Kitabı oku: «Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, December 1878», sayfa 8
SOME ASPECTS OF CONTEMPORARY ART
The art of the present day succeeds to the art of past centuries not immediately nor by an insensible gradation. It is preceded by an interval of absolute deadness in matters artistic. Sixty years ago art in almost every branch was a sealed book to the majority of even well-educated persons, and contentedly contemplated by them as such. All love for it, with all knowledge of its history and all desire for its development, was for a generation or two confined to a few professed followers and a few devoted patrons, the mass of mankind thinking of it not at all. But slowly a revival came in the main centres of civilization—not much sooner in one than in another, though somewhat differently in each. In Germany we see it beginning with the famous Teutonic colony at Rome, reverent in spirit, cautious in method, severe in theory, restrained in style—culminating, on the one hand, in the academic pietism of Overbeck, on the other in the deliberate majesty of Cornelius. In France the new life begins with the successors of David, strenuous, impetuous, jealous and innovating, Ingres and outline waging deadly battle with color and Delacroix. In England architectural enthusiasm gave the first impulse, the "Gothic Revival" becoming the basis of all subsequent work.
If, before noting the points of difference between one branch and another of this modern art, we try to find the characteristics in which these branches resemble one another, and by which they collectively are distinguished from earlier developments, we find the most prominent one to be self-consciousness—not necessarily self-conceit, but the inward consciousness that they are, and the endeavor to realize just what they are. With these comes, when the art is conscientious, a desire to discover the noblest goal and to formulate the best methods of reaching it. Some, casting the horoscope for this struggling art of ours, find in these facts a great discouragement, believing that the vital germ of art is spontaneity—believing that there cannot again be a genuine form of art until there arise a fresh race of artists, unfed by the mummy-wheat of tradition, unfettered by the cere-cloths of criticism. Others, more sanguine, believe that spontaneity has done all it can, and that its place is in the future to be worthily filled by a wide eclecticism. Let us inquire what testimony as to the value of spontaneity and the influence of self-consciousness in art may be gathered from the methods and results of the past, and what from a contrast between the different contemporary schools in their methods and their results. Painting, as most prominently before our eyes and minds just now, will principally concern us.
To the making of every work of art go three things and no more—the material worked upon, the hand that works, and the intellect or imagination which guides that hand. When the proportion is perfect between the three, the work of art is perfect of its kind. But in the different kinds of art the necessary proportion is not the same. In music, for example, the medium is at its lowest value, the imagination at its highest. In architecture, on the other hand, material is most important. Musicians use the vibration of string and atmosphere, sculptors use bronze and marble, painters use color and canvas, poets use rhythm and rhyme, as vehicles to express their ideas. The architect's ideas are for the sake of his material. He takes his material as such, and embellishes it with his ideas—creates beauty merely by disposing its masses and enriching its surface. But in all and each of these processes, whether mind predominate or matter, there comes in as a further necessary factor the actual technical manipulation. Poetic visions and a noble mother-tongue do not constitute a man a poet if he cannot treat that language nobly according to the technique of his art. Nor, though Ariel sing in his brain and the everlasting harp of the atmosphere wait for him, is he a musician if he have not a sensitive ear and a knowledge of counter-point. More notably yet does the hand—and in this as a technical term I include the other bodily powers which go to form technical skill,—more notably yet does the hand come in play with the painter. Here the material is little, the imagination mighty indeed, but less overwhelming than with poet and musician; but the technique, the God-given and labor-trained cunning of retina and wrist, how all-important! often how all-sufficing!
In all criticism it is necessary first to reflect which of these three factors—intellectual power, physical endowment or propitious material—is most imperious. When we find this factor most perfectly developed, and the others, though subordinate, neither absent nor stunted, we shall find the art nearest to perfection. And the conditions of race and climate and society which most helpfully develop that factor without injuring the others are the conditions which will best further that art. And the critic who lays most stress on that factor, and is content to miss, if necessary, though noting the loss, a certain measure of the other two in order more entirely to gain the one that is vitalest, is the critic whose words are tonic. And he who, blending the province of the arts, calling them all with vagueness "art," exalts and demands the same factor first in all of them, must be detrimental, no matter how great his sincerity and his knowledge.
Before weighing any contemporary thing in the balance let us mark out in the past some standards of comparison. For it is useless to speculate upon theoretical methods if we can discover the actual methods employed by those whose art, if not ideally perfect, is yet so far beyond our present power as to be quite perfectly ideal. It needs no discussion to prove that to find the utmost that has been actually accomplished by human endeavor we must turn in sculpture and in language to Greece, in music to Germany, in architecture to Greece or to mediæval Europe as our taste may pull, and in painting to the Italians.
The primary conception of art in its productive energy is as a certain inspiration. How did that inspiration work in those whom we acknowledge to have received it in fullest measure? If we think a moment we shall say, "Involuntarily"—by a sort of possession rather than a voluntary intellectual effort. The sculpture of the Greeks, their tragedies and their temples, were all wrought simply, without effort, without conscious travailing, by a natural evolution, not by a potent egg-hatching process of instructive criticism and morbid self-inspection and consulting of previous models, native and foreign. Architectural motives were gathered from Egypt and the East, from Phoenicia and Anatolia, but they were worked in as material, not copied as patterns; and the architecture is as original as if no one had ever built before. Phidias and Praxiteles and the rest shaped and chiselled, aiming at perfection no doubt, trying to do their best, but without troubling themselves as to what that best "ought" to be. Criticism was rife in Athens of all places, but it was a criticism of things existing, not of things problematically desirable. Statue and temple-front were criticised, not sculptor and architect—surely not sculpture and architecture in the abstract. Not sculptors and architects, that is, when the question was of their works. The men came in for their share of criticism, but on a different count. Theseus and Athene were judged as works of art, not as lame though interesting revelations of Phidias's soul. And be sure no faintest sin of the chisel was excused on the plea that Phidias meant more than he could express, and so bungled in the expression. Nor was the plea advanced that such bungling after the infinite was better than simple perfection in the attainable. An artist was called upon to be an artist, not a poet nor a philosopher nor a moralist. When Plato confounded them all in a splendid confusion of criticism the fruit-time had gone by. There was left but to expatiate on the hoard which summer had bequeathed, or to speculate, if he chose, on the possible yield of a future and most problematical year.
In the rich Italian summer one sees the same thing. Men paint because they must—because put at anything else they come back to art as iron to the magnet. Not because art is lovely, nor because to be an artist is a desirable or a noble or a righteous thing, but because they are artists born, stamped, double-dyed, and, kick as they might, they could be nothing else—if not artists creative, yet artists critical and appreciative. Truly, they think and strive over their art, write treatises and dogmas and speculations, vie with and rival and outdo each other. But it is their art they discuss, not themselves, not one another—technical methods, practical instruction, questions of pigment and model and touch, of perspective and chiaroscuro and varnish, not psychological æsthetics, biographical and psychical explanations as to facts of canvas and color. What is done is what is to be criticised. What can be done technically is what should be done theoretically, and what cannot be done with absolute and perfect technical success is out of the domain of art once and for ever. As the Greek did not try to carve marble eyelashes, so no Venetian tried to put his conscience on a panel. All Lionardo could see of Mona Lisa's soul he might paint, not all he could feel of Lionardo's. Mr. Ruskin himself quotes Dürer's note that Raphael sent him his drawings, not to show his soul nor his theories, but simply seine Hand zu weisen—to prove his touch. In Raphael's touch was implied Raphael's eye, and those two made the artist Raphael.
Nothing strikes one more in these men than the oblivion of self in their work. Only one of the first-rank men was self-conscious, and he, the most mighty as a man, is by no means the first as an artist. And even Michael Angelo had not the self-consciousness of to-day: it requires a clique of commentators and a brotherhood of artists equally infected to develop that. But just so far as he tried to put his mighty self into his work, just so far he failed of artistic perfection; and not every one is Michael Angelo to make even failure beautifully colossal. In architecture, which in his day was already a dead art to be galvanized, not alive and manly like the art of the painter, his self-consciousness shows most strongly and his failure is most conspicuous. Here he did not create, but avowedly composed—set himself deliberately to study the past and to decide what was best for the future. And upon none but him rests the blame of having driven out of the semi-unconscious, semi-original Renaissance style what elements of power it had, and sent it reeling down through two centuries crazed with conceit and distorted with self-inspection.
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."
