Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, December 1878

On the unconscious development of mediæval architecture, due to no one man, but to a universal interest in and appreciation of the art, it is unnecessary to dwell. Nor need we for present purposes seek further illustration farther afield. Let us take time now to look more narrowly at the art of to-day, and try to mark the different shapes it has taken with different nations.

The most decided school is in France: her artists, many in number, confine, whether involuntarily or not, their individual differences within sharply-marked and easily-noted limits. In Germany the schools are two—one of so-called historical painting at Munich, one of what we may name domestic painting at Düsseldorf. This last may be put on one side as having no specially obtrusive characteristics, and by German pictures will be meant those of the Munich and Vienna type, whether actually from the studios of Munich and Vienna or not. In English contemporary art can one pretend to find a school at all in any true sense of the word? What we do find is a very widespread art-literature and talk of art, a large number of working artists varying in temperament, and a vast horde of amateurs, who are not content to be patrons, but yearn also to be practisers of art.

In England theories of art are more carefully discussed and more widely diffused than they are in any other country. But they are theories of an essentially untechnical, amateurish, literary kind. The English critic calls all law and philosophy, all rules of morals and manners, of religion and political economy and science and scientific æsthetics, to aid his critical faculty when he needs must speak of pictures. In Germany there is also much theorizing, but of a different kind. It is not so much the whole physical and psychical cosmos that the German critic studies as the past history of art in its most recondite phases and most subtle divergences. Upon this he draws for information as to the value of the work before him. On the other hand, we shall find French art-criticism to be almost purely technical.

As the critics differ, so do the criticised by the natural law of national coherence. An English painter is apt to be primarily an embodied theory of one sort or another; which theory is more or less directly connected with his actual work as a painter. A German painting is apt to be scientifically composed on theory also, but a theory drawn from the study of art per se, not of the whole world external to art. The work of a Frenchman, like the criticism of his commentator, is primarily technical.

Because both German work and English work are theoretical compared with French, I do not wish to imply that technically they are on a par. Aside from the difference of imaginative power in the two nations, which renders German conceptions more valuable in every way than contemporary English ideas, there is a great difference in the technical training of the two groups of artists. German work often shows technical qualities as notable as those we find in France, though of another kind. The noble physical endowment of an artist—that by reason of which, and by reason of which alone, he is an artist—is twofold: power of eye and power of hand. By power of the eye I mean simple vision exalted into a special gift, a special appreciation of line, an ultra delicate and profound perception of color, and an exact, unconscious memory. This last is not imagination nor imaginative memory, but an automatic power, if I may so say, of the retina—as unconscious as is the pianist's memory of his notes, and as unerring. It is not the power to fix in the mind by conscious effort the objects before one, and to recall them deliberately, inch by inch, at any time, but the power, when the brush pauses trembling for the signal, to put down unerringly facts learned God knows where, or imagined God knows how. Automatic, I repeat, this power must be. The tongue might not be able to tell, nor the mind deliberately to recall in cold blood, what was the depth of blue on a distant hill or the vagueness of its outlines, or what the anatomical structure of a mistress's fingers. But the brush knows, as nothing but the brush of an artist can; and when it comes to painting them, aërial perspective and anatomical detail must come right. This is the first and the great endowment. And the second is like unto it in—Shall I use the fashionable artistic slang and say preciousness? It is the gift of a dexterous hand, winged with lightness and steady as steel, sensitive as a blind man's finger-tips, yet unerring in its stroke as the piston of a steamship. This is a gift as well as the other, but it can, far more than the other, be improved and developed by practice and patience. Both gifts in equal perfection constitute a technical master. It is hardly necessary to say that no man—certainly no nation—can to-day claim the highest measure of both. The French are most highly gifted with the first, the Germans with the second. In the latter, patience and science, working upon a natural aptitude, have developed great strength and accuracy of wrist, and with this the power of composition and design, purity and accuracy of outline, and good chiaroscuro. But the whole race is deficient in a sense of color. Its work is marked by crudeness and harshness, or at the best reticence—splendor without softness or inoffensiveness without charm. In cases where much is attempted in color—as in what is undoubtedly one of the best of contemporary paintings, Knille's Tannhäuser and Venus in the Berlin Gallery—the success is by no means on a par with the great excellence of drawing and composition. In France the eye for color is present—I will not say as in Venice, but to a greater degree than in the two other nations.

If we leave now professional painters and professional critics and turn to the untrained public, we shall find, of course, all our modern faults more evident. The English public is pre-eminently untechnical in its judgments, pre-eminently literary or moral. But the French and the German public approximate more to the English—as is natural—than do their respective artists. I use the word literary as it has often been used by others in characterizing the popular art-criticism of the time—and in England much of the professional criticism also—to denote a prominence given to the subject, the idea, the story—l'anecdote, as a French critic calls it—over the purely painter's work of a picture. It denotes the theory that a picture is not first to please the sense, but to catch the fancy or the intellect or to touch the heart. This feeling, which in France turns toward sensationalism, in England toward sentimentality, is something other than the interest which attaches to historical painting as the record of facts—in itself not the highest interest one can find in a work of art. If we think back for a moment, we shall see how different from either of these moods was the mood in which the great Italians painted. Some "subject" of course a painting must have that is not a portrait, but these men chose instinctively—hardly, it is to be supposed, theoretically—such subjects as were most familiar to their public, and therefore least likely to engage attention primarily, and to the exclusion of the absolute pictorial value of the painting as such. We never find Titian telling anecdotes. His portraits are quiescence itself—portraits of men and women standing in the fulness of beauty and strength to be painted by Titian. We do not find likenesses snatched in some occurrence of daily life or in some dramatic action of historical or biographical importance. Even Raphael's great frescoes are symbolical more truly than historical, expressing the significance of a whole series of events rather than literally rendering one single event. The first remark of many who, accustomed to the literary interest of modern pictures, are for the first time making acquaintance with the old masters, is, that the galleries are so unexcitingly monotonous: the subjects are not interesting. Portraits, scenes from sacred history or Greek mythology,—that is all among the Italians. Desiring nothing but beauty of line and color, and expressiveness provided it was beautiful, they

sought a subject merely as the raison d'etre of beauty. Raphael could paint the Madonna and Child a score of times, and Veronese his Marriages of Cana, and all of them Magdalenes and St. Sebastians by the dozen, without thinking of finding fresh subjects to excite fresh interest. Nor does this restricted range of subjects imply, under the hand of a master, monotony. There is more unlikeness in Raphael's Madonnas than in the figures of any modern artist, whatever their variety of name and action. Even a century later than Raphael, among the Flemings and Hollanders, the best pictures are the simplest, the least dependent for their interest upon anything dramatic or anecdotal in their subject. The triumphs of the Dutch school are the portraits of the guilds. The masterpieces of Rubens are his children and single figures and biblical scenes, not his Marie de Medicis. And what of Rembrandt is so perfect as his Saskia with the Pink at Dresden? If we have a photograph even of such a picture as this constantly before us, with a modern picture of anecdotal interest, no matter how vivid and pleasant that interest may have been at first, it is not hard to predict which will please us longest—which will grow to be an element in the happiness of every day, while the other becomes at last fade and insipid. This even if we suppose its technical excellence to be great. How, then, shall such interest take the place of technical excellence?

This modern love of l'anecdote is not exactly the cause perhaps, nor yet the effect, of the self-consciousness of modern art, but it goes hand in hand with it: they are manifestations of the same spirit in the two different spheres of worker and spectator.

But it may be said, If Michael Angelo was self-conscious, it was because he first caught the infection of modern times. Life, the world, the nineteenth century, are self-conscious through and through. It is impossible to be otherwise. It is impossible for a world which has lived through what ours has, which has recorded its doings and sufferings and speculations for our benefit, ever to be naïve or spontaneous in anything. Inspiration unsought and unquestioned is a thing of the past. Study, reflection, absorption, eclecticism,—these are the watchwords of the future. If this were granted, many would still think it an open question whether art of the highest kind would in the future be possible or not. But is by no means necessary to grant it, for we have had in the most learned and speculative of nations an art in our century—still surviving, indeed, in our very midst—the growth of which has been as rapid and the flowering as superb as the growth and bloom of sculpture in Greece or of painting in Italy. I mean, of course, music in Germany. And if we think a moment we shall see that its growth was as unpremeditated, its direction and development as unbiassed by theories, its votaries as untroubled with self-consciousness, as if they had been archaic sculptors or builders of the thirteenth century. Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, what sublime unconsciousness of their own personality as the personality of artists and as influencing art! Does Richard Wagner seem at first sight to be a glaring exception to such a rule—seem to strive more than any other artist in any branch of art to be critic as well—seem, perhaps, to be most notably self-conscious even in an age of self-consciousness? The most highly gifted of the generation as an artist, his musical talent developed spontaneously, irresistibly. It had thus developed before he began to reason about it, to justify in theory that which had approved itself in fact. His power lies in the union we find in him of musician and dramatist. His dogmatizing and theorizing expatiate not on the way he works in either art, but on the propriety of combining the two. Not his theories, but his artist's instinct, taught him how to do it as it is done in the Meistersinger. His theories try to explain his work, but by just so much as his work is consciously founded on his theories, by just so much is it less perfect than it would have been had he preserved his unconsciousness. The fact of his self-consciousness tends in many eyes to mark him as the rearguard of a line of artists, the pioneer of a generation of critical musicians. May Liszt perhaps serve as a sample of such—learned, critical, self-conscious, productive, but unoriginal? And the worst sign in Germany is less that the young musicians copy Wagner than that they copy him not instinctively and by nature, but theoretically and of deliberate intent, exalting his theories to rank beside his work.

It seems at first strange that, music being at once the glory and the recreation of the whole German nation, and a knowledge of it being native to the vast majority of individual Germans, there is little existing musical criticism—none as compared with the abounding German criticism on every other branch of art and every other subject under the sun. The field offered here to the cobweb-spinning German brain is wide and attractive. It seems strange that it should be as yet uncultivated, unless we fall back on the theory that art at its vitalest is of necessity uncritical, and that where an inborn love of, and aptitude for, an art exists with a daily enjoyment of its technical perfection, we shall be least likely to find it elaborately criticised theoretically. Where practice is abundantly satisfactory theories are superfluous.

Below, though still in the same category with, the musical gift of the Germans we may cite the literary gift of the English. For though this may not be the greatest literary epoch of England, yet it will not be denied that the greatest of English aptitudes is for literature. The wide appreciation of it in England is unmatched by a like appreciation of any other form of art. The growth of English novel-writing and its healthy development, accompanied, it may be, by many fungus-growths due to over-fertility, afford us the spectacle of a contemporary yet spontaneous English art, unforced by hothouse cultivation, uninfluenced by theories. A century or so hence the hearty, unconscious bloom of narrative literature in our day and language may seem as strange as seems to us the spontaneous blossoming of Venetian painting, of Greek sculpture, or of architecture in the Ile de France. An Englishman of to-day who thinks painters can be spun out of theories would surely laugh with instinctive knowledge of the veritable requirements of their art if one were to propose supplying novelists or poets in a similar way.

If we thus acknowledge that two kinds of art—and those two requiring the greatest amount of imaginative power—can flourish with spontaneity even in so self-conscious a civilization as ours, we shall fail to see in that civilization a sufficient a priori reason why the same might not have been the case with painting. If, however, still keeping to our own day, we look for the reverse of this picture, we shall find some approach to it in the condition of the painter's art in England. Here theory runs wild, practice falls far behind, and a great part of the practice that exists is inspired and regulated by theory. Artists are especially self-conscious, and the public, while much concerned with things artistic and fed on daily food of art-theory and speculation, is specially devoid of an innate artistic sense and an educated faculty for appreciating technical perfection.

In England, more even than on the Continent or with ourselves, is there a passion for story-telling with the brush, a desire to give ideas instead of pictures, a denial of the fact that the main object of a picture is to please the eye just as truly and as surely as the main object of a symphony is to please the ear. If we look through the catalogue of a Royal Academy exhibition, we notice the preponderance of scenes illustrative of English or other literature—of canvases that tell a story or point a moral or bear a punning or a sentimental title. And we notice the great number of quotations introduced into the catalogue without any actual explanatory necessity. Even landscapes are dragged into the domain of sentiment, and Mr. Millais, who copies Nature with the exactest reverence, cannot call his brook a brook, but "The sound of many waters;" and a graveyard is not named a graveyard, but "Where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap;" and instead of Winding the Clock we are told "The clock beats out the life of little men." A canvas representing "untrodden snow" must be ticketed, for increase of interest, "Within three miles of Charing Cross." Another is marked, "Christmas Eve: a welcome to old friends. (See Silas Marner.)" And so on, ad infinitum. May one not say ad nauseam before a piece of marble labelled "Baby doesn't like the water," or a canvas by Faed, R. A., called "Little cold tooties," or the portrait by the president of the Academy of a child on her pony denoted not only by the child's name in full, but her pony's also?

Prominent also at a first visit to a London exhibition stands out the hesitancy; of English artists to deal with large canvases and life-size figures—their strict confinement to genre of a domestic or bookishly archæological type. This is not the place to discuss the causes of such a fact, nor to insist on the lack of certain technical qualities in even the best English work. Such discussions can only be profitable when the originals are at hand to recriticise the criticism.

More striking than anything to be seen in 1877 at the Royal Academy was the small collection of pictures at the Grosvenor Gallery, organized and controlled by a noble amateur—himself a painter also—with the avowed intention of exhibiting the latest and most eccentric phases of English art. To a Londoner the opening day was interesting, as revealing the newest works of the most conspicuous London artists. To a stranger fresh from continental pictures, old and new, eager to see the touch of hands so often described in print, it was a revelation not only of a few men's work, but of the tendency of a national art and the artistic temperament of a whole people. Superficially, these pictures seemed the exact opposite of those at the conservative Academy—as aberrant as the latter were commonplace. But to one who knew them as the work of a fashionable, highly-educated clique they seemed merely a reaction of the same spirit that produced the elder style. In striving to get out of the rut of commonplace which had so long held in its grip the wheels of English art, not originality, so much as deliberate, sought-out eccentricity, was the result. The scale of work, starting from the original bathos of domestic sentimentality, runs up to the veriest contortions of affected mediævalism, rarely striking out a note of common sense. Simple English art is the apotheosis of the British middle-class spirit, of Mr. Arnold's "Philistinism." English art departing from this spirit shows, not Mr. Arnold's "sweetness and light," not calmness, repose, sureness of self, unconsciousness of its own springs of life, but theories running into vague contradictions, a far-fetched abnormalness, a morbid conception of beauty, a defiant disregard of the fact that a public exists which judges by common sense and the eye, not by a fine-spun confusion of theories and an undefined but omnipotent and deified "æsthetic sense" non-resident in the optic nerve. Mr. Whistler's pictures to-day, cleverly as he can paint if he will, are not pictures—I do not mean in fact, which is certainly true—but in title. They are "Natures in Black and Gold," or "In Blue and Silver," or "In Blue and Gold," or "Arrangements in Black," or "Harmonies in Amber and Brown." Here we have the desperate reaction from the idea that l'anecdote is everything to the idea that it is sufficient to represent nothing (poetically conceived!) with little color and less form, with the vaguest and slightest and most untechnical technique. It is hard to say which would most puzzle Titian redivivus—"Little cold tooties," or a blue-gray wash with a point or two of yellow, bearing some imaginary resemblance to the Thames with its gaslights, and called a "Nocturne in Blue and Gold."

The French "impressionalist" clique, similar in spirit to these Englishmen, though less outré in practice, is not by any means of so great importance in France as they are in England. It has more than once been remarked in England that the old-fashioned amateur—patron and critic, kenner—is dying out, and that his modern substitute must not only choose, but experiment—not only admire, but be admired. This spirit, spreading through a nation, will not make it a nation of artists, but will make the nation's artists amateurs. No critic, no amateur, is more loath to try his own hand than the one who most deeply and rightly appreciates the skill of others, and the rare and God-given and difficult nature of that skill. The confusion of amateur with professional work lowers the standard, so there will be every year fewer to tell the mass of the nation that most useful of truths—how earnest a thing is true art, and how rare a native appreciation of its truest worth.

There is no place where the interest excited by national art is so widespread, where the exhibitions are so crowded, where they so regulate times and seasons, annual excursions to and departures from town, as in England. Yet there is no place where the interest in art seems to a stranger so factitious, so much a matter of fashion and custom, of instinctive following of chance-appointed bell-wethers. It would scarcely be a matter of surprise if the whole thing should collapse through some pin-thrust of rival interest or excitement, and next year's exhibition be a desert, next year's artists paint their theories and their souls for unregarding eyes, or rather for unheeding brains. Have we not an apology for such a suggestion in the history of the rage for Gothic architecture, so thoroughly demonstrated in every possible theoretical and philosophical way to be the only proper style for Englishmen present or future, so devotedly and exclusively followed for a while by the profession, only to be suddenly abandoned for its fresher rivals, the so-called styles of Queen Elizabeth and Queen Anne?

In the throngs that flocked to the opening of the Royal Academy, waiting hours before the doors were opened, fighting and struggling for a foothold on the stairs, eager to be the first to see, though there were weeks of opportunities ahead—in the rare recurrence through the hum of the vast criticising crowd of a word of technical judgment or sober artistic criticism—it was easy to recognize the same spirit that confuses morality with chair-legs, that finds a knocker more "sincere" and "right" than a door-bell, that insists as upon a vital necessity that the heads of all nails should be visible and that all lines should be straight, and would as soon have a shadow on its conscience as in the pattern of wall-paper. Nowhere was decorative art so non-existent a few years ago as in England—nowhere is it so universally dwelt upon to-day. Yet it is easy to see how entirely the revival is a child of theory and books and teachers and rules—how little owing to a spontaneous development of art-instinct in the people, a spontaneous desire for more beauty in their surroundings, a spontaneous knowledge of how it is best to be obtained.

The literary and un-painterlike—if I may use such an awkward term—nature of English art is shown perhaps more forcibly in its critics than in artists or public. One is especially struck in reading criticisms of whatever grade with the excessive prominence given to the artist's personality. The work of this year is judged not so much by its excellence as by comparison with the work of last year. A–'s pictures, and B–'s and C–'s and D–'s, are interesting and valuable mainly as showing A–'s improvement, or B–'s falling off, or C–'s unexpected change of theme, or D–'s fine mind and delicate sensibilities.

Mr. Ruskin is without doubt the most remarkable of English critics, and summarizes so many opposite theories and tendencies that his pages may in some sort be taken as an epitome of the whole matter. It would be impossible to abstract from their great bulk any consecutive or consistent system of thought or precept. His influence has been mainly by isolated ideas of more or less truth and value. It is impossible here to analyze his work. Such is the mixed tissue of his woof that the captive princess who was set to sort a roomful of birds' feathers had scarcely a harder task than one who should try to separate and classify his threads, some priceless and steady, some rotten, false, misleading. Morals, manners, religion, political economy, are mixed with art in every shape—art considered theoretically and technically, historically, philosophically and prophetically. Various as are his views on these varying subjects, on no one subject even do they remain invariable. Yet such is the charm of his style, delightfully sarcastic, and eloquent as a master's brush, so vividly is each idea presented in itself, that, each idea being enjoyed as it comes, all seem at first of equal value. We realize neither the fallacy of many taken singly nor the conflict of all taken together. His points are often cleverly and faithfully put, and our attention is so riveted on this cleverness and faithfulness that we take for granted the rightness of his deductions, slovenly, illogical or false though they may be. What we most remark in his books is how the purely artistic element in his nature—of a very high grade and very true instincts—is dwarfed of full development and stunted of full results by the theorizing literary bent which he has in common with his time and people. In theorizing even on truly-felt and clearly-stated facts, in explaining their origin and unfolding their effects, his guidance is least valuable. We may more safely ask him what than why. His influence on English art has been great at the instant: whether it will be permanent is doubtful. At one time it was said that without having read his books one could tell by an inspection of the Royal Academy walls what Mr. Ruskin had written in the past year. Now, the most notable exponents of his teaching, whether consciously so or not, are on the one hand the shining lights of the Grosvenor Gallery—hierophants of mysticism and allegory and symbolism and painted souls and moral beauty expressed in the flesh, copying Ruskin's Botticelli line for line, forgetting that what was naïveté in him, and in him admirable, because all before him had done so much less well, becomes to-day in them the direst affectation, is reprehensible in them because many before them have done so much better. On the other hand, we have a naturalistic throng which follows Mr. Ruskin's precepts when he overweights the other side of the scale and says that art should "never exist alone, never for itself," never except as "representing a true"—defined as actually-existing—"thing or decorating a useful thing;" when he declares that every attempt by the imagination to "exalt or refine healthy humanity has weakened or caricatured it." Mr. Ruskin bade men "go to Nature in all singleness of heart, and walk with her laboriously and trustingly, having no other thought but how best to penetrate her meaning, rejecting nothing, selecting nothing and scorning nothing;" and Mr. Hamerton was literally obeying him when he exiled himself for five years in a hut on an island in a bleak Scotch lake to learn faithfully to portray the shores of that single lake. Was it thus that Titian studied in his youth, and learned how, years after in Venice, to paint the chestnuts and the hills of Cadore a thousand-fold more artistically and more truly, because more abstractly and more ideally, than could all the "pre-Raphaelite" copyists of to-day? Thus we see the two extremes of Mr. Ruskin's teaching—see him at one time exalting imagination and feeling over the pictorial part of art, at another degrading art into the servilest copying.