideas originally took form. No doubt he labored and composed and tried effects by putting things in and taking them out. No doubt the “Ariadne and Bacchus,” or the “Miracle of the Slave” (Plate [15]) as we see it to-day, was the third or fourth thought instead of the first; but there is no questioning the exaltation of the final result. The subject of the Resurrection in his day had become a tradition in painting, and was usually shown as a square tomb of marble with a man rising from it between two angels. This stereotyped tradition had been handed down for centuries; but how greatly Tintoretto changed it and improved it in his picture in the Scuola San Rocco! He imagined the side of a mountain, a rock-cut tomb with angels pulling away the great door, and as it slowly opens the blinding light within the tomb bursts forth, and the figure of Christ rises swiftly, supported by the throbbing wings of angels.
However this last-named picture was produced, by combination or association, at least it is purely pictorial—that is, it deals with forms, lights, and colors, things that can be seen. I hardly know what to make of Mr. Ruskin’s remarks upon some of the other pictures by Tintoretto, in the Scuola San Rocco. He seeks to exemplify the painter’s ever-fertile imagination by pointing out, in the “Annunciation,” that the corner-stone of the building is meant by Tintoretto to be that of the old Hebrew Dispensation, which has been retained by the builders as the corner-stone of the new Christian Dispensation; and that, in the “Crucifixion,” the donkey at the back eating the palm-branches recently thrown down before Christ upon his entry into Jerusalem is a great piece of imaginative sarcasm. I confess my inability to follow Mr. Ruskin just here, and I cannot believe that Tintoretto meant anything of the sort about either the corner-stone or the palm-branches. If he did, it was perhaps a mistake. The motives would be more literary than pictorial. I think it all exemplifies Mr. Ruskin’s imagination rather than Tintoretto’s, and in either case it has little to do with imagination in painting as generally understood among painters. Painting and the pictorial conception, it must be repeated, have to do with forms and colors seen by the eye or in the mind’s eye; they have very little to do with a sarcasm or a Hebraic mystery.
There is still another phase of imagination which figures in metaphysical text-books under the name of fancy. It is sometimes called the passive imagination, apparently for no reason other than distinction’s sake. It is supposed to be temporary and accidental in its association of ideas and images, to be light, airy, capricious, perhaps indefinite; whereas, imagination is said to be more sober, serious, single in purpose, seeking unity of effect. The illustrations usually cited are taken from Shakespeare. The “Midsummer Night’s Dream” is said to be a product of fancy, while “Lear” or “Hamlet” is a work of the imagination. But again I must confess my inability to comprehend the distinction. The thought in the one case busies itself with a light or gay theme, and in the other with a sober or tragic theme; but the mental process would seem to be the same in either case. The mind may grow happy over a birth or grieve over a death, but one mind and one imagination would seem flexible enough to comprehend them both. There is a difference in art between what is called the serious and what is called the clever; but the imagination has nothing to do with it. A figure of a soubrette dashed off in a Parisian studio, and sent in a hurry to a Salon or Academy exhibition as a “stunning thing,” may be clever. Mr. La Farge has defined such cleverness as “intelligence working for the moment without a background of previous thought or strong sentiment.” And this definition suggests that the serious in art is just the opposite of the clever. A figure by Millet, such as that of “The Sower,” is serious just because the intelligence has been working upon it for many months. But, in spite of calling a Jacquet soubrette fanciful and a Millet sower imaginative, there would seem to be no difference in the mental processes. The difference is one of subject, time, men, original endowment; not a difference in the kind of thought.
The fantastic is also a product of the imagination, but it is a lighter, more volatile and irresponsible expression than fancy. It is the imagination just escaping from control, dominated by caprice and leaning toward the bizarre. The griffins and the spouting dragons along the gutters of the Gothic churches, and the boar-headed, bird-footed devils of early art are perhaps fair illustrations of it. In modern painting Blake and Monticelli came perilously near the fantastic in some of their creations. Turner in his last years quite lost himself in fantasy, and a number of the painters in France and England might be named as illustrating the tendency to the bizarre. When the bizarre is finally reached we may still recognize it as the working imagination, but uncontrolled by reason. Our dreams which often strike us as so absurd are good instances of the play of the imagination unfettered by reason; and if our dream-land conceptions could be reduced to art we would undoubtedly have what we have called the bizarre. Caricature and the grotesque are different again. They are conscious distortions, designed exaggerations of certain features for effect. They are not ruled so much by either fancy or caprice as by a sensible view of the extravagant.
XV.—TINTORETTO, Miracle of Slave. Academy, Venice.
There is no metaphysical or æsthetic term to designate an absence of the imagination, but possibly the words “baroque” or “bombastic” will suggest the results in art. And there is no lack of material to illustrate it. Unfortunately the master minds in both poetry and painting have been few and far between. The names and works that have come down to us from the past are the survivals from many siftings; and the few geniuses of the present are perhaps still obscured by the bombastic performances of smaller men. The Robert Montgomerys and the Martin Farquhar Tuppers somehow contrive to make a stir and delude the public into considering them as great originals. They have not imagination of their own, so they imitate the imaginative utterances and styles of others. Not one but many styles of many men are thus brought together in a conglomeration that may deceive the groundlings into thinking it genuine poetry; but the judicious soon find out its true character. Of course, all imitators try to imitate the inimitable individualities. The Montgomerys and the Tuppers aspire to no less than Shakespeare and Milton. Just so in pictorial art. Vasari, Guido, the Caracci reached out for the imaginations of Michael Angelo, Raphael, and Correggio. The result was the contorted bombastic art of the Decadence than which nothing could be less imaginative and more monstrous. The mind of a Michael Angelo of necessity distorted the image in the first place and then a Salviati came along to distort the distortion! The figure of a Madonna, for instance, is elongated by Correggio for grace, and Parmigianino following after elongated the elongation! This is what I have called the bombastic. It is indicative of a lack of imagination. Modern painting is full of it. The attempts at the heroic that overstep the sublime and fall into the ridiculous, the rant and high-sounding utterances of the brush, the inflated figures of allegory and the vacuous types of symbolism, are all illustrative of it.
But the bombastic and its companion evils in art need no further consideration at this time. It is not my aim to illustrate the deficiencies of painting, but to point out its higher beauties, and if the reverse of the shield is occasionally shown it is but to illustrate and emphasize the brighter side. Perhaps one may be pardoned for thinking that sometimes the analysis of error is a potent factor in the establishment of truth.
CHAPTER IV
PICTORIAL POETRY
Time was, and not very long ago at that, when an argument for poetic thought in art would have been considered superfluous. Everyone was agreed that the higher aim of language was to convey an idea, a feeling, or an emotion. That the language should be beautiful in itself was an advantage, but there was never any doubt that the thought expressed was greater than the manner of its expression. To-day it would seem that we have changed all that. The moderns are insisting that language is language for its own sake, and art is art for art’s sake. They are, to a certain extent, right in their contention; for there is great beauty in methods, materials and the general decorative appearance.[[6]] But perhaps they insist too much. We are not yet prepared to admit that because Tennyson’s poetry sounds well, his thoughts have no value; nor, for all Tintoretto’s fine form and color, can we believe his poetic imagination a wholly unnecessary factor in his art.
[6]. I have stated the case for the decorative side and for the technical beauties of painting in Art for Art’s Sake, New York, 1902.
The technical and the decorative beauties of painting, however important they may be, are not necessarily the final aim of the picture. In the hands of all the great painters of the world they have been only a means to an end. The Michael Angelos, the Rembrandts, the Raphaels, and the Titians have generally had an ulterior meaning in their work. And by “meaning” I do not mean anything very abstruse or metaphysical, nor am I thinking of anything ethical, allegorical, or anecdotal. The idea which a picture may contain is not necessarily one that points a moral, nor need it have anything to do with heroic action or romantic sentiment or fictional occurrence. There are many ideas, noble in themselves, that find expression in literature better than in painting, and it is a sound rule in all the arts that a conception which can be well told in one art has no excuse for being badly told in another art. The materials and their application to the best advantage are always to be regarded. Why waste effort in cutting glass when you can blow it? Why chisel curtains in marble when you can weave them in cloth? Why tell sequential stories, moral, narrative, or historical, in paint when it can be done more easily in writing? And why describe landscapes in writing when you can do it so much better in painting? It is mere consumption of energy and distortion of materials to write down the colors of the sunset or to paint the history of Greece or Rome.
XVI.—DAUBIGNY, Spring. Louvre, Paris.
It is well for us then at the start that we have no misunderstanding about the relationship between literature and art. That they are related in measure may be said with equal truth of preaching and science, of poetry and politics, of music and history. Science has been preached and politics have been poetized, and history has been shrieked in a high treble at the opera. Just so art has illustrated literature and literature art; but it can hardly be contended that any one of them has been put to its proper purpose. The main affair of literature is to illustrate literature, and the business of art is primarily to produce art. They are independent pursuits and there is no need of confounding their aims or being confused by their apparent resemblances.
Therefore, in using the phrase pictorial poetry I would be understood as meaning pictorial poetry and not literary poetry. They are two quite different things by virtue of their means of expression. The idea in art, whether poetic or otherwise, has its material limitations, which we must not fail to take into account. The first limitation is the major one and it demands that painting deal with things seen. We have referred to this in speaking of Tintoretto’s “Annunciation,” but it is worth while to take it up again and more definitely.
The couplet,
“The mind that broods o’er guilty woes
Is like the scorpion girt by fire,”
is certainly a poetic image; but fancy, if you can, how a painter would paint that brooding mind. He could not do it. Why? Because it is not tangible, it cannot be seen, it has no form or color. It is an abstract idea to be comprehended by the mind through sound, and belongs to literature. Perhaps you think the painter might have rendered it by showing a sad face and a wrinkled brow, but how would you know whether the wrinkles came from mental or from physical pain? And what can he say to you about “guilty woes” with a paint brush? The writer can tell you about the inside and the outside of the head, but the painter is limited to the outside.
The inability of painting to deal with sound—a something without tangible form—may be further illustrated by Millet’s celebrated picture of the “Angelus.” It has already served me for illustration, but I shall not at this time go out of my way for a newer example. The expressed thought of the picture, the whole story, hinges on the sound of a church-bell—the Angelus bell of sunset. How does Millet attempt to picture this sound? Why, by painting far back in the distance a church-spire seen against a sunset sky, and in the foreground two peasants with bowed heads. But the effort at sound is inadequate. The peal of the bell is beyond the reach of paints and brushes. The most brilliant colors make no sound. It is not to be wondered at, therefore, that there have been half a dozen different readings of the picture’s meaning. The idea of the Angelus is in the picture only because it has been read into it by the title of the work. That is a leaning upon literature which is unnecessary in art. The painting should require no explanation by language.
It need not be denied that the Angelus story is poetic; but it is perfectly just and proper to contend that by its dependence upon sound it is better fitted for literature than for art. A Tennyson could have made a poem about it wherein the sound of the bells would have been in the cadences of the language—in the very syllables breaking upon the ear. We all remember his flying notes from the horns of Elfland in “The Princess.”
“Oh hark, oh hear! how thin and clear
And thinner, clearer, further going.
Ah! sweet and far, from cliff and scar,
The horns of Elfland faintly blowing.”
In those lines we have the idea of sound conveyed to us most forcibly. The flow of the words describes exactly (and they even imitate) the long travel of the bugle notes, far across the lake, up the vales, and finally dying away into the remotest distance. Surely the thought of that passage is best told in language. What could pigments do with it? What could a fine technician like Bargue or a poet in paint like Delacroix make of that mellow music? They might picture someone with a horn to his lips and a mountain lake in the background; but the fetching part of those Elfland horns is not their look, but their sound. What could the painters do with the sound? Why nothing except to let it alone. A flat canvas will not discourse music like the board of a piano. Forms and colors may talk very eloquently to the eye, but they say nothing to the ear. The old division of the arts made over a century ago by Lessing is still acceptable to-day. The fine arts of architecture, sculpture, and painting address the sense of sight; the fine arts of music and literature address the sense of hearing. Therefore, let us assume that such thoughts, ideas, or emotions, poetic or otherwise, as a painter may wish to express in painting should be primarily pictorial by addressing the sense of sight.
XVII.—BENOZZO GOZZOLI, Adoration of Kings (detail). Riccardi Palace, Florence.
There is another, a minor limitation put upon painting which in its way is quite as binding as the major one. This is the time limit. A painting is not a shifting panorama like a drama. It cannot picture (though it may hint at) the past or the future; it can deal adequately only with the present. You may turn the leaves of a book and pass from Greek days to the present time as you read; but you cannot do that with a picture. It does not turn or shift or show any more than the one face. Therefore the idea in art, generally speaking, should not concern itself with time, or be dependent upon shiftings of scene, or deal with anything that has gone before or is to come after. A picture of Charlotte Corday on the way to the guillotine indicates a present happening, and, so far as it offers something complete in itself, it is pictorial enough; but the picture fails to tell us that some days before she assassinated Marat, and that some minutes later she herself will be done away with by the executioner’s knife. The title of the picture may tell us her story, but then that is leaning upon literature again. A painting of “Alexander Entering Babylon” by Lebrun may show us marching troops, elephants, chariots, and Alexander himself surrounded by his generals. It is a present scene; but how shall the picture tell you who Alexander was, what battles he fought, what ending he came to? It may suggest the past and the future by the present condition, but the suggestion is often too vague for human comprehension. Time-movement, sequential events are really beyond the reach of pigments.
It is much easier deciding what painting can picture than what it cannot. We have only to ask ourselves if the subject is one that may be comprehended by the unaided eye, and if it is a theme completed in present time. Painting moves freely only within these boundaries, whereas literature moves within and without them as it pleases, and with measurable success even in pictorial themes. Here is a word-landscape by Scott that illustrates my meaning:
“Sweet Teviot, on thy silver tide
The glaring bale-fires blaze no more,
No longer steel-clad warriors ride
Along thy wild and willowed shore.”
There we have a picture painted in words. Scott has gone poaching into the domain of pictorial art, and with astonishing results. It is a picture. Literature is certainly capable of dealing with forms and colors as with abstractions of the mind, but it cannot handle them so well, perhaps, as painting. We have here not abstractions, but entities of form and color. There is something for the painter to grasp with pencil and brush. Perhaps he can paint the “silver tide” and the “willowed shore” more effectively than Scott can describe them; and if he should paint them with that feeling which would give us the wildness of the shore, the weirdness of the bale-fires, the crush and rush of steel-clad warriors along the banks, paralleling the push-forward of the stream itself, we should have what I am disposed to call pictorial poetry.
But, if you please, it is not to be inferred that this pictorial poetry is to be gotten out of literary poetry only. Painting is no mere servant of literature, whose duty it is to illustrate rather than create. There is no reason why the painter, looking at the river Teviot, should not see poetry in it as well as the writer. Delacroix not only could but did see it. Turner saw the same kind of romantic sentiment as Scott in all the rivers he ever pictured. Daubigny saw it less romantically, but with more of the real charm of nature, along the banks of the Marne; and Claude Monet has certainly shown us many times the poetry of light, color, and rushing, dancing water on the Seine. Monet is just as susceptible to poetic impressions as Leconte de Lisle, only his poetry comes to him in forms and colors rather than in the measured cadences of language. It is painter’s poetry, not writer’s poetry.
It is true enough that painting has often taken its themes from the play, the novel, and the poem, and not without success. All the older painters of England spent their time illustrating Shakespeare and Milton. But it was not at all necessary, nor did it result in the best kind of art. And as for literature taking its theme from painting, one can pick illustrations of it in quantity from any anthology. For instance, what is more probable than that Scott was looking at a painting when writing this:
“No earthly flame blazed e’er so bright
It shone like heaven’s own blessed light,
And, issuing from the tomb,
Showed the monk’s cowl and visage pale,
Danced on the dark-browed warrior’s mail,
And kissed his waving plume.”
The light-and-shade of the scene seems to bring to mind some lost Correggio. And how like Giorgione is the “flame” dancing on the warrior’s mail, and “kissing his waving plume!” (Plate [24].) In reading the “Faery Queene” one finds a whole gallery of pictures painted with words. Spenser would have made a painter, for he had the pictorial mind. Milton is not unlike him; and Shakespeare goes hither and yon over all fields and through all departments. Here, for example, is his genre picture of the hounds of Theseus:
“My hounds are bred out of the Spartan kind,
So flewed, so sanded: and their heads are hung
With ears that sweep away the morning dew;
Crook-kneed and dew-lapp’d like Thessalian bulls.”
XVIII.—VAN DYCK, Jean Grusset Richardot. Louvre, Paris.
Surely a very striking picture, but after all you cannot see Shakespeare’s hounds so completely and perfectly as those of Velasquez or Snyders or Troyon.
Sculpture, too, may furnish material for good poetry, as witness this description of the marble figures upon the tomb in the Church of Brou.
“So rest, forever rest, O princely Pair!
In your high church ‘mid the still mountain air,
Where horn and hound and vassals never come.
Only the blessed saints are smiling dumb
From the rich painted windows of the nave
On aisle and transept and your marble grave;
· · · ·
So sleep, forever sleep, O marble Pair!
Or if ye wake, let it be then, when fair
On the carved western front a flood of light
Streams from the setting sun, and colors bright
Prophets, transfigured Saints and Martyrs brave,
In the vast western window of the nave;
And on the pavement round the tomb there glints
A chequer-work of glowing sapphire tints
And amethyst and ruby....”
Matthew Arnold has certainly made a striking picture in words out of the tomb and its figures, but again the poetry is plastic—that is, fitted for sculpture or painting.
So it is—to repeat and summarize—that the writer with his words shows things picturesque and sculpturesque—inadequately perhaps as compared with the plastic mediums, but nevertheless effectively; but not so the painter with his colors. The brush will not reveal and can scarcely do more than hint at things without form. It is perhaps possible for painting to be as clear-cut and as definite in its ideas as literature, but, as a matter of fact, it seldom is so. More often there is suggestion than realization, and the poetry comes to us in an almost indescribable feeling or sentiment of the painter. Indeed, the greater part of what we have called “pictorial poetry” lies in a glimmering consciousness of beauty, an impression that charms, a feeling that sways, rather than in any exact statement.
Now that word “feeling” is not a cant expression of dilettanteism. It has a distinct meaning in all the arts. In the presence of beauty the artist “feels” that beauty and is emotionally moved by it as you or I might be moved by an heroic action, a splendid sunset, or a fine burst of orchestral music. He responds to the charm and yet is not able to express his whole feeling, not even in words, much less in forms and colors. With all the resources of language and with all his skill in expression Tennyson is not cunning enough to tell the whole passionate tale of Arthur and Launcelot and Guinevere—the three who lived and loved and died so many years ago and now lie “low in the dust of half-forgotten kings.” All the heroism, the nobility, the splendid pathos of those lives, could not be put into words. Tennyson could only summon up a sentiment about them, and deeply imbued with that sentiment, he left a tinge of unutterable sadness in the poem which you and I feel and love, and yet can but poorly describe. We do not know it like a mathematical problem; we feel it.