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Title: The meaning of pictures : Six lectures given for Columbia University at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Author: Van Dyke, John Charles
Language: English
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BOOKS BY PROF. JOHN C. VAN DYKE

=Art for Art’s $1.50
Sake.= University
Lectures on the
Technical Beauties
of Painting. With
24 Illustrations.
12mo

=The Meaning of _net_
Pictures.= $1.25
University
Lectures at the
Metropolitan
Museum, New York.
With 31
Illustrations.
12mo

=Studies in _net_
Pictures.= An $1.25
Introduction to
the Famous
Galleries. With 40
Illustrations.
12mo

=What is Art?= _net_
Studies in the $1.00
Technique and
Criticism of
Painting. 12mo

=Text Book of the $1.50
History of
Painting.= With
110
Illustrations.
12mo

=Old Dutch and $7.50
Flemish Masters.=
With Timothy
Cole’s
Wood-Engravings.
Superroyal 8vo

=Old English $8.00
Masters.= With
Timothy Cole’s
Wood-Engravings.
Superroyal 8vo

=Modern French $10.00
Masters.= Written
by American
Artists and Edited
by Prof. Van Dyke.
With 66 Full-page
Illustrations.
Superroyal 8vo

=Nature for Its Own $1.50
Sake.= First
Studies in Natural
Appearances. With
Portrait. 12mo

=The Desert.= _net_
Further Studies in $1.25
Natural
Appearances. With
Frontispiece. 12mo

=The Opal Sea.= _net_
Continued Studies $1.25
in Impressions
and Appearances.
With Frontispiece.
12mo

=The Money God.= _net_
Chapters of Heresy $1.00
and Dissent
concerning
Business Methods
and Mercenary
Ideals in American
Life. 12mo

=The New New York.= _net_
A Commentary on $4.00
the Place and the
People. With 125
Illustrations by
Joseph Pennell

------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Illustration:

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_

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

------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Illustration]

------------------------------------------------------------------------

~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 1
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

CHAPTER II. _Individuality or the Personal 31
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

CHAPTER III. _Imagination of the Artist._—The act 60
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

CHAPTER IV. _Pictorial Poetry._—The argument for 87
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

CHAPTER V. _The Decorative Quality._—Disagreement 114
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

CHAPTER VI. _Subject in Painting._—Art for the 139
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

------------------------------------------------------------------------

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PALMA VECCHIO, ST. BARBARA _Frontispiece_
(DETAIL).

PAGE

I. HOLBEIN, PORTRAIT OF A MAN, 8

II. BENOZZO GOZZOLI, ADORATION OF KINGS 12
(DETAIL),

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 28
ENGLAND (DETAIL),

VII. BELLINI, MADONNA AND SAINTS, 36

VIII. CORREGGIO, MYSTIC MARRIAGE OF ST. 40
CATHERINE,

IX. COROT, LANDSCAPE, 48

X. DÜRER, CHRIST ON THE CROSS, 56

XI. TURNER, THE FIGHTING TÉMÉRAIRE, 64

XII. ANTONELLO DA MESSINA, PORTRAIT OF A 70
MAN,

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 92
(DETAIL),

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 120
FROM THE NILE,

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, H_{2}O, 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?

[Illustration:

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.

[Illustration:

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.

Footnote 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.

[Illustration:

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?

[Illustration:

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.

[Illustration:

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.

[Illustration:

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 H_{2}O. 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]

Footnote 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.

[Illustration:

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]

Footnote 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.

[Illustration:

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.

[Illustration:

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.

[Illustration:

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]

Footnote 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.

[Illustration:

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.

[Illustration:

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.

[Illustration:

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]

Footnote 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).

[Illustration:

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.

[Illustration:

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.

Footnote 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.

[Illustration:

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.

[Illustration:

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.”

[Illustration:

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.

And consider that old man forsaken of his children—Lear. His complaints
and tempers seem almost childish at times; and yet through that play,
more than through any other written expression of human woe, runs the
feeling and the passion of a great heart breaking through ingratitude.
Again think of that last act in “The Cenci,” with Beatrice cursed by
fate, stained with crime, and finally brought face to face with trial
and death. Have you ever read or known of such another whirlwind of
wildness and calmness, of weakness and fortitude, of courage and fear!
And the ghastly, creeping horror of it all! Can you not feel it? Neither
Shakespeare nor Shelley can chart and scale upon a board the passion he
would show us. It could not be pinned down or summed up scientifically.
It can, in fact, be brought home to us only by that great under-current
running through all notable art—feeling.

Consider once again Wagner’s “Götterdämmerung!” How would it be possible
to tell with musical notes all the tragic power that lies in that opera?
Wagner himself was not able to do it. What he did was to summon up a
romantic mood of mind by contemplating the theme in his imagination and
then, to suggest by a choice of motives and orchestration, the immense
passion of the story. By following the orchestration rather than the
individual singers you can feel in the different _motifs_ the poetry of
that heroic age—the glorious achievements, the sad passing, the mournful
sunset, the fading into oblivion of those who ruled the beautiful world.
If you cannot feel the mystery, the sadness, the splendor of it all, I
am afraid it argues some want of music and romance in your soul rather
than a want of poetry in the opera. The feeling is there; it is the last
thing perhaps to be recognized by the student of music, and yet it is
the one thing above all others that has made Wagner a great poet. He
could suggest more than he could describe, and because he suggests and
does not describe is one reason why he is, at first, so difficult to
understand.

[Illustration:

XIX.—GAINSBOROUGH, Mrs. Siddons. National Gallery, London.
]

The picture in this respect, is not different from music or literary
poetry. Poetic feeling in painting may be and has been shown in many
subjects and in many ways. If we go back to the Gothic period in Italy,
when the painters were just emerging from mediævalism, we shall find a
profound feeling for religion. It shows in Giotto and the Florentines,
in Duccio and the Sienese. They do not know how to draw, color, or light
a picture correctly; they are just learning to paint, and like children
they feel infinitely more than they can express. And they do not try to
express any precise or detailed account of Christianity. They could not
if they would. That which is called “religious feeling” in the
altar-pieces of the Gothic period and the early Renaissance is really a
mental and emotional attitude of the painter—a fine sentiment, an
exquisite tenderness in the presentation of biblical themes and
characters. It is no matter whether the sentiment is really religious or
merely human; it is in either case poetic. And it is no matter whether
the painter’s devotion and earnestness were misplaced or not; at least
they were sincere. There never was a time in the history of painting
when the body of artists believed more thoroughly in their theme, their
work, and themselves than during that early Italian time.

You can see this well exemplified in Orcagna—in his “Last Judgment” in
Santa Maria Novella. The Madonna looking up at her Son is an embodiment
of all the pietistic sentiment of the time. The figure is ill-drawn,
stiff, archaic-looking; but in the white-cowled face what purity, what
serenity, what pathos! The clasped hands seem moved in prayer; the
upturned eyes look unutterable adoration. Orcagna is bent upon telling
the faith of the Madonna in her Son, but he can only do so by telling
the faith that is within his own soul. His revelation is a
self-revelation, but it is not the less a religious feeling and a poetic
feeling. Is this not equally true of that pious monk of San Marco, Fra
Angelico? Can there be any doubt about his life-long sympathy with
religion and the religious theme in art? It was his sympathy that begat
his painting. That sweet, fair face full of divine tenderness, which we
have so often seen in the copies of his trumpet-blowing angels, is it
not the earthly embodiment of a divine spirit?

Fra Angelico was the last of the great religionists in art, and before
his death the sentiment of religion began to wane in the works of his
contemporaries. They were straying from the religious to the
naturalistic subject, but wherever their sympathy extended their feeling
showed. When Masaccio, Benozzo, Botticelli, and Leonardo began to study
the outer world with what earnestness and love they pictured the
humanity, the trees, the grasses, the flowers, the long, flowing
hill-lines, and the wide, expanding Italian sky. Botticelli’s “Allegory
of Spring” (Plate 29) or Benozzo’s “Adoration of the Magi” in the
Riccardi palace (Plates 2 and 17) or Leonardo’s face of “Mona Lisa” must
have been seen sympathetically and thought over passionately, else we
never should have felt their beauty. Benozzo, inheriting his religious
point of view from Fra Angelico, blends his love of man, animals, and
landscape with his belief that they are all made for righteousness;
Botticelli is so intense that he is half-morbid in his sensitiveness;
and Leonardo, with that charm of mood and sweetness of disposition in
the “Mona Lisa,” is really transcendental. It is all fine, pictorial
poetry, howbeit more in the suggestion than in the absolute realization.

This quality of poetry shown so largely in what I have called “feeling”
is apparent in all great art, regardless of nationality or subject. The
Venetians, for example, had none of the intense piety of the Umbrians,
but they had perhaps just as much poetry. Even the early Venetians, like
Carpaccio and Bellini, were more material than Fra Angelico and
Filippino. They painted the Madonna with all seriousness and sincerity,
with belief in the truth of their theme, but with a human side, as noble
in its way as the spiritual, and just as truly marked by poetic feeling
(Plate 7). After them came another painter, of greater skill and power.
He was not so boyish in his enthusiasm as Carpaccio, but Theocritus in
love with pastoral nature never had so much feeling for the pure joy of
living as Giorgione. His shepherds seated on a hill-side playing and
singing, in a fine landscape and under a blue sky, make up a picture far
removed in spirit from theology, philosophy, science, war, or commerce.
The world of action is forgotten and in its place there is Arcadia with
sunlight and flowers, with beautiful women and strong men. But is it not
nobly poetic? When Giorgione painted the Castelfranco Madonna (Plate 24)
he did not change his spirit to suit the subject. The picture has
written upon the face of the Madonna as upon the face of the landscape:
“I believe in the beauty and glory of the world.” You may call this a
pagan belief if you choose, but it is with Giorgione a sincere and a
poetic belief.

Correggio at Parma was not materially different from Giorgione as
regards the spirit of his art. His religious characters were only so in
name. He never had the slightest sympathy with the melodramatic side of
the Christian faith and could not depict the tragic without becoming
repulsive; but he saw the beauty of women and children in landscape and
he felt the splendor of sunlight and shadow and color (Plate 8). There
is no mystery or austerity or solemnity or intellectuality about his
characters. They are not burdened with the cares of the world; but how
serenely and superbly they move and have their being! What grace of
action! What poetry of motion! What loveliness of color! Shall you say
that there is no poetry in that which appeals directly to the senses,
that which belongs only to the earth? As well contend that there is no
beauty in the blue sky, no loveliness in flowers, no grace in the wave
that curves and falls on the beach.

[Illustration:

XX.—GÉRÔME, Napoleon before the Sphinx.
]

If we move to the north, passing the splendid achievements of Titian,
Tintoretto, Palma, and Paolo Veronese, passing the mysticism of Dürer
and the intense humanity of Holbein, passing the radiant splendor of
Rubens and the courtly elegance of Van Dyck, we shall come eventually to
Holland and to those Dutchmen whom the academicians declared had no
style. There we shall find the arch-heretic, Rembrandt, who had nothing
of Greek form and academic composition, and yet possessed what was worth
far more—deep human feeling. His characters are only poor Dutch
peasants; his Christ is a forlorn, bare-footed, frail-bodied outcast;
his back-grounds are generally squalid, ill-lighted interiors. There is
no splendor of architecture, no glamour of wealth, no fair Italian
valley with a deep-blue sky above it. His materials for making the
pictorial poem were slight enough; but never a picture was painted with
so much poetic pathos as that little “Supper at Emmaus” in the Louvre.
The intense sympathy of Rembrandt going out to the poor and oppressed
all his life, went out above all others to that One who was poor and
despised—the lowly One who taught the gospel of love. No one can look
upon any of the peasants of Rembrandt without being conscious of the
man’s deep feeling. His _technique_, of course, is marvellous; but so is
his insight and his capacity to feel. If it were not so we should gain
little pleasure from his subjects.

Have you never wondered what it is in art that makes a painter’s
interpretation of a scene more agreeable than the scene itself? If you
had a few sheep, a French peasant, a straw-thatched cottage, and a
barren plain you would have the materials for a Millet picture. Suppose
you lived in a fine country place, how long would the cottage stand near
you before you had it torn down, or the shepherd and sheep roam your
lawns before you had them driven off by dogs? You would not care for
them, they would not be beautiful, they would not even be interesting
after the first day. Why is it then that you pay thousands of dollars
for a picture of the shepherd and his sheep to hang in your
drawing-room, when you would not have the originals within gun-shot? Is
it not that the materials have something added to them? Are they not
helped in their representation by the painter’s insight and his capacity
to feel?

Rembrandt saw a deeper meaning in his commonplace materials than you or
I. He saw that under the tattered gaberdine of the Amsterdam Jew beat
the heart and throbbed the brain of all humanity. The Jew was typical of
universal suffering—an epitome of humanity, and at the same time an
exemplar of inhumanity. And think you there is no force, no nobility in
the uncouth, heavy-set peasant of Holland? Can you not see the stamp of
character in the deep-marked face and the labor-worn form? Can you not
see that the man is self-made, made strong by hardships; that he has
been developed and brought to maturity through adversity? It is this
beauty of character that Rembrandt is bringing to your notice. And can
you believe that there is no charm in the low-lying land of the
Dutchman—the land where clouds roll out to sea by day, and fogs drift
inland by night? Can you not see that here, too, is something developed
through adversity, that this domain has been wrested from the sea and
turned into flower-spattered meadows, fields of grain, ranks of polders,
groves of trees? Have not man and country a peculiar beauty of their
own—a beauty of character?

And how different is it with the peasantry of France? These gleaners in
the fields as they bend forward to gather the stray stalks, how fine
they are in their great simple outlines, how substantial in body, how
excellent in motion (Plate 4)! And see how they harmonize with the
coloring of the stubble and fit into their atmospheric place, so that
they are of a piece with the foreground, background, and sky—cemented,
blended into one, by the warm haze of a July afternoon. Is then this
flat space of stubble under the burning summer sun, this bare treeless
field, “La belle France” which every Frenchman and many a foreigner
raves about? Yes; only doubly intensified. This is the substance and the
solidity of France—the yielding, arable soil that makes the wealth of
France. And this sower moving silently in the shadow of the hill, moving
with such rhythmic motion, tired and worn yet swinging and sowing—the
sun gone down and twilight upon him, yet still without a murmur, without
a falter, swinging and sowing the grain—is this the brave Frenchman
whose kith and kin fought at Marengo and Waterloo? Yes; only doubly
intensified. He is the brawn and muscle of France—the original producer,
the planter and sustainer of the race. Has he, who has so labored, so
wrestled with stubborn circumstance and wrought success from meagre
opportunity, has he not a character of his own that may be called
beautiful in art? And the land he has broken and made so productive, the
soil that he sprang from and is so intimately associated with, has it
not a character of landscape peculiarly its own and again pictorially
beautiful?

[Illustration:

XXI.—MICHAEL ANGELO, Delphic Sibyl. Sistine Chapel, Rome.
]

Millet and Rembrandt knew this truth of character in both man and
nature, and often they must have thrown down their brushes in despair of
ever telling it; but knowing it so well and feeling it so deeply, they
could not choose but leave the mark of their feeling in their pictures.
And they produced great democratic art—the assertion that all beauty
does not lie in the straight nose, the Apollo mouth, and the Apoxyomenos
form; and that poetry is not alone the tale of classic heroes and
mediæval marauders. The man, though rag-patched, may be a king; the
land, though no Arcadian grove, is still the great productive
mother-earth. Shall we have an aristocracy solely of wealth, or an
aristocracy solely of birth? May there not also be an aristocracy of
character?

I have said that this poetic feeling in art found its way into many
subjects. The examples given are but a handful from that vast world of
life from which the painter is privileged to draw; and you must not
infer that it has to do with religion and the pathos of humble life
alone. Corot, for instance, never painted anything that expressed
either. His was the poetry of light (Plate 9) as Rousseau’s the poetry
of the forest and Daubigny’s the poetry of the meadow and the river-bank
(Plate 16). And are there not pæans of beauty unmixed in the voyaging
clouds of Constable, the serene blue skies of Courbet, the silvery mists
of Maris, the stormy coasts of Winslow Homer? A portrait by Gainsborough
(Plate 19) or Van Dyck (Plate 18), an interior by Van der Meer of Delft
or Pieter de Hooge, a Venetian scene by Guardi or Bunce, a battle or
shipwreck by Delacroix, a tiger and a serpent by Barye, may any or all
of them be poetic. The poetry is in the man, not the subject. Whatever
the poet sees, if it appeals to him emotionally, may start that train of
feeling which evitably creeps into the canvas—creeps in just as when one
is in a gay or sad mood his gayety or sadness will tinge the current of
his playing or his singing or be apparent in his conversation.

Again let me repeat that the thought in pictures, whether poetic or
otherwise, is seldom so definite or precise as in literature. Meissonier
in his “Napoleon in 1814” wishes to tell you of the Emperor’s defeat,
but the only way he can do it is to paint a man on horseback alone on
the brow of a hill with a gloomy, set face and a dark sky. It is
suggestion rather than realization. Gérôme is one of the best
story-tellers with the paint-brush of the present times, but what does
he mean by his “Napoleon before the Sphinx” (Plate 20)? Evidently a
contrast has been thought of—a contrast between the tiny figure on
horseback and the colossal head looming above the desert sands—but what
precisely does the contrast mean? Is this the modern world against the
whole vast past? Is it France, the latest of nations, conquering Egypt,
the earliest of nations? Or is this little man on horseback the
intellectual force, the Œdipus of the West, come at last to Egypt to
solve the riddle of the Sphinx? You see the actual thought is not so
accurately read. Again, I am disposed to think that in Mr. Watts’s “Love
and Death” the little god upon the doorstep falling back among the
flowers before the great outstretched arm of Death means that into every
house where love and joy and flowers have been supreme, the spectre of
death must sooner or later enter. But I do not know that Mr. Watts had
quite that idea when he painted the picture. It is because the thought
in painting is always more or less indefinite as compared with
literature that so many different meanings are read into or out of
celebrated pictures. Art-critics and historians are still explaining
Titian’s “Venus Equipping Cupid” and Botticelli’s “Allegory of Spring.”
Pictorial language is not like the vernacular of speech; it is not even
written so that all alike may comprehend its spirit. At best it is a
sign language that permits of varying interpretations, and it is not by
any means the best medium of conveying abstract ideas from one mind to
another. But like music it is very responsive to emotional feeling and
conveys the poetic mood or sentiment, sometimes with great force.

Indeed, true pictorial feeling finds its way into still less clear
conceptions than we have cited. The very means of expression are often
tinged by it. There may be no deep sentiment in the subject or
characters. It may be only a group of tavern brawlers by Jan Steen or a
smirking fish-wife by Frans Hals, and yet the picture may be handled in
color and light with such charm as to produce a prismatic poem. Diaz
could and did paint flowers as worthy of Paradise as Ghiberti’s “Gates
of the Baptistery,” solely because of his fine feeling for color.
Sometimes there is a feeling for the sweep and flow of lines, as in
Raphael, Tintoretto, and Rubens, that is poetic in the best sense of the
word, and in Delacroix’s colors there is often the haunting suggestion
of passion, fury, fire, and death. The subject may count for little.
What the painter feels about it may make it poetic. Decamp got poetry
out of the exact value of a spot of sunshine falling on the floor; and
Chardin found it in the textures of pots and pans in a kitchen.

Paint itself may be made poetic by the sympathetic handling of it, just
as words and sentences in literature. There is nothing remarkably poetic
in thought about Byron’s

“Before St. Mark’s still glow his steeds of brass,
Their gilded collars glittering in the sun,”

but can you not feel in the expression of it the stately and majestic
march of numbers? You may think there is nothing remarkable in thought
in the flying figures of William Blake. They are descriptions like
Byron’s couplet, but under them is the feeling of vast sweeping power.
This is all poetry of a most sovereign kind; and that, too, shown in the
means of expression—in the _technique_ of art. The same kind of feeling
appears in the contours of Leonardo, in the light-and-shade of
Correggio, in the coloring of Paolo Veronese, in the modelling of
Velasquez, in the brush-work of Manet. It rises to the sublime with
Michael Angelo; it abides in the smallest things of earth in the hands
of the Japanese. Into the infinitely little as into the infinitely great
the feeling of the man may infuse that true poetry of painting which is
perhaps the highest as it is the ultimate aim of pictorial art. That it
is not the only aim we shall see immediately when we come to discuss the
decorative value of painting.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER V

THE DECORATIVE QUALITY

WE could easily settle, _ex cathedra_, this matter of art if our views
were the only ones to be considered; but, unfortunately, intelligent
people differ with us, and the painter himself is often our most
determined antagonist. The painter, in fact, has opinions of his own
about his pictures and he sometimes asserts them with no uncertain
voice. His most persistent assertion is that the picture should be
something decorative in form or color—be something beautiful to look
at—rather than something moral, intellectual, or narrative. But the
public, being differently minded, keeps insisting that the picture
should be something in subject or have some literary meaning; and,
consequently, it often misses the decorative altogether. So it is that
there is plenty of material for disagreement. The painter and his public
seem ever at swords’ points. Let us to-day review the case for the
plaintiff and to-morrow perhaps we can sum up for the defendant public.

It is true, to begin with, that the average person who takes an interest
in painting and attends gallery exhibitions often shoots wide of the
mark in his appreciations. He starts wrong by devoting too much
attention to pictures that have pretty faces and tell pretty stories. He
is over-fond of heroes and heroines, plots and tales, dramatic scenes
from history, or familiar characters in fiction. The ideal, whether in
figure, face or landscape, pleases him; and he does not object to a
laugh over the comic or the ludicrous. But he cannot abide coarse
peasants or fishermen in art; Dutch pictures with their tavern brawls
are not to his taste; and he persists in misunderstanding Italian people
dressed in modern garb and representing sacred characters. Anachronisms
of type, furniture, architecture, bother him beyond measure. The Madonna
and the Apostles were Jews and lived in Judea, and he wishes an
archæological report of the race, country, climate and soil. Of course,
he does not care for portraits by Velasquez with their outlandish
dresses, or large Flemish women by Rubens, or the “splashy” painting of
Dutch burghers by Frans Hals. In short the average person is devoted to
the pleasant subject in art and is continually asking of the picture:
What does it mean?

The view of the painter is very different from all this. He is not
interested in the pretty face. The Madonnas and Saints whether Dutch,
French, German, or Italian, do not interest him as Madonnas and Saints.
A figure, whether sacred or profane, is to him only a figure. As for the
pretty story, the ideal, the correct costume, he usually turns up his
nose at them. He is not always interested in what a picture means. Too
often perhaps he cares not a rap whether it means anything or not. His
question is first of all: What does it look? He wishes to know whether
that figure is well drawn, rightly placed, beautiful as form solely and
simply. Costume, whether right or wrong, is no great matter; but does
that Madonna’s robe make for graceful line, or play well as a spot of
color? The interior of a room has no significance architecturally. It
may be false to history; but does it make a good setting for the
figures, does it lend readily to light-and-shade, has it atmosphere
(Plate 27)? Finally, what is the result of the workmanship as a whole?
Has the painter handled his materials artistically, has he drawn his
figures effectively, has he arranged them compactly, has he brought his
lights-and-shades together truthfully, and has he fused his color-masses
harmoniously? If so he has produced a work of art, whether its subject
means much or means little.

[Illustration:

XXII. —HALS, The Jolly Man. Rijks Museum, Amsterdam.
]

The distinction which I would make is the old one between art as
representation and art as decoration. The Arabic numeral 8, for example,
conveys an abstract idea to the mind; but if you draw a series of linked
8’s thus: 888888888888888888 you will have something that conveys no
idea and yet _looks_ to the eye very like a graceful pattern for an
architectural frieze. The art which the “average person” seeks in a
picture-gallery represents an idea and has an expressive meaning, the
art which the painter seeks in a gallery _looks_ something and has a
decorative meaning. It need not be inferred that the two kinds of art
are incompatible with each other. On the contrary, they are closely
united, for great art is both expressive and decorative, and all art is
more or less decorative even when not expressive. Nor is it necessary to
say that one is better than the other. Perhaps it is the thing said
rather than the manner of saying that counts most with us; but what I
wish to insist upon just here is that the painter is first of all
devoted to the manner of saying, he is devoted to the decorative. We
look at his pictures and think how long he toiled over that conception,
how he walked the town, like Raphael, searching for that pretty face,
how he must have studied to verify all his archæological facts. But, no.
His greatest effort has perhaps gone out in the endeavor to make his
tones harmonize, to get his drawing right, to hold his picture together
in its planes, and make it one united impression of beautiful form and
color.

You perhaps fancy that this contention for the decorative on the part of
the painter is some fad of modernity. If you have that idea pray dismiss
it, for it has no basis in fact. The decorative sense goes back to the
dawn of history. It was the very first sign of the art instinct in
Primitive Man. Just how it originally came to the surface would be
difficult to determine. Years ago Schiller put forth a theory which has
been accepted by Mr. Herbert Spencer and others to the effect that it
arose through the play-impulse; and that art in its early significance
was merely the result of man’s superfluous energy—something done for
pleasure in an idle hour. That is to say, the Stone Age man ornamented
his weapons of the chase and his domestic utensils with color and line
because he had too great a supply of animal spirits. And the safety
valve where his spirits blew off was art! We are to infer then that the
decorative came into existence through man’s delight in form and color
and because he had nothing better to do. The theory is ingenious but not
wholly convincing. It is quite as reasonable to argue with Mr. Whistler
that when the so-called Primitive Man set out for the chase in the
morning there was some weak or crippled brother of the tribe who had not
enough animal spirits to join the band, and was left behind with the
women to do camp work. He could not draw bow or fight and so it is
possible that he was put to work at making weapons, carving implements,
moulding, decorating, and baking pottery. He was at first no doubt an
awkward workman; but as his hands became more deft and his senses more
acute he rounded shapes and forms with growing grace, and put patterns
upon bowls and knife-handles with more justness of balance and
appropriateness of design.

It is interesting to observe that almost at the start this primitive
artist recognized the problem of adapting design and color to a given
space—a problem that is to-day continually up for solution in every
studio in the country. He recognized that the body of an ordinary vase,
for instance, was capable of receiving one sort of a design—an open,
free pattern perhaps,—the neck of it required something like a
narrow-band pattern, the top or cover required a circular pattern. It
was not long before our primitive artist found that the secret of good
decoration lay in filling given spaces symmetrically; and that the sense
of order, harmony, and proportion were necessities of his craft. He
found the same problem staring him in the face when he left his pottery
and its geometrical designs and began scratching the outlines of animals
and men upon weapons or flat surfaces of stone. He had to adapt his
figures to his space—adapt them rhythmically, decoratively. If the space
happened to be a dagger-handle then the figures were necessarily of
diminutive size or represented in horizontal attitudes; if the space
were a shield then the figures had to carry the action around the centre
in rows perhaps; if it were an upright panel of clay or stone then the
figures were required to stand at full length and fill the space from
bottom to top. The adaptation of design and color to prescribed space
was (and is) the primary requisite of good decoration; and the early
artist was accounted a success or a failure just in proportion as he
accepted or rejected this requisite.

[Illustration:

XXIII.—BONIFAZIO VERONESE, Moses Saved from the Nile. Brera, Milan.
]

Centuries after the period of Primitive Man—no one knows how many
centuries—when civilization had become established on the banks of the
Nile, we find pottery, household utensils, weapons of warfare,
furniture, embroideries, walls of temples and walls of tombs, all
covered with patterns, figures, and colors. The carvings and paintings
are better in execution, but not unlike those of more barbaric times.
And the artist here in Egypt, like his predecessor in the Stone Age, is
concerned with filling spaces decoratively. To be sure the king in his
chariot surrounded by his bowmen, the flying enemy, the files of
prisoners bearing tribute, the convocation of the gods, the scenes from
royal and humble life, are all records of history, religion, or custom.
The painter is saying something, illustrating something, with his
figures and groups and colors; but how careful he is that he shall say
it gracefully, pleasing the eye as well as the mind. The composition
usually runs in long tiers or bands and the spaces are filled with
standing or moving figures. The open spots about the figures are dotted
with accessory objects, such as palms, fruits, implements,
cartouches—all decorative in form or color. Everywhere in the Egyptian
temple the hieroglyphs appeared in bands and rows—a text explanatory of
the subject, but introduced in such a manner that no space in the
picture should look empty or wanting in balance.

Assyrian art tells us the same tale. The alabaster slabs that lined the
palace walls of Nineveh were all cut of one size, and the colored
bas-reliefs upon them picturing warriors, chariots, horses, dogs,
hunting scenes, battle scenes, and sacred scenes conformed to that size.
Trees and city ramparts and rivers were used as accessory objects, and
often the cuneiform inscriptions ran across them and held them together
like a veil of atmosphere. With Greek art this decorative
filling-of-space reached its highest point in the ancient world. You
cannot to-day take up a red-figured vase, a silver coin, or an engraved
gem without being conscious that the artist’s first thought was how to
fill the given space effectively. There is little attempt at fitting a
round stone into a square hole. The whole surface of the vase, the coin,
or the gem is covered with a regard for the general form of the space
decorated. A Greek coin almost always shows good decorative effect,
because the disk is completely filled with a round profile; an American
coin usually shows poor decorative effect because the space is not
filled with one large object, but is huddled full of small dates,
figures, stars, liberty-caps, and shields. The Greek die-sinker is
influenced solely by decorative appearance, whereas the American
die-sinker or his employer wants to tell you on a ten-cent piece all
about the constitution, the flag, and the magnificent freedom and
general excellence of the greatest republic on earth.

Not alone with small objects was the Greek a decorative workman. The
wall-paintings, the sculpture, the architecture, all exemplified his
skill in space-filling. It was no mere accident that the figures in the
highest part of a Parthenon pediment were shown standing, and that they
were seated or reclining in the lower angles. There was a pedimental
form to fill with figures, and Pheidias would not have been Pheidias had
he not placed the figures so that they would fill the space gracefully,
easily, and with no loss of dignity in their attitudes. Just so with the
Parthenon frieze of Athenian youths on horseback. How gracefully they
ride! And how well adapted the moving train of horsemen to the long,
lane-like frieze that conducts them around the temple. It is obvious
enough that the sculptor had to consider the field upon which he worked,
and he had to fill it so that it would first of all be beautiful to the
eye.

The step from ancient to modern art is a long one, but the decorating
motive did not die with the Greeks. The Gothic age had perhaps more need
for it than the age of Pericles. When painting began to rise in Italy,
the chief patron of it was the all-powerful Church. At that time artists
were not artists, in name at least. They were mechanics, members of
trades-unions called guilds, and were hired to do certain kinds of work
like carpenters, masons, stone-cutters, and other mechanics. The painter
at that time was often a layer of colors, a gilder of altar-pieces, a
modeller in clay, a hewer of marble, a goldsmith, a frame-maker—all in
one. When the church was built he was called in to decorate it—that is,
to make it beautiful to look at, attractive in appearance. There were
certain architectural spaces—ovals, triangles, squares, panels—certain
recesses in the apse, the dome, the ceiling, that had to be filled with
carvings, designs, pictures. He filled them, and he was praised or
criticised as he filled those spaces decoratively or otherwise. He was a
decorator pure and simple. Then came Giotto. The same kind of spaces
needed filling, but Giotto filled them better than his predecessors. His
decorative sense was larger, his taste in color more refined; and he
could draw a figure nobler and with more flexibility as regards its
muscular play and action. Painting advanced with a bound. It did not do
so because of Giotto’s subjects, because he painted the traditional
Church themes like those before him; but because Giotto was, for his
time, a great craftsman.

A hundred or more years later came Masaccio. Art was once more pushed
suddenly forward, for Masaccio rounded the archaic line, drew drapery
with ease, fathomed the tones of colors, gave light-and-shade,
perspective, values. Then another hundred years to Michael Angelo and
Raphael. With these two last-named artists drawing reached a great
height. It could not at that time be carried further, and no painters in
Florence were so famed for drawing and composition as Michael Angelo and
Raphael. They filled space quite perfectly with lines and forms. (Plates
21 and 28.)

Contemporary with Michael Angelo and Raphael lived Leonardo da Vinci. He
was an excellent draughtsman but you do not often hear him spoken of as
such. His fame rests largely upon his discovery and mastery of
light-and-shade. Here was something new with which to fill space. It
made no difference that at this time painting often came down from the
apse and the ceiling and spread itself upon canvas and wooden panel to
make what we to-day call the easel-picture. The decorative motive was
not lost sight of for a moment. Leonardo was just as solicitous that the
panel should be decoratively beautiful as the wall fresco, and he made
it beautiful by his mystery of light-and-shade, by his figures and
colors. He was for Florence the perfect craftsman, and many students
followed his initiative. Then came Correggio at Parma (Plate 8) and
Giorgione at Venice (Plate 24), varying the use of light-and-shade and
making of it a magnificent background upon which to weave colors. These
three men for Italy perfected and completed the decorative use of
light-and-shade, and you will always hear them spoken of as the masters
of chiaroscuro, the inventors of composition by masses of light and
dark.

One moment more to the school of Venice! You will remember that from her
infancy Venice was a trader with the East. She was the carrier by sea,
the broker, between Europe and that realm of Mahomet lying back of
Constantinople which has never known any other art than colored
ornament. This Moslem empire and its color-glamour had its influence
upon the Venetians through their ships and traders, and when the
painters began the fabrication of altar-pieces and mosaics for the
Venetian churches it was not line or form or light or shade that
primarily interested them. It was color—the color of the old decadent
Eastern world—to which they were devoted. The Bellinis began it, their
pupils Giorgione and Titian made it glorious, Paolo Veronese gave it
final brilliancy and splendor. (Plates 5 and 14.) Again the height was
reached. Space-filling at Venice was done primarily by masses of color,
and to-day you will always hear the Venetians spoken of as the great
colorists in art.

Now have you noticed that I have given you, in this little outline of
art-history, the names of the great masters in painting? Have you
noticed that the rise of that greatest school of all, the Italian, can
be adequately explained on purely decorative grounds? Art was great in
Italy primarily because the Italians were great technicians, great
decorators, great space-fillers. If you will turn back and read their
lives, their adventures, and their quarrels among themselves you will
discover that they were not wholly absorbed by the Madonnas and Holy
Families and the religious sentiment of art. Many of them had piety and
strong belief, and some of them had neither the one nor the other. The
subjects were dealt out to all of them alike by the Church; but the
manner in which they should be painted was something taught in the
_bottega_ of the master, something dictated in each case by the space
(the wall or altar) which had to be decorated.

Even the pietists like Fra Angelico were not free of obligation to the
decorative. Nor did a single one of them ever wish to be free. Whether
they believed in religion or not, whether they had pietistic sentiment
or not, they all believed in the beauty of good form and good color. If
you will look again at Andrea del Sarto’s Holy Families you will see
little holiness about them or in them. They are only Florentine people
posed in traditional attitudes, with Andrea’s wife enacting the part of
the Madonna. But they are not wanting in decorative charm. Andrea knew
how to fill space if not how to paint soul, and it was because he did
fill space beautifully in the convent of the Annunziata that his
townspeople called him “the faultless painter.” No one ever referred to
him as “the faultless thinker” or “the faultless sentimentalist” or “the
pietistic painter.”

If you will look again at the pictures of Titian you will see only
handsome, well-fed, richly robed Venetians. Their brows are not burdened
with Christian ecstasy nor their faces furrowed with classic thought.
There is little to them but fine form and fine color. And yet I venture
to think that Titian, taking him for all in all, was the greatest
painter known to history. It was by and with such men—men devoted to the
material and technical side of their art—that Italian craftsmanship rose
step by step through three hundred years of severe training until the
Renaissance height was reached and great art was the result. The
pictorial voice of Italy would never have been heard in this world had
it not been for the decorative skill of the workman, the craftsman of
the Renaissance, the man we to-day call a technician. And from beginning
to end the first consideration of Italian art was not religion, nor
nature, nor the ideal nor the classic, but rather the making of a
beautiful decoration by the use of lines, lights, shadows, and colors.

[Illustration:

XXIV.—GIORGIONE, Madonna and Saints. Cathedral, Castelfranco.
]

I am aware that you regard all this as decidedly heterodox, and possibly
you may think I am distorting the facts to make a point in argument. But
no. I am stating the artist’s contention, giving his idea of the
development of art—the view held by the ancients and still upheld to-day
by the moderns. But let me ramble on a little further, and consider this
matter negatively. You know that with Raphael, Michael Angelo, and
Titian art in Italy reached its climax, and that after them came that
deluge known to history as the Decadence. But why was there a decadence?
What caused it? Nothing more nor less than that the followers of the
great men came to regard craftsmanship as something of a trick to be
readily picked up, and failed to study with the severity of the early
men. They thought to be technicians without labor, to gain facility
without skill, to produce great pictures without knowledge. Their
predecessors had achieved _technique_, and the followers thought they
had nothing to do but help themselves to the result without bothering
about going to the fountain-head. So they tried to combine certain
line-effects of Raphael with Titian’s color and Correggio’s
light-and-shade. Of course this attempt at a unity of technical
excellences was an absurdity. Then, too, they began to think that the
sublime or sentimental subject was worth more than good workmanship, and
that Michael Angelo’s greatness lay in his mystery-haunted figures, as
Raphael’s in his round-faced Madonnas. So they began copying these
features, too. And as a result there appeared the ponderous scowling
Titans of Salviati and Vasari, the sugary, empty-headed Madonnas of
Carlo Dolci and Sassoferrato. They could not draw or paint like the
great masters, because their hands had not been thoroughly trained; they
could not design decoratively, because their taste had become corrupted;
they could not think effectively, because they were following other
people’s ideas rather than their own. No wonder there was decadence. It
would have been very strange had there been anything else.

Two hundred years of this meretricious art followed the downfall of the
Renaissance. During those centuries painting in Europe lay barren, save
in some exceptional spots. It flourished in Holland with Rembrandt; it
flourished in Flanders with Rubens; it flourished in Spain with
Velasquez. Why did it flourish? If I were searching the entire history
of painting I could not name for you three greater technicians than
Rembrandt, Rubens, and Velasquez. With Titian, they are the great
masters of the craft. Art always flourishes in the hands of the skilled
craftsman; it always languishes in the hands of the unskilled craftsman.
And it is necessary to insist upon it again that all these men were
workmen, working with the decorative sense uppermost. They were artists,
too—artists who expressed great thoughts, sentiments, and emotions,
particularly Rembrandt; but they never would have been artists, they
never would have represented any fact or thought worth considering, had
they not been, first of all, decorative workmen.

But you may say we have changed all that. The painter in those days was
only a court dependant—a varlet of the king—not different from
cabinet-makers, stone-cutters, and other mechanics; but to-day he is an
independent citizen, a creative genius, a teacher of mankind, an
influencer and moulder of public opinion. Yes; but the picture is still
the picture. And custom may change the painter’s skin, but not his
nature. He is still a skilled workman at heart, or at least would be
such. And his main aim is decorative craftsmanship. Modern painting
gives it proof. It is said, and truly enough, that art has advanced in
this century. Why has it advanced? Simply because it has taken hold of
the old technical and decorative problems, and tried to better them. In
France, Ingres was doing his best to draw like Raphael, when Delacroix
came to the front with a new kind of drawing. Instead of line he
substituted the patch of color, and made the outer rim elastic, movable,
life-like. Corot, Rousseau, and the landscape painters; Courbet, Millet,
and Manet, the _genre_ painters, helped complete it. Art under them rose
rapidly, and the truth of nature was more nearly approximated.

But the light was too dull, the shadows too black. A new man came to the
front to revise and re-edit the light-and-shade of Leonardo, Correggio,
and Rembrandt. That man was Monet, the so-called impressionist. He
changed the whole pitch of light by transposing the scale, and giving
both lights and darks a higher register. And has not the rich deep color
of the old Venetians been revised too? Look about you at the high keys
of color that greet you in every modern picture exhibition. Claude
Monet, whom people smiled at a dozen years ago, but are now calling a
genius, is responsible for this high scale of color and light. He has
transformed the whole decorative aspect of landscape painting, by
studying the intermixture and play of pigments. We are now seeing colors
in art that approximate, at least, the colors of nature; and they are
just as beautiful decoratively as the old ones, only we are not yet
accustomed to them.

Painting advances, breaks out new sails, and enters upon new seas with
such new knowledge of materials. And of course some of the energy put
into the study is to enable the painters to show a truer life and nature
than ever before; but we are not to forget that there is beauty also in
the new pitch of light and color and that the painter is using them with
a decorative purpose. Indeed it would be easy to demonstrate that no
present-day painter begins upon an oval, a square, a triangle of wood or
canvas, without first planning how to fill that space gracefully with
forms, lights, and colors. These nineteenth-century painters have had
few wall-spaces to fill, but it has already been suggested that the
decorative tradition has descended to them, and that they are as
considerate about filling a panel or canvas as ever the old men were
considerate about filling an apse or spandrel.

[Illustration:

XXV.—REYNOLDS, Lady Cockburn and Family. National Gallery, London.
]

But I fancy you are ready to stop me by protesting that these motives
are too material, too mechanical. You will perhaps insist that true art
is above all this petty planning, squaring, measuring, space-filling;
that genius knows not method, and that the ideal out-soars the base
materials that would hold it down to earth. There are those who believe
that inspiration dictates with the voice of an angel and that the hand
of the poet or painter but obeys the voice; there are those who believe
there is no labor or plan or design or foundation in the work of art.
And it is true that oftentimes painting and poetry appear so effortless
that we think them spontaneous and unpremeditated. But those are always
the works that have been slaved over the most. Every great work of art
is based in technical knowledge and has the skilled workman back of it.
And many are the poets born by nature, yet lacking the accomplishment of
verse. Did you ever read a great piece of prose or poetry written by a
man ignorant of grammar and the rhythmical construction of sentences?
Did you ever hear of a good piece of architecture built by a man who
knew not plans, scales, and proportions? Did you ever see a great
picture painted by a man who could not draw decently or lay color
harmoniously? We are quite right in admiring the feeling, the
enthusiasm, yes, the inspiration, if you prefer that word, of some great
violinist over his instrument; but we should not forget the training of
the hand, the many years of dealing with the material that made
enthusiasm and feeling possible. How much of them should we have heard
had the hand remained untrained? Shelley’s poetic thoughts, yes, but
Shelley’s sense of melody, his knowledge of rhythm, his general mastery
of words and sentences, gave them meaning to the world. And so, too,
while we admire Tintoretto’s fertility of resource and his bounding
imagination we should not overlook the fact that it was his absolute
skill of hand, his knowledge of line and light and color, that made an
idyl of the “Ariadne and Bacchus” and an epic of that great maëlstrom
composition the “Paradise.”

Materials, craftsmanship, the decorative sense which requires that a
man’s work shall be interesting in itself, are the very bases of art;
and we often go astray in our judgments by not considering them. We have
with us to-day one of the best literary technicians of the nineteenth
century—Mr. James the novelist. It can hardly be contended that he is a
very popular novelist. We sometimes read outbreaks in newspaper or
magazine columns to the effect that he is not much of a story-teller,
has not much of a plot. That is the complaint of the average person in
the picture-gallery when he stands face to face with a Whistler
nocturne. He wants what the artist does not care to paint. Mr. Whistler
and Mr. James are both very well acquainted with the pretty face and the
romantic story, but they choose to ignore them. The average person may
read a novel by Mr. James and keep asking: What does it mean? but if Mr.
James were at his elbow and disposed to ask questions he would certainly
inquire: How does it read?

It may be admitted, if you please, that the insistence upon the
decorative use of language with Mr. James or with Mr. Swinburne is
excessive. And so, too, the followers of Mr. Whistler, if not the leader
himself, may be thought to refine color and mystify tone and shadow into
a meaningless fog of pigments. Any principle, however good in itself,
may be rendered ridiculous by extravagance in its application. But the
followers of the decorative are not the only ones who go beyond the
normal. Painters who are given to “ideas in art” oftentimes fly to the
other extreme and neglect the decorative altogether. Mr. Holman Hunt,
for example, will hardly be accused of not having enough ideas and
meaning in his Palestine pictures, and just as certainly he will not be
accused of pandering to the decorative. His drawing, coloring, painting,
surfaces, are anything but pleasing. Nor does anyone doubt that Walt
Whitman has put forth some poetic ideas as great as any in American
literature, but the form in which he has sent them forth is far enough
removed from the rhythmical. You read him and question perhaps whether
he is a great poet or a solemn impostor just because he trusts his
thoughts to bad drawing, crude coloring, and incoherent composition,
just because he dispenses with the decorative.

Now you will please not understand me as saying that it makes no
difference what you say if you but say it well, or that the setting is
nobler or better than the gem itself. It is not necessary to rush to
either extreme of statement. Some artists there be who make sweeping
claims for the decorative, and so far as they themselves are concerned
they are doubtless in the right. That is to say, form and color, in
graceful combinations, make one kind of painting; but we need not
straightway conclude that it is the only kind of painting. It has been
suggested already that music and poetry may have something more to them
than melodious sounds that fall sweetly on the ear; and that painting
may have another mission than that of pleasing the eye with sensuous
lines and colors. The ultimate end of painting is perhaps the expression
of emotional feeling; and I am not now contending for superlative and
final art in the Persian-rug picture made up of subtle lights and tones
of colors. But it may be reasonably insisted that it is better for the
picture—no matter what its ulterior meaning—that it should first of all
be pleasing to the eye and decoratively attractive. Certainly that is
the way all the great artists of the world have thought and wrought,
from the man of the Stone Age who first decorated pottery to the
American of to-day who is concerned with filling space upon panel or
canvas.

[Illustration:

XXVI.—CLAUDE LORRAINE, Flight into Egypt.
]

And this decorative motive, which was the first consideration, remains
to the last the most enduring feature of art. The history of a marble or
a picture may be lost; its subject or theme may be forgotten; what it
meant or signified to a past generation may be incomprehensible to a
present generation; but what it _looks_ is substantially the same for
all times and all peoples. What, I wonder, makes the glory of the “Venus
of Milo”—the fact that she is a Venus? It has been gravely questioned,
is still questioned, just what character that figure is intended to
personify; but it has never been doubted that it is a wonderful piece of
line and form—something beautiful to look upon. What makes the glory of
Titian’s “Sacred and Profane Love”? There is nothing either sacred or
profane about it; the title is a misnomer—something attached to the
picture long after the painter’s death—and no one knows what Titian
intended to say in the picture. But is the picture less beautiful for
that? It is a splendid panel of form and color; any name or no name
could not render it less splendid. Its decorative quality is quite
perfect. All those altar-pieces, frescoes, and mosaics in the Italian
churches—how much meaning have they and their sacred subjects for the
unbelieving art-lover of to-day! Very little indeed; but how beautiful
they are to look upon just as pictures! (Plates 23 and 27). Who really
cares to-day for the characters of Lear, Hamlet, and Macbeth as compared
with the deathless language of their decorative setting! Who does not
care for Shakespeare’s jewelled sentences!

It is the common experience of art-lovers that the more they study
pictures the more certainly do they lose interest in the theme or
narrative illustrated. The historical or poetical incident portrayed
fades into insignificance beside well-drawn forms and impressive schemes
of color. No one who knows much about painting ever looks twice for the
meaning of a Watteau or a Lancret group. The only meaning of it lies in
its vivacity and gayety expressed in color and handling. Even where the
meaning is important, as in Reynolds’s “Lady Cockburn and Family” (Plate
25) or Leighton’s “Summer Moon,” it is not possible to overlook or
ignore the intertwining and blending of the group in both form and
color, which makes it so attractive decoratively.

Such in brief is the artist’s view of art. It is firmly based upon the
decorative, though all artists do not advocate it to the extinction of
every other feature of the painting. On the contrary there are many who
believe in sentiment, feeling, and emotional expression as the final
aim. And some there are who stickle for the value of history,
archæology, and story, as others for the value of the natural and the
real. Indeed, there are several kinds of painting, representing several
different points of view, and if we would cultivate catholicity of taste
we should consider them all. There is a large body of intelligent people
in this world who are even heretical enough to believe that art has some
value as illustration; and since we have given the painter’s contention,
perhaps it would be as well that we now state the case for the other
side.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER VI

SUBJECT IN PAINTING

IT has been intimated, more than once in these lectures, that the
artist, deep down in his heart, has no great respect for the public’s
taste concerning works of art. He has always arrogated to himself and
his fellows the exclusive right of saying what was and what was not art;
and he would have us believe that after all art is made only for the
appreciation of artists. Such a feeling is comforting and comfortable,
no doubt. It possibly pervades branches of industry other than the arts.
The shoemaker probably feels that he knows more about shoes than the
people that wear them and the cook more about dinners than the people
that eat them; but neither of them would contend that shoes were made
only for shoemakers or dinners only for cooks. Nor can the contention of
art exclusively for the artist be made good save in the extravagant
atmosphere of the art-school. Unless the picture appeals to someone
without the studio, unless it is accepted by someone in the outside
world, its excuse for being would seem to be very slight. The work may
please the worker and he may be as absorbed and happy in his occupation
as a child making sand houses on the sea-shore; but in neither case is
energy put to a profitable purpose. An author writes a book to be read
by the public, and an orator speaks to be heard by the public; why
should not a painter paint to be seen by the public?

[Illustration:

XXVII.—TINTORETTO, Marriage in Cana, S. M. della Sa’ute, Venice.
]

And the audience that sees has something to say about what the painter
shall paint. It creates in large measure the demand which the artist
supplies. I am aware that oftentimes the contrary is maintained and it
is asserted that the artist sets the pace and directs the public taste.
Sometimes he does, but he is influenced more or less by his audience.
The demand for work has always come from those who could pay for it, and
the patron usually insists upon having his views incorporated in the
work. The history of painter and patron in the past rather confirms
this. No doubt Michael Angelo had some contempt for the art views of
Julius II., but he painted the Sistine ceiling as the Pope requested.
And probably Rubens thought his Jesuit patrons in Flanders an ignorant
pack of priests, but he painted the themes and subjects they designated.
The subject—aye—there’s the rub! For the public will have it and the
painters will hate it—that is to say, some of the modern painters have
come to hate it apparently for no other reason than that the public
likes it. Of recent years there has arisen a cry of “art for art’s
sake”—that is to say, art in the form, color, and workmanship, but not
in the thought or subject—and many artists have given their unqualified
support to the dogma. In upholding the charm of the decorative they are
prone to deny charm to anything and everything else. Form and color,
they alone make a picture, and all else is philistine sentiment—the very
leather and prunello of art.

It is not to be denied that this contention of the painter is right
enough so far as it affirms the importance of the decorative. Form and
color do make art, and that too with slight reference to
subject-meaning; but we may question the assumption that there is no
other form of art, and that the subject and what art may mean to us are
matters of no importance. We have already considered the different kinds
of painting that are produced by painters who think and paint in
different ways. “Art is in the look,” says Whistler; “No, it is in the
thought,” says Millet; Vibert in his pictures seems to believe it is the
subject that counts; and if Meissonier were alive he would certainly
insist upon it that art consists in realizing the model—in painting a
boot you could pull off or a spur you could put on. But it must be
apparent to you that each one of these men, while exploiting his own
preference, is possibly exploiting his own limitation. No doubt each one
of them believes there is nothing to be seen beyond where he has
travelled.

But there is something too much of “my way is the only way” in these
views of painting. Not perhaps too much for the men themselves, because
a person usually succeeds better who believes implicitly in himself and
is convinced by his own convictions; but too much perhaps for those who
have nothing to do with production, who have to do only with the
enjoyment of things produced. Individually we may be willing to admit
that neither the subject nor the realistic portrayal of nature interests
us so much as the look of a picture and what it may express in thought
or sentiment; but it would be idle for us to ignore the fact that
four-fifths of the people who are looking at pictures are interested
only in subject and that perhaps two-thirds of the painters who are
painting them are intent only upon doing something realistic. It is
possible to influence and persuade these many dwellers in Philistia, if
you choose so to regard them, but they cannot be pushed aside
contemptuously.

And sometimes the persuasion of the artist is in direct defiance of the
rational. The “no-subject” cry of some present-day writers of fiction
will perhaps illustrate this. What shall we say, for instance, to the
extravagance of those who tell us that in writing nothing which teaches,
argues, or expounds is “literature”; that “literature” consists in the
writing of something clever about nothing, and that when the thing said
becomes of importance the work ceases to be literary. The inference is,
of course, that history and essay step down and out in favor of poetry
and fiction; that Richard Le Gallienne’s sensuous cadences and Henry
Harland’s delightful ping-pong conversations are “literature”; but not
Macaulay’s history and De Quincey’s essays. Are we to believe that there
is no art in Bossuet’s oration over the great Condé because it preaches;
no art in Taine’s philosophy because it teaches? It is true enough that
there is art in the skilful use of the adjective, in the glow of words,
and in the slip of sentences; but why is there not art also in the
handling of an idea, in the development of a subject, in a point of
view? Why is it necessary to let the sense out of everything before it
becomes artistic? Practically it is not possible to separate the mental
from the mechanical. The mind guides the hand, and both are but
manifestations of an individuality. How shall you distinguish
Shakespeare the thinker from Shakespeare the dramatic writer? How shall
you separate emotional thinking from its sequence, enthusiastic
craftsmanship? People are not convinced by the argument for art in the
method but not in the mind or the material.

Mr. Whistler, speaking for painting, is scarcely less extravagant than
the writers. “As music is the poetry of sound, so is painting the poetry
of sight, and the subject-matter has nothing to do with the harmony of
sound or of color. Art should stand alone and appeal to the artistic
sense of eye or ear without confounding this with emotions entirely
foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism, and the like.” Thus
Mr. Whistler; and again there is a measure of pungent pertinence in the
remark. Painting should appeal primarily to “the artistic sense of eye,”
but not necessarily to that alone. There is no reason why it should not
have a meaning and express a feeling or a sentiment about something
besides form and color. Even music appeals to something more than the
ear. It suggests a feeling, an association. If it be true that it has no
idea or sentiment, why do we grow sad over Siegfried’s Death March, or
elated over that last upward burst of song in the dungeon scene from
“Faust”? Why do we become emotional or sentimental or romantic over a
symphony by Beethoven? If we wish meaningless sound we must take the
æolian harp or the hum of the wind through pine needles or the roar of
the sea breaking on the beach; and perhaps each of these seems beautiful
to us largely because it suggests something like a human moan or wail.

Just so there may be a suggestion or meaning behind the most decorative
of pictures. Every picture, if it be coherent at all, illustrates,
represents, or expresses some fact, thought, or feeling. However shadowy
the trees of the no-subject artist, however vague and ghost-like the
figures of a symphonist in paint, we see and recognize the trees and the
figures. The lines, lights, and colors are so placed that they
illustrate subjects, namely, trees and figures; they convey to us a
meaning, and if they are so indefinite that we cannot distinguish trees
from figures, rocks from grass, or water from sky, then the picture is
not a picture, but merely a dash of variegated colors. Two dead fish
upon a plank and behind them an iron pot—the picture that Vollon has
painted for us—has, as a picture, perhaps as little subject about it as
the most confirmed modern could desire; yet it is no less a subject. We
recognize the pot, the plank, the fish readily enough. Smear the canvas
so that we have only streaks of gray and black, and the subject is gone
and with it the picture. It is then only a medley of pigment which may
be rather interesting as a color-spot, but is no more of a picture than
so much color rubbed on the panel of a door.

Mr. Whistler may call one of his small canvases of the open sea a
symphony in blue or gray or catalogue it by any other fantastic name he
chooses; but the fact remains that his few touches of the brush give us
not only the form and color of the sea, but suggest to us the great
ocean tossing after storm—rolling moodily under gray skies. The painter
intended that such a meaning should be suggested. If he had not defined
his sea and sky so that we could recognize them his canvas might still
be a pretty piece of blue and gray, and it might be a “symphony”; but it
would not be a picture. It would not picture anything; it would be
merely pigment again.

And even an art-for-art’s-sake devotee might wonder why Mr. Whistler
should fight wind-mills about “devotion, pity, love and patriotism” in
pictures. Are the altar-pieces of the early Italians the worse for being
filled with what people choose to think true “devotion”? Would the
pictures by Filippino or Botticelli be the better if the pietistic
sentiment were eliminated and a smiling Froufrou took the place of the
sad-faced Madonna? Consider for a moment that splendid family group
kneeling in the altar-piece of the Pesaro family by Titian, and then ask
yourself if the suggestion of devotion here is any more objectionable
than the spirit of frivolity or gayety in a scene from the ballet by
Degas. Some years ago there was a rather interesting picture by
Dagnan-Bouveret in the Salon, called “The Conscripts”—a picture showing
a squad of youths marching down the street to the sound of drum-beats,
with the tricolor flying over their heads. The sentiment of it was
undoubtedly patriotic, and crowds stood about it day by day as long as
the exhibition remained open. Would Mr. Whistler condemn it for either
its patriotism or its popularity? If so, why not the “Surrender at
Breda” by Velasquez? That, too, smacks of military glory, and I doubt
not had its crowds of Spaniards staring at it in the past as
Dagnan-Bouveret’s picture in the present. And why not put Rembrandt’s
“Night Watch,” and Frans Hals’s Shooting Companies at Haarlem in the
same pillory? They are full of uniforms, flags, drums and guns, and they
are stuffed with patriotism, civic pride and burgher conceit; but, oddly
enough, we find no painter-writer abusing them on that account. Why?
Because they are not lacking in decorative quality; they are superb as
form and color.

So it seems then that Velasquez, Frans Hals, and Rembrandt shall go
scot-free for perpetrating what is adjudged little short of a crime in
Sir John Millais and George Boughton. Which is it, then, the presence of
the devotional and the patriotic or the absence of the decorative that
really excites the wrath of the Whistlerians? Possibly what their
spokesmen meant to say was that in modern painting there is too much
insistence upon the theme, the subject, the story told; that artistic
qualities of form and color are ignored, pushed aside, overlooked in
favor of the incident set forth; that painting is not a mere vehicle for
illustrating poetry, fiction, religion, or history; that it has
qualities peculiarly its own, which are entitled to quite as much
consideration as the thought or theme which may be illustrated. And all
of that would be true enough. The decorative phase of art is quite as
important as the illustrative, but why are not both important? Why and
how do they conflict with one another?

[Illustration:

XXVIII.—RAPHAEL, Sistine Madonna. Dresden Gallery.
]

But, to return to our original contention, expressive painting cannot
get on without a thought and a theme. It must represent or illustrate
something. And if we should cast out all the pictures that have an
expressive meaning we should do away with almost all the art of the
past. Certainly all descriptive art would have to go. Historical
canvases, we are told, are only “illustrative” anyway, and not art pure
and simple. But just where shall the line be drawn between what is
historical and what is not historical? A canvas of Napoleon retreating
from Russia is illustrative—historical beyond doubt; but how does
Meissonier’s portrait of Napoleon riding at the head of his bedraggled
columns differ from Mr. Whistler’s picture of a blacksmith at his forge?
One is the likeness of a famous general in time of war, the other is the
likeness of a common blacksmith in time of peace; but both canvases are
biographical, and therefore historical. A picture of the field of
Gravelotte or the palace at Versailles might serve as an illustration of
the political history of France; but a wheat stack and a row of poplars
by Monet, a wood-chopper or a gleaner by Millet, why do they not equally
well illustrate the social and agricultural history of France? There is
really no point where one can stop. Everything that can be recognized at
all in a painting is more or less illustrative of history, fact or
incident. And there is no reason why modernity should strain at an
interesting subject because it happens to be political history, and
swallow a stupid one because it happens to be social history. Titian,
Rubens, and Velasquez did not do it. Each one of them painted the life
and history of his time, not in portraiture alone, but in battle scene
and court ceremony. And famous canvases they made of them, too. Can it
be thought for a moment that the subjects were detrimental to the
artists or their art? Evidently the painters themselves did not think
so.

And is the church art of Italy to go, too, because it illustrates the
biblical narratives? Without doubt it is the most complete expression of
painting we have ever known, the most perfect in decorative charm, the
most satisfactory in expressive meaning. What if it did teach the Bible
to those who could not read! Did it not also adorn the interior of
churches, and fulfil the modern requirements of painting by its beauty
of form and color? And if it be true that art consists not in devotion
or patriotism, but in drawing the nude figure, what difference does it
make whether you draw that of Adam lying upon the edge of the world as
Michael Angelo, or that of a dead unknown lying upon a hospital slab as
Rembrandt? If the female figure be insisted upon as the acme of graceful
line and delicate color, why cannot these be shown in a “Susanna at the
Bath” as well as in a “Venus” or an “Olympe”? Some years ago Mr.
Whistler painted the figure of a girl in white standing at full length
upon a white bear-skin, and the result was called “The White Girl.” It
is a study in whites, and his followers might count it a symphony in
white without making much more of it than a clever exposition of
painter’s values. In Venice, some centuries ago, Palma Vecchio painted
the figure of a girl in rich browns standing at full length upon guns,
and called the result “Santa Barbara.” (Frontispiece.) As a symphony, as
a study in color-harmony, as a piece of drawing and painting, it is
irreproachable. It is decoratively all that could be desired. Yes; and
there is something more to it. The figure expresses superb dignity,
nobility, and repose; it is the perfect type of woman; and in addition
the picture has illustrated to the mob for many years the story of Santa
Barbara the martyr. Both pictures are true enough art, delightful each
in its way; but which is the more complete? And would you have the
meaning knocked out of Palma’s picture, would you have it reduced to a
mere symphony of brown and gold—something you might catalogue as “The
Brown Girl”? Suppose, for argument’s sake, we admit that calling it
Santa Barbara does not help it in any way; but does it injure it in any
way? Certainly not.

Nor is it worth while to accept an allegorical figure by Fantin-Latour
or a nursing mother by Degas and then quarrel with the meaning of a
“Madonna” by Bellini (Plate 7) or a “St. Catherine” by Sodoma. The use
of the latter pictures by the Church to point a moral or adorn a tale
does not invalidate their art, nor does the name attached to them blind
anyone to their harmony of form, light, and color. We may be certain
that those Renaissance men were just as much interested in the
decorative side of their art as the moderns. They were expert
technicians with a fine sense of line and color. Every feature of the
Madonna’s face, form or costume, the fall of a robe, the sparkle of a
gem, the play of light upon hair or nude shoulder, the depth and
resonance of colors, were seized upon for decorative effect; but the
emotions of “devotion, pity and the like,” which Mr. Whistler insists
are quite foreign to art, did not disturb them in any way. They used
them as they pleased and still made beautiful pictures.

Just so with the Dutchmen at the north. They painted portraits,
interiors, _fête_ scenes, marines—all things that related to Holland—and
they were very intent upon giving the realistic appearance of everything
so that anyone could divine the meaning; but they did not neglect the
decorative nor quarrel about the subjects of their canvases. The fine
conversation-pictures of Terburg or the interiors of Steen or the
portraits of Hals (Plate 22) need no apology for their purely artistic
qualities. Every face or hand or figure, every scrap of light or color,
has the most made of it. The painters wrung all the hues possible out of
silks and satins, caught all the sparkle of glass, all the sheen of pots
and dishes; but they did not think to win entirely by virtue of these
qualities. They cared something for their subject and insisted upon its
truth of representation and illustration, too.

[Illustration:

XXIX.—BOTTICELLI, Allegory of Spring. Academy, Florence.
]

And what of the landscape? Are we to cast out the historical productions
of Claude and Turner (Plates 11 and 26) because they are supposed to
represent ancient Italy or classic Greece? What if Turner does paint a
picture of Venice in which people may recognize some things Venetian,
does that mar his painting of light, air, sky, and color, or dim the
decorative splendor of the landscape in any way? Those splendid Venetian
sunsets with scarlet clouds waving and flaming far up the zenith, their
crimson reflection in the waters of the lagoons, the golden atmosphere
that never painter yet painted, how are they harmed by the stray
sunshafts that flush pink the familiar top of the San Marco campanile or
gild into recognition the great silver domes of the Salute? And if a
modern paint a patch of mid-ocean without a name how much greater as art
are his sea-waves than the waves of Claude shown in a seaport of France?
What harm does the “seaport” and “France” do the picture? We have
recently had some very beautiful studies of color, light, and air by
Claude Monet which he has called “Rouen Cathedral” and “Westminster
Bridge.” They are much vaguer in outline than Turner or Claude would
have painted them; but they picture historical structures and might be
called historical landscapes with as much reason as Turner’s “Bay of
Baiæ” or Claude’s “Queen of Sheba.”

But the chief quarrel of the modern is with the story-telling
subject—the sentimental or funny incident in paint—of which we see
enough and to spare at every new exhibition. This too is historical art
in a way. For the _genre_ subjects of the present time are history in
the little—personal incidents usually, but nevertheless the history of
the people. And yet it must be acknowledged that there is some reason
for waging war against this kind of art as we find it to-day. Not that
the story in itself is necessarily objectionable. If we are not
interested in its incident perhaps we can enjoy its decorative
qualities. The “Sacred and Profane Love” by Titian, which I have already
mentioned, certainly had a literary meaning at one time, but to-day the
allegory is lost to us and the picture lives by virtue of its fine form
and color—the allegory in no way injuring its decorative qualities. Nor
are the stories of Jan Steen or Van der Meer of Delft or Teniers
objectionable in their pictures. You will hear no modern railing against
them, for the very good reason that the pictures are excellent pieces of
workmanship and exceptionally beautiful in surfaces, handling, color,
light and atmosphere. But the present-day story-teller with a
paint-brush is not so good a workman as the Dutchmen. He slurs the
decorative and throws all the interest of his picture upon the incident
portrayed, and lets form and color go lame, blind and halt if they
choose. There is little to be said in praise of his work. The tawdry
colors and the card-board figures with which his stories are told
condemn them at the start. Yet the public, seeing not the cheapness of
the method, applauds the incident portrayed and thus endorses a lame and
halting art. It is this that stirs the wrath of the art-for-art’s-sake
advocates and leads to their extravagance of statement.

It is the Marcus Stones, the Viberts, and the Defreggers of painting who
have brought the story into contempt and caused the opposition to it.
That the “unco guid” Sunday-school incident or the horse-play of the
grinning Tyrolean peasant, or the red-robed monk story should pass
current as art while the peasants of Millet, the landscapes of Corot,
the marines of Whistler should be sneered at as impressionistic or
“faddish,” was more than the artistic brotherhood could bear. It took up
the cudgels for more art and less literature, and in knocking the silly
incident in the head, it also tried to knock in the head every other
incident in the art-world. This was perhaps an error. For the subject is
not necessarily silly except in the hands of the whipper-snapper
painter. There is nothing silly about the “Moses saved from the Nile”
(Plate 23) by Bonifazio, or the “Miracle of the Slave” (Plate 15) by
Tintoretto, or the “Good Samaritan” by Rembrandt, or the “Garden of
Love” by Rubens, or the “Shepherds in Arcadia” (Plate 30) by Poussin.
Oh, yes; the old masters could paint stories when it pleased them to do
so. They were religious and classic stories—themes hallowed by
tradition—but not differing in other respects from the stories of
to-day. They painted them well and with great decorative skill and
therefore you never hear any painter decrying them; but, so far as their
legitimacy or illegitimacy is concerned, they were not different from
the “Love and Death” of Mr. Watts or the “Beguiling of Merlin” by Sir
Edward Burne-Jones or the “Blind Fiddler” by Sir David Wilkie.

But we must not push our argument too hard, for we are not the special
advocates of the story-picture. Nor should we, while stating the
contention of the public for the subject-picture, be unjust to the
contention of the painter for the decorative picture. It is true enough
that the religious or classic theme of Renaissance art is not its most
enduring quality with us to-day. The pictures live more by their
excellences of form and color than by their subjects. Still the painters
found no great hardship in having to paint designated themes. They
worked easily under imposed conditions. When Mantegna was asked to paint
a chapel in the Eremitani at Padua and the life of St. Christopher was
given him as a subject he did not cry out against subjects in painting
and talk about the absurdity of devotion and patriotism in art. He
accepted the conditions and fulfilled them nobly. When Correggio was
asked to paint an Assumption of the Madonna in the cupola of the Duomo
at Parma he, too, accepted the conditions of subject and architectural
surroundings and produced that wonderful circle of whirling angels
which, seen from below, seems to rise higher and higher in the dome as
though actually disappearing in the blue sky.

[Illustration:

XXX.—POUSSIN, Shepherds in Arcadia. Louvre, Paris.
]

Hundreds of the Renaissance painters filled wall and altar spaces under
similar limitations, producing Nativities, Flights into Egypt,
Crucifixions, Resurrections, without ever a thought of quarrelling with
their themes. They were hackneyed themes, too; but they knew that their
success in the estimation of their fellow-craftsmen was largely
dependent upon the degree of freshness and originality with which the
subjects were treated. One of the astonishing things about Tintoretto at
Venice is that, coming at the final day of the Renaissance, he should
have handled the old time-worn and art-worn themes with such novelty and
power. The Annunciation, the Nativity, the Flight, the Crucifixion in
the Scuola San Rocco at Venice are marvellous pieces of originality and
invention. Before Tintoretto’s time there were innumerable “Marriages in
Cana” painted for the Church, but that wonderful picture in the Sacristy
of the Salute at Venice goes beyond them all (Plate 27). What was it to
Titian or Moretto that the early men had painted the “Assumption of the
Madonna”? They did it over again with greater originality and splendor.

Nor did the Renaissance painters wholly ignore the audience for which
their pictures were intended. When Raphael painted the “Sistine Madonna”
(Plate 28), he was most careful about the composition of the group,
about the drawing, the draperies, the light, the color, the action of
the figures. He studied long and hard every decorative feature of the
picture, that it might have grace of line and charm of hue. Yes; and he
also studied long and hard the story it should tell to the congregation
of the Black Friars’ Church at Piacenza, for whom the picture was
originally painted. It hung over the high altar of the church and was so
conspicuously placed that the whole kneeling throng could see it. The
curtains painted at the top of the picture are supposed to be the real
altar-curtains, the ledge at the bottom where the cherubs rest is
supposed to be the real altar-top. The angel-throng with the Madonna is
coming down from heaven. She is walking on the clouds, coming forward to
meet the kneeling worshippers and holding up to them the Child as the
Hope of the World. Behind them is a great halo of light made up of
angel-heads—the light of the Eternal Day. At the right St. Barbara
kneeling turns away her face as though blinded by the radiance; at the
left San Sisto the martyr looks up to the Madonna and with one
deprecating hand upon his bosom points outward with the other to the
congregation as though saying: “Not for me, but for these poor souls in
my keeping.” It is impossible to ignore the story told in the picture;
impossible to say that it is an intrusion or should have been left out.
There is nothing very decorative about the large round eyes of the
Mother and Child—they were taken almost _verbatim_ from the old
Byzantine mosaics—but again it is impossible not to recognize the look
of wonder they express and the specific meaning they must have had for
the audience.

All of which would seem to suggest once more that the theme in painting
is at least not a hindrance, not a something to be got rid of, but a
condition to be dealt with and handled illustratively in the same way
that a given space of wall, panel or canvas is a condition to be dealt
with decoratively. To say that painting shall reveal only “the
appearance of things” and that the significance of those things shall
count for naught is one extreme; to say that objects shall depend solely
upon their meaning and be regardless of decorative charm is the other
extreme. Painters may choose either one or the other as becomes
partisans (the great painters have always chosen both), but the
spectator should cultivate a broader taste and exhibit a more
discriminative mind. To Mr. Whistler, for instance, was given the sense
of color, light, air, and the power to produce the glamour and the
mystery of these in harmonies, symphonies, nocturnes—all of them
decorative things lovely to look upon. Let us by all means admire them
and love them; but we should not allow ourselves to think that this
alone is art, and all the products of the other men but so much rags and
scrap-iron. Mr. Watts has a differently endowed mind. He grasps
elemental truths of life and presents them in allegorical forms that are
beautiful to think about, and Mr. Whistler does not like that. But never
mind; let us listen to Mr. Watts, too. He is a man of imagination, and
what he has to say is well worth listening to, though he has not Mr.
Whistler’s point of view, and is somewhat lacking in the decorative
quality.

Nor need we despise those painters whose equipment leads them to care as
little for things decorative as for things symbolical. There are
artistic minds that love to deal with facts as facts. Realism is
healthful at least, and besides there may be much that is interesting in
facts if we only study them long enough. Men like Courbet and Bonnat and
Meissonier and Gérôme are not to be ignored. They are great students,
great artists of their kind. Their minds move along scientific and
archæological grooves, and in that respect they are quite different from
the Whistlers, the Millets, and the Delacroixs; but I do not see why
they are not entitled to admiration for what they do, especially when
they do it so very well.

We should find something to admire in all of them, if we had more
judgment and less prejudice. Unfortunately, we allow our likes to
dictate to our taste. A certain form of art is agreeable to us, and
therefore everything else is bad form and not art at all. Because one
likes the Madonnas of Raphael is no reason for condemning the Madonnas
of Holbein and Rubens. The landscape of Claude Lorraine is not
incompatible with the landscape of Claude Monet. Both are good. But it
is very difficult to make people see and believe that. Raising ourselves
above prejudice is not easy of accomplishment. It is what is called,
broadly, education—a difficult attainment to many, an absolute
impossibility to some.

Indeed when we come to sum up these lectures we find their burden to be
chiefly “Raising ourselves above prejudice.” The special pleas of
painters, whether for realization or decoration or illustration, are, of
course, to be heard and accepted in part; but we are not to believe in
any one of them to the utter exclusion of the others. Each is excellent
of its kind, so far as it goes; but in our final judgment of the work of
art we may conclude that the sum of the whole is greater than any of its
parts, and that truth to nature, individuality, imagination, pictorial
poetry, decorative beauty, subject—all the elements—go to the making of
what is called “great art.” Titian, Rubens, and Velasquez scorned none
of these elements, advocated none of them exclusively; and you and I,
who help make up the public, can perhaps do no better than base our
principles of taste upon the works of those famed masters of the craft.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

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● Transcriber’s Notes:
○ Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected.
○ Typographical errors were silently corrected.
○ Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only
when a predominant form was found in this book.
○ Text that:
was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_);
was in bold by is enclosed by “equal” signs (=bold=).

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