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University of Toronto. From the Van Home Collection.
MODERN ART
AUTHORISED BY MR. WHISTLER
THE LIFE OF JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER
By E. R. & J. PENNELL
In Two Volumes, with over 120 Plates in Half
Tone and Photogravure. Crown 4to. Price 363.
net. Also an Edition de Luxe of 150 Numbered
Copies on Japanese paper. Price £5 53. net
This book is the Life authorised and planned by Whistler himself, and it is based on material furnished by himself and by his family. Whistler was certainly fortunate in his choice, forMrs.Pennell's admirable Life of Charles Godfrey Leland has proved her to be a very able biographer, and the master's long friendship with her and her husband gave them that opportunity of personal knowledge which no bio- grapher who had only documents to work from could possibly possess. Many of the pictures were photographed before they left Whistler's studio, and it is certain that rarely, if ever, was so much material brought together to illustrate the life-work of a great artist. That his personality was as interesting as his work, all those experienced who came into contact with him. His wit, his brilliant conversation, the fun with which he baited his enemies, the determination with which he cherished and upheld his friends, the philosophy of his art and the clearness of his vision, all these delighted his circle day by day.
LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN
MIER: "•
MAN (LA LAVEUSI
L(
H
MODERN ART
BEING A CONTRIBUTION TO A NEW SYSTEM OF AESTHETICS
BY
JULIUS MEIER-GRAEFE
FROM THE GERMAN BY
FLORENCE SIMMONDS
AND
GEORGE W. CHRYSTAL
VOLUME 1
LONDON : WILLIAM HEINEMANN
NEW YORK: G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS •,
1908
Copyright London 1908 by William Heinemann and Washington. U.S.A. ly G. P. Putnam's Sons
CONTENTS BOOK I
THE STRUGGLE FOR PAINTING
PAGE
THE MEDIUMS OF ART, PAST AND PRESENT i
TRADITIONS 12
THE RISE OF PAINTING 15
MOSAICS 1 5
FROM THE GOTHIC PERIOD TO THE RENAISSANCE 21
THE FIRST FLORESCENCE OF PAINTING 27
THE EMPIRE 33
INGRES 36
GERMAN ART 40
ENGLAND'S CONTRIBUTION 45
HOGARTH 45
THE PORTRAIT MANUFACTURERS 64
WILSON AND GAINSBOROUGH 74
TURNER 82
CONSTABLE 99
FROM DELACROIX TO COURBET 144
EUGENE DELACROIX 144
HONORE DAUMIER 155
COROT i 60
JEAN FRAN9ois MILLET 195
SEGANTINI 200
VINCENT VAN GOGH 202
CONSTANTIN MEUNIER 213
vi CONTENTS
BOOK II
THE PILLARS OF MODERN PAINTING
PAGE
GUSTAVE COURBET 219
THE GENERATION OF 1870 252
MANET AND HIS CIRCLE 257
CEZANNE AND HIS CIRCLE 266
PAUL CEZANNE 266
VUILLARD, BONNARD, RoUSSEL 271
DEGAS AND HIS CIRCLE 277
EDGAR DEGAS 277
THE SUCCESSORS 282
HENRI DE TOULOUSE-LAUTREC 283
RENOIR AND HIS CIRCLE 287
BOOK III
COLOUR AND COMPOSITION
I. COLOUR
CLAUDE MONET 301
SEURAT AND HIS CIRCLE 309
THE APOSTLE AND THE CONGREGATION 309
PAUL SIGNAC 015
NEO-IMPRESSIONISM AS AN ART-FORM 318
NEO-IMPRESSIONISM itf BRUSSELS 323
ILLUSTRATIONS
Tf/act t*S'
DAUMIER. The Washerwoman. 'Bureau Collection, Paris FrmtispUct
FANTIN-LATOUR. Drawing for the Portrait in the Van Cutsen Collection, Brusielt vi Mosaic in Murano Cathedral 8
BENOZZO GOZZOLI. Fresco. Noah's Vintage. Campo Santo, Pisa 12
GIOTTO. Detail of a Fresco in the Chapel of the Madonna dell' Arena in Padua 20
VAN EYCK. Jan Arnolfini and his Wife. National Gallery 24
TINTORETTO. Martyrdom of St. Mark. 'Brussels Museum 26
RUBENS. The Lion Hunt. Hermitage, St. Petersburg 28
REMBRANDT. Dr. Deyman's Anatomy Lesson. Rijk.5 Museum, Amsterdam 30
REMBRANDT. The Unmerciful Servant. Wallace Collection, London 32
J. L. DAVID. Paris and Helen. Group from the picture in the Louvre, Paris 34
J. L. DAVID. The Three Ladies of Ghent. Louvre, Paris 36
INGRES. Drawing of a Lady 38
INGRES. Madame Riviere. Louvre, Paris 40
INGRES. La Grande Odalisque. Louvre, Paris 42
HOGARTH. Peg Woffington. Sir Edward Tennant's Collection 46
HOGARTH. Unused Sketch for " Industry and Idleness." 'British Museum 50
HOGARTH. Marriage k la Mode. National Gallery 54
HOGARTH. The Shrimp Girl. National Gallery 60
REYNOLDS. Lavinia, Countess Spencer. Earl Spencer's Collection 64
REYNOLDS. White the Paviour. Earl of Cretce's Collection 68
ROMNEY. Portrait of Miss Ramus. Hon. W. F. D. Smith's Collection 70
RAEBURN. Portrait of Mrs. James Campbell. Mr. L. Muirhead's Collection 72
WILSON. Italian Lake. The White Pilgrim 74
GAINSBOROUGH. Cornard Wood. National Gallery 76
GAINSBOROUGH. The Mall. Sir A. Neelfs Collection 78
GAINSBOROUGH. Portrait Study. Heseltine Collection 80
CLAUDE LORRAIN. The Marriage of Isaac and Rebecca. National Gallery 86
TURNER. The Fighting T6meraire. National Gallery 90
TURNER. The Great Western Railway. National Gallery 90
CUTP. After the Thunder-storm. The Hague Museum no
VAN GOYEN. View of Dordrecht. The Hague Museum 114
CONSTABLE. The Cornfield. National Gallery 118
RUBENS. Mercury and Argus. Brussels Museum 120
RUBINS. Autumn. National Gallery 1 22
CONSTABLE. Coast Scene. Cheramy Collection, Paris 128
CONSTABLE. Jubilee at East Bergholt after Waterloo. Cheramy Collection, Paris 132
DELACROIX. Portrait of the Artist. Louvre, Paris 140
DELACROIX. Fragment from the Massacre of Scio, 1838. Cheramy Collection, Paris 144
GE'RICAULT. Silenus (Drawing). Marcille Collection, Paris 146
viii ILLUSTRATIONS
To/act
foe*
G^RICAULT. The Mad Woman. Cheramy Collection, Paris *48 DILACROIX. Horse and Tiger (Lithograph). Cheramy and A. Rouart Collections, Paris
GOYA. Vision de la Romeria de San Isidro. Prado, Madrid 1 54
DAUMIER Drinking Song (Water-colour). Tavernier Collection, Paris 154
DAUMIER. Portrait of Berlioz. Versailles Museum 156
DAUMIE*. The Two Lawyers (Water-colour). Bureau Collection, Paris 158
DAUMIER. The Fugitives. From a Cast of the Bronze Relief. Marx Collection, Paris 160
DAUMIER. Ratapoil (Bronze). A. Rouart Collection, Paris 1 64
COROT. St. Sebastian. Cheramy Collection, Paris 168
COROT. The Toilette. Dei/ones Collection, Paris 1 7°
VERMEER. View of Delft. The Hague Museum 174
COROT. Genzano. Cheramy Collection, Paris 178
VERMEER. The Soldier and the Laughing Girl. From an Etching by Jacjuemart 182
COROT. The Studio. Esnault-Pelterie Collection, Paris 184
VERMEER. Head of a Girl. The Hague Museum 188
COROT. The Lady in Blue. H. Rouart Collection, Paris 19*
MILLET. The Soup. Marseilles Museum 194
MILLET. Drawing 19"
SEGANTINI. The Mothers (Drawing) 200
SEGANTINI. La Vacca Bagnata. Flersheim Collection, Frankfort 200
VINCENT VAN GOGH. Landscape. Kessler Collection, Weimar 202
VINCENT VAN GOGH. The Good Samaritan. Painted Jrom a lithograph after the picture by
Delacroix 206
VINCENT VAN GOGH. Public Gardens at Aries. Gustave Fayet Collection, 'Be'ziers 210
CONSTANTIN MEUNIER. Harvest (a relief from the " Labour " monument) 214
MANET. At Pere Lathuile's, 1879. Van Cutsen Collection, Brussels 216
MANET. Boating, 1874. Havemeyer Collection, New York 216
RENOIR. Lise. Folkioang Museum, Hagen 218
COURBET. The Woman and the Wave. Photograph Durand Ruel 220
F. HALS. Portrait of Willem Croes. The Hague Museum 222
GOYA. El Famoso Americano, Mariano Ceballos (Lithograph) 224
GOYA. The Dance. Design for Tapestry. Torrecilla Collection, Madrid 226
GOYA. Charlotte Corday. Photograph Durand Ruel 228
COURBET. The Ladies of the Village, 185 I. Durand Ruel 232
VELAZQUEZ. Pope Innocent X. Hermitage, St. Petersburg 236
COURBET. The Grotto of the Loire. Photograph Durand Ruei 244
COURBET. The Grotto. Photograph Durand T(uel 244
CONSTANTIN GUYS. At Mabille (Water-colour) 246
EUGENE LAMI. Races at Maisons Lafitte. A, Rouart Collection, Paris 248
JONGKIND. View of Honfleur, 1865. Photograph Durand Ruel 250
SISLEY. The Flood, 1875. Camondo Collection, Paris 250
MANET. The Nymph Surprised, 1861. Manzi Collection, Paris. Photograph Camentron 252
MANET. Fishing, 1 86 1. Durand Ruel 254
MANET. The Al-Fresco Luncheon. Moreau-NMaton Collection, Paris 254
MANET. Lola de Valence, 1852. Camondo Collection, Paris 256
SARGENT. Portrait of Madame Gautreau 258
MANET. Toilers of the Sea, 1874. Faure Collection, Paris. Photograph Camentron 260
MANET. Before the Mirror, 1876. Photograph Durand Ruet 262
CEZANNE. A Sunday in Summer (Woodcut). Hessel Collection, Paris 264
ILLUSTRATIONS ix
T.fmc, faft
CEZANNE. The Rape. Photograph Durand Rucl 266
CEZANNE. The Al-Fresco Luncheon. Pollard Gallery, Paris 266
CEZANNE. Still Life. Bernheim Collection, Parti 268
BONNARD. The Boulevard. Photograph Drutt 270
BONMAKD. Une Apr&midi Bourgeoise. Property of the Artist 272
ROUSSEL. Hylas. Fineon Collection, Parti 27^.
ROUSSEL. Nymphs and Faun. Fineon Collection, Paris 274
DEGAS. The Dancers (Les Pointes) (Pastel) 276
DEGAI. Harlequin and Columbine (Pastel) 278
DEGAS. The Bath (Pastel). Luxembourg, Parts 280
DEGAS. A Caf£ on the Boulevard Montmartre (Pastel). Luxembourg, Paris 280
TOULOUSE-LAUTREC. A la Mie. Bernheim Collection, Paris 282
TOULOUSE-LAUTREC. The Model Resting. 'Bernheim Collection, Paris 284
RENOIR. Idyll. Kessler Collection, Weimar 286
RENOIR. Lady on Horseback. H. Rouart Collection, Paris 288
FRAGONAKD. Women Bathing. Louvre, Paris 290
RENOIR. Women Bathing. Bernheim Collection, Paris 20,0
RENOIR. Women Bathing, 1885. Blanche Collection, Paris 292
RENOIR. A Woman Bathing. Durand Rucl Collection, Paris 294
RENOIR. Nude Figure on the Beach. Durand Ruel Collection, Paris 296
CLAUDE MONET. The Bridge at Argenteuil. Faure Collection, Paris 298
CLAUDE MONET. Saardam. Tavernier Collection, Paris. Photograph Druet 298
CLAUDE MONET. The Seine at Rueil. Photograph Durand Ruel 300
CLAUDE MONET. Cliffs and Beach at Pourville. Photograph Durand Rucl 302
CLAUDE MONET. Still Life. Photograph 'Durand Ruel 304
CAMILLE PISSARRO. The Edge of the Lake (Water-colour). Cheramy Collection, Paris 306
CAMILLE PISSARRO. The Fountain of the Tuileries. Bernheim Collection, Paris 306
SBURAT. Bathing (fragment, 1884). Penton Collection, Paris 308
SEURAT. Sketch for " La Grande Jatte," 1884. Fineon Collection, Parii 310
SEURAT. Le Chahut, 1 890. Photograph Drutt 3 1 2
PAUL SIGNAC. The Coast at Port-en-Bassin. FMon Collection, Paris 314.
CLAUDE MONET. The Field of Poppies, 1883. Stern Collection, Berlin 314.
PAUL SIGNAC. Morning at Samois. Kessler Collection, Weimar 316
HENRI EDMCND CROSS. Fishermen (Var), 1901 318
DEGAS. Portrait of Mdlle. Malot, the Dancer. Blanche Collection, Paris 320
DEGAS. Coming from the Bath (Pastel). Tavernier Collection, Paris 322
DEGAS. The Dancing Lesson. "Blanche Collection, Paris 324
BONNARD. Nude Study. Photograph Druet 326
ERRATA
Page 41, line 25, jot " Kraus " read " Knaus."
.. 70, for " W. J. D." read " W. F. D." on Plate.
„ 1 53, line 43, for "I shall deal " rtad " I have dealt. "
,, 194, for "Marseille," read "Marseilles" on Plate.
H 236, for "Doria Pamfili Gallery" read "Hermitage, St. Petersburg" on Plate.
ii 256 /or " G. Manet " read " Edouard Manet" Pages 276, 286 read " From a Drawing by Fllix Vallotton."
VOL. I.
ILLUSTRATIONS IN TEXT
Fragment of the large Mosaic at Torcello
Wooden Crucifix in Brunswick Cathedral
From an Engraving by DURER
From an Engraving by DURER
TURNER. Solway Moss (after the etching)
Auvergnate Peasant Woman spinning (from a Woodcut by Paris after J. F. Millet)
Drawing by J. F. MILLET (after a Woodcut by A, Lav'uille)
EDOUARD MANET. Portrait of Courbet
EDOUARD MANET. Olympia (from a Woodcut by the Painter)
EDOUARD MANET. Portrait of Guys (from a Woodcut by Tieltrand)
From a Drawing by FELIX VALLOTTON
From a Drawing by FELIX VALLOTTON
From a Drawing by FELIX VALLOTTON
From a Drawing by FELIX VALLOTTON
From a Japanese Woodcut
From a Drawing by GEORGE LEMMEN
From an Etching by HENRI DE BRAEKELEER
PAGE X
26
39 44 98
'97 199
255 256 265 276 286
298
308
325 326
FRAGMENT OF THE LARGE MOSAIC AT TORCELLO
BOOK I
THE STRUGGLE FOR PAINTING
THE MEDIUMS OF ART, PAST AND PRESENT
OUR collective artistic culture was bound to suffer, when the collective forces of art were concentrated in a special domain, that of pictures and statues. The fact is not minimised by the consideration, that this development was the work of a glorious history, originating in the most brilliant phases of modern culture. Nor can it be denied that the most splendid epochs of humanity achieved their great results without the omnipotence of pictures. It will hardly be contended that the Greeks lacked the instinct for artistic expression. The only modern nations that may aptly be compared with the Greeks in artistic importance, the Chinese and Japanese, certainly had pictures, but they had them as the Greeks had their sculptures and their wall-decorations ; to such gifted nations as these, abstract art was not the final goal of artistic ambition, but merely one of the many emanations of their rich culture. These works are, no doubt, the most important evidences of their art that we now possess, but they are far from being the only ones ; they crown a whole that is homogeneous throughout. They are, therefore, infinitely less significant of the degree of culture of their age than are works of equal importance in our own times. To the brilliant researches of German savants, more especially Furtwangler, we owe the beginnings of a personal estimate of Phidias. Yet who does not feel that even this greatest of artists was not the arbiter of his epoch, but a product of its glory ?
The ideal interdependence of all artistic activities made art the possession of the whole people, and enabled them to understand it and to love it.
We moderns repeatedly see instances of great artists who live and work and die among us, and find recognition only after death, while the public acclaims the pigmy who is no sooner dead than he is forgotten. It was not so in the past. Among the pictures of the great masters in our galleries we find portraits of their wealthy and powerful contemporaries. How came the rich patrons of Florence, Flanders, and the Netherlands, of France and Germany, to choose the greatest masters of their time as their portraitists, whereas the wealthy and distinguished of our own age so often content themselves with the most miserably equipped ? Obviously, they were better able to appreciate good painting. Yet then as now, princes busied themselves with affairs of state, and their artistic sense was not relatively higher above that of the general public than it is to-day. But the general standard was higher. The public was no more concerned with painting than it is now ; then as now, it had other things to occupy it ; but it was familiar with art. People found in painting the same excellence as in other things, chairs, tables, and clothing; they would have been astonished to find anything else. Painting was not much more highly esteemed than any other craft. It owed its privileged position solely
VOL. I A
2 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART
to the fact that from its nature, it existed mainly as the handmaid of religion ; it adorned the church, the sanctuary. The origin of this adornment was practical ; it filled the bare surfaces left by the architect, the real artist in the eyes of the masses throughout the Gothic period. Painting dealt only with predetermined themes ; it had to translate religious conceptions ; hence there is a certain essential difference between it and the art of our own day ; subject was in no sense charac- teristic, for it was the same for all. This necessarily led to a purely artistic development, which the multitude followed. If it did not quite exclude critical errors, it reduced them to a minimum. The strict convention no artist could cast aside, did not prevent artists from becoming great; it served them as a shield against the public, who recognised something familiar even in their originality ; the convention was a protection, not an impediment. But at the same time a close relation between artist and layman was not of such practical necessity then as now. The Church or the State was, broadly speaking, the sole patron. The artist troubled himself little about the public, for he had no immediate or practical dealings therewith. This circumstance had not only a material side ; it contributed to the ideal relations subsisting between the two. The layman of the Gothic period looked at a work of art with other eyes as compared with ourselves. To a certain extent he was colder in his attitude ; but he was also juster.
In these days, the pure work of art has been brought into immediate contact with every-day life ; an attempt has been made to transform it utterly, to make it the medium of the aesthetic aspirations of the house, whereas this function belongs properly to the house itself and the utilitarian objects in it. We have tried to popularise the highest expression of art, something only significant when applied to the loftiest purposes, something, the enjoyment of which without a certain solemnity is inconceivable, or, at least, only to be attained in moments of peculiar detach- ment. We have succeeded merely in vulgarising it.
This is the source of the great error that retards our artistic culture. We revolve in vicious circles round the abstract work of art.
The painted or carved image is in its nature immovable. Not only because it was originally composed for a given space, but because the world of emotion to which it belongs lies wholly apart. This may be so powerful, that its association with the things of daily life cannot be effected without serious damage either to the one or the other.
The association of works of art with religious worship was therefore the most natural association possible. A heavenly illumination, itself possessed of all the attributes of divinity, art gave impetus to the soul in its aspirations towards the mystic, its flight from the sufferings of daily life, and offered the best medium possible for that materialisation of the divine idea, which the primitive man demands in religion. The ancient Greek worship, with its natural, purely sensuous conceptions, was the happiest basis for the artist, for in Greece religion and art were one thing : beauty. The god was the ideal of beauty.
When the temple became a church, art lost its original purity, and became the handmaid of the hierarchy. But religion was so deeply implanted in the souls of the faithful, that both to executant and recipient the service never lost the mystic atmosphere, the common bond, and all hostile antagonism was avoided. It was the Reformation that first drove the image from the temple, and gave to worship a form, the austerity of which excluded any sensuous enjoyment.
THE MEDIUMS OF ART, PAST AND PRESENT 3
This was one of the many contributory impulses that brought about the con- fusion of aesthetics. Art was so closely bound up with religion, that it almost seemed as if the enlightenment that shattered the one, must be dangerous to the other. The mysticism of art and that of religion had formerly mingled their currents. As a fact, the former was no less obscure than the latter — who can say even now, what the essence of art is ? But the pious and sometimes beautiful fable of religion had to perish, to make way, not for Luther's compromise, but for something radically opposite, science, by which the raison d'etre of art remained unaffected. Indeed, as science could not satisfy the mystic yearnings of the soul, the sphere of art was, if possible, extended, though it could no longer be restricted to conventional forms.
The emancipation of man from the dogmas of the church was an advance. In the domain of art, where it destroyed the fixed convention as to subject, it might have become beneficent. But as a fact, it entailed retrogression. Painting was not yet strong enough to stand alone, or perhaps it was already enervated ; instead, now that it was free from all objective constraint, of rising to the heights of pure art, sustained by its own convention alone, it gradually became vulgarised, and finally fell into perplexities from which it had been preserved in the early ages of culture. A three-fold watchword inspired the political and social contests of the new age : Freedom, Truth, Equality. We think we have the first two ; and our generation is warring for a verdict as to the third.
Art thought herself bound to take part in the contest. As on other battlefields, the three sections of the ideal were upheld simultaneously, and as in these again, the fight was sharpest and most decisive over the first two, Freedom and Truth.
Broadly speaking, the trilogy, taken absolutely, is Utopian, and even nonsen- sical ; but in social matters, the ideal regulates itself in a rational manner. In art, where such was not the case, where the extravagance of the postulate was far in excess of its good sense, it worked most mischievously.
Art was to be free — but free from what ? The innovators forgot, that freedom implies isolation. In her impulsive vehemence, art cast away the elements that made her indispensable to man. The vaster the wide ocean of unbounded aims before her, the more distant was the terra firma which had been her home. She lost her native land.
The goal was of the vaguest, and therefore, it was dubbed truth. For the most part it was a negation of the very essence of art, which is neither truer nor falser than an earthworm, or a star, or any imaginable thing to which conceptions such as that of truth have no possible relation. But the formula persisted, and the materialisation of the abstract was carried so far, that Art was humiliated by a crude comparison with Nature. Because conceptions of certain aspects of Nature figure among the technical equipment of great artists, because they faithfully re- produced things the eye is supposed to have seen in woods and meadows, they were pronounced " truer " than others who did not use these means, or who used them differently. Men began to forget that to the artist, woods and meadows can be no more than a purely mechanical medium such as his brushes or his palette, or a thousand other things he supposes, rightly or wrongly, to be necessary to him, but which are as foreign to the enjoyment of others as those rotten apples which a certain German poet needed for his inspiration !
It must be understood that the artist did not think thus. It was the layman. He took to reflection where he had formerly given himself up to sensation, and
4 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART
his attempt to arrive at a rational understanding of art resulted in schism, as formerly in the case of religion. It was impossible for him to see the thing as it was, and not knowing how justifiable was his repulsion to an incomprehensible abstraction, he caught at the first tendencies his caprice presented to him, and directed art in accordance therewith. The immediate result was that adroit persons at once sprang up, who exploited these tendencies. They were greeted with acclamations.
This alone is a sufficient explanation of the ever-increasing disproportion between artists and those who impertinently call themselves such. And at the same time, it accounts for the antagonism of the layman to art. In earlier times the mysticism of the church drove the believer into the mysticism of art. He offered no resistance. One awe completed the other. But later he had made up his mind to a personal interest in the matter, and when this was not satisfied, he was repelled.
The conception of equality in the secularisation of art tended to positive aberration. It did not attain to the authority of & shibboleth, like the two others, but it danced like an ignis fatuus before the eyes of both artists and laymen. Art was to lay aside its majesty. Even here tyranny was supposed to have entrenched itself. It was to present itself humbly, soberly, plainly, realisti- cally. But when it came, men knew not what to make of it, and in lofty scorn of the equality that had been won, it turned to serve the few, the elect.
Art could only have remained equal and universal on universally accessible ground. This it had lost when it was severed from the church. An attempt was indeed made to replace the religious ideal by the patriotic passion. But setting aside the fact that there was no appropriate stage for the display of the results, this ideal, though perhaps a more possible substitute than any other, lacked all the elements necessary to a tradition. It was, above all, too mobile, too closely related to contemporary passions and personalities. It gave us the historical picture, in which the public saw only the history ; the enthusiasm or pain that it evoked could not be laid to the account of art.
That works of art should be easy of acquisition by purchase was one of the principles of the theory of equality. Every one was henceforth to be able to buy art. All that was needed was money. This, again, led to a direct negation of the shibboleth.
It was only in those earlier days, when proprietary rights were not associated with art, that the relation of the layman thereto approached the socialistic ideal. Art was for all, for it belonged to no one. It stood above individual greed, a highly communistic symbol in an age that in all else was far indeed from the socialism of our day. Now it has become the expression of our terrible class distinctions. It is only accessible to an aristocracy, whose domination is the more sinister, in that it is not based solely on rank and wealth, that is to say, on things by the division of which the ardent socialist hopes to re-establish the social equilibrium. There is nothing so unattainable, for the enjoyment of it pre- supposes an abnormal refinement of aesthetic perception, which has become as rare as genius itself. Nowadays, one must not only have a great deal of money to buy art, but one must be an exceptional creature, of peculiar gifts, to enjoy it. It exists only , for the few, and these are far from being the most admirable or beneficent of mankind ; they seem, indeed, to show all the characteristics of the degenerate. Loftiness of character, or of intelligence, are not essential to the com-
THE MEDIUMS OF ART, PAST AND PRESENT 5
prehension of art. The greatest men of our age have notoriously known nothing about it, and what is more remarkable, artists themselves often understand it least of all. Artists have talked more nonsense about art than any other class of men. Modern artistic culture can scarcely be accounted an indispensable element of general culture any longer, for the simple reason that art has ceased to play a part in the general organism.
Art has not so much as a decisive influence on our taste, even among those who have penetrated most deeply into the secrets of artistic enjoyment. We have the clearest evidence of this in the indifference with which people, who surround themselves with the most costly works, regard the general decadence of industry. They, the elect, who possess their masterpieces, not only materially, but psycholo- gically, tolerate the most glaring breaches of taste in the rooms where their treasures hang. They, who have shown themselves competent to choose the best among the best, amaze us by their utter insensibility in such matters as their clothing, and their daily surroundings. The one thing swallows up all the rest ; their worship has become mania.
This attenuation of aesthetic exigence tends further to reduce their demands on the work of art itself to a minimum. They tolerate the most glaring defects, nay, even to a certain extent absolute incapacity, if some single quality is preserved, which approves itself as unique.
In the course of our appreciations, we shall make due allowance for the relative justification of such estimates in individual instances ; we may even fall under the spell of the particular so far, as to be unable to keep the general always before our eyes. I register my protest here at the outset the more emphatically, in the hope that it may be strong enough to curb my own obsessions. It is the vow of the " infirm of purpose," his hand already on the door of the tea-house, whose inmates beckon to him from behind the reeds.
II
The incomprehensibility of painting and sculpture to the general public has been shrouded in a veil of pretentious exposition. The amount of talking and writing about art in our day exceeds that in all other epochs put together. The increase of sociability rising from increase of wealth made it necessary to invent suitable occupations for unproductive energies. Chatter about art became a highly popular form of such amusement ; it requires no special preparation, no exertion, is independent of weather and seasons, and can be practised in drawing-rooms ! Art has become like caviare — every one wants to have it, whether they like it or not. The immaterial elements of the former give a certain intellectual tone to the sport, which is lacking in a feast of caviare ; it is therefore complacently opposed to such material enjoyments. The discussion of art in Germany (the home, par excellence, of such discussion) originated in the dark days of the nation during the first quarter of the nineteenth century, when men were dreaming romantically of the great things they lacked. Nevertheless, it was more fruitful than it is now ; it was the sphere of great personalities, and the origin of an idealism, which, though impotent, was sincere. Nothing of all this has survived but a subsidiary function. It is the form of
6 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART
entertainment affected by families who do not give expensive dinner-parties. It has become the feudal cognisance of the aspiring bourgeoisie, as necessary to the well-educated as some indispensable garment.
Love of art, however, especially the kind of love that goes beyond platonic limits, becomes rarer as those who meddle with it multiply in every land. Purchase has become the touchstone of such affection ; like marriage, it is a practical token of sentiment, and even to the artist, this evidence is generally more important than the impulse that inspired it.
It can hardly be otherwise now." If art is to be anything, it must not arouse merely that languid attention which people manifest when they politely approve something as "very interesting." It is not enough that it should inspire the pens of scribblers, and develop itself alone, and not others. In the form to which it is confined to-day — that of picture or statue, a marketable commodity—it could only exercise an influence by fulfilling the purpose of other marketable things : that of being purchased. But the popularisation of art is rendered impossible by the extravagant prices commanded by recognised works of art and demanded for those that are not so recognised, by a frantic, absurd, and unhappily, thoroughly dishonest traffic. I can conceive of rich people who would refrain from the purchase of pictures out of sheer disgust at the trade, a desire to keep their hands clean. The purchasing amateur is a personality made up of the most obscure springs of action. The absolutely incalculable fluctuations in prices, the influence of fashion, nowhere so demented as in this connection, the desire to go on improving his collection, i.e., to bring it up to the fashionable standard of the moment, forces the collector to be always selling, to become the shamefaced dealer, who is, of course, the most shameless, and who introduces additional elements of disorder into a commerce already chaotic. The result is that there are, as a fact, no buyers, but only dealers, people who pile their pictures one above the other, deal exclusively, or almost exclusively, with each other, and have no connection with the real public. Statistics, showing how few are the hands to which the immense artistic wealth of the world is confined, would make a sensation. A great London dealer once told me that he had only three customers ! Durand-Ruel, of Paris, has several times had certain famous Impressionist pictures in his possession at progressive prices, rising some 1000 per cent, each time, and the purchasers have often been the same persons on several occasions.
Such conditions reduce the aesthetic usefulness of a work to a minimum. Pictures become securities, which can be kept locked up like papers. Even the individual, the owner, ceases to enjoy his possession. Nine-tenths of the most precious French pictures are kept for nine-tenths of the year in magnificent cases, to protect them from dust. Sales are effected as on the Bourse, and speculation plays an important part in the operations. The goods are scarcely seen, even at the sale. A typical, but by no means unique, example is afforded by the late Forbes collection. It consisted of I forget how many hundreds or thousands of pictures. To house them, the owner rented the upper storey of one of the largest London railway stations, vast storehouses, but all too circumscribed to allow of the hanging of the pictures. They stood in huge stacks against the walls, one behind the other : the Israels, Mauves, and Marises were to be counted by hundreds, the French masters of 1830 by dozens ; there where exquisite examples of Millet, Corot, Daubigny, Courbet, &c., and Whistler. Although the stacks of pictures were held up by muscular servants, the enjoyment of these
THE MEDIUMS OF ART, PAST AND PRESENT 7
treasures was a tremendously exhausting physical process. One walked between pictures ; one felt capable of walking calmly over them ! After five minutes in the musty atmosphere, goaded by the idiotic impulse to see as much as possible, and the irritating consciousness that it was impossible to grasp anything, every better instinct was stifled by an indifference that quenched all power of ap- preciation. The deathly calm one broke in upon, as one toiled sweating through these bare gigantic rooms where there was no space to turn, the whistling of the engines, the trembling of the floor as the trains ran in and out below, seemed to inspire a kind of strange fury, a silent longing to destroy the whole lot.
Who would be the loser if this were actually done ? If anything could justify anarchism, it is the knowledge that the greatest artists toil in poverty, to enable a few dealers to grow rich after their deaths, and a few fanatics to hoard their works in warehouses. The most notorious vices are not so grotesquely irrational as this mania for hoarding, which, owing to its apparent innocuousness, has not yet been recognised as a malady. All the famous collectors of Paris, London, and America are more or less tainted with this disease. We enter their houses full of eager anticipation, and quit them with a sigh of relief, half suffocated by the pictures that cover every inch of wall-space, and wholly depressed, not by a feeling of envy, but by the thought that there are people who have voluntarily accepted the torture of spending their lives among all these things.
Even if a wiser economy should improve the conditions we have described, it will never be possible to induce a better appreciation of art by commercial means. Hence all the fine ideas of " popular art " are doomed to remain mere dreams. It is materially impossible to produce pure works of art at prices that will bring them within the means of the masses. The Fitzroy Society in England, and the publishers of the prints for the Riviere School in Paris made the attempt, and in Germany Thoma was inspired by the same ideal in the production of his lithographs. All these attempts have only served to stimulate the collecting mania. Every speculation that panders to this instinct is successful, whether it deals with postage stamps or pictures. There is no question of aesthetic principle in the matter. I believe that the plebeian would really prove accessible to a revival of artistic influences, if he could possess a picture of his own, to hang up. But a work of art could never be cheap enough for this, for if it cost but tenpence, the poor man will always prefer to save his tenpence, towards the purchase of something necesssary to his physical well-being. An artistic propaganda that relies on purchasable and abstract works of art must always fail. It can only succeed by means of industry, by producing things which combine artistic and utilitarian qualities. As long as we neglect these, we need not wonder to find the artistic sense of the lower orders more depraved than at any other period of the world's history.
The social struggle is breaking down class distinctions ; the intelligent outcast of to-day is the millionaire of to-morrow. Nothing opposes the rise of the pro- letarian in the modern state, and he brings his lack of culture with him into his higher sphere. The man who has had no aesthetic stimulus in his period of development will, as a rule, have no lofty requirements when chance has made him an influential member of the community, though he may simulate these, and so add a new source of error to those already present.
8 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART
III
So much for the material side of the question. This is in itself decisive- discussion on any other basis can only deal with the conditional, and with com- promises. Let us suppose for a moment that we could realise a state of things m which every citizen should not only have a fowl in the pot, as the good king wished, but a picture in his room. What can the man who is blessed with taste and wealth buy in these days ?
Every sensible person who buys things will be governed by his requirements. When he purchases a picture, he will ask : can I make use of it ? and this will lead him to the further inquiry : can I hang it up in my house ?
And here the tragedy of contemporary art forces itself upon us, the lack of all steady connection between art and purpose, the impossibility of establishing an intimate relation between producer and consumer. The artist cannot attempt this, for in general he does not know for whom or for what his work is destined. Experience has taught him that he will do well to make it as adaptable as possible, easily moved, and suitable for a great variety of interiors; in other words, not intrinsically valuable to its possessor, but valuable as an object of barter. These conditions are disastrous to the ideals of the artist, who feels it to be incom- patible with his freedom to be fettered by such limitations, and to allow his creations to be governed by anything but his artistic conception.
Directly the layman is brought into established relations with art, the absolute value of art gives way to the relative value. The appreciations that determine this are very complex.
The question of locality, the axiom that a work of art can only be perfectly executed for a given place, is by no means decisive. This idea rests on a misconception which is practically refuted every day, though this refutation is far from favourable to modern methods of creation. The axiom is not even sound as applied to the works of the old masters, although these were always more or less architectonic in structure. A beautiful figure of a saint in the porch of an early Gothic church remains beautiful, even when it is removed ; it even retains a considerable part of its charm in surroundings that have no sort of relation to it. A work of art in which the architectonic relation to the original place is less intimate, as is the case with most easel-pictures, may change its home still more readily ; it may even gain by the change.
The past decade has given us excellent museums, which have settled this question satisfactorily. The majority of " Old Masters " which adorn tnese galleries, show to greater advantage here than in the places for which they were painted, places where the light was often defective, or where it was impossible to get at a right distance from the picture. We have taken up the rational position, that the essential in these matters is a condition realised in the great museums : the picture should be seen in the most favourable manner possible. We have not the same eyes as those for whom these things were originally made, and we have every right to use all the means at our disposal to enhance our enjoyment of them. Our enjoyments differ from those of the original spectators. We have invented new pleasures. We may instance the grouping together of works by the same artist or different artists, and of different periods, on the same wall, and the effect of one wall so arranged on another ; such and many other combinations
MOSAIC IN MURANO CATHEDRAL
THE MEDIUMS OF ART, PAST AND PRESENT 9
possible in our museums have, in spite of all antiquarian logic, an artistic charm which was lacking to these works in former times.
The museum is perhaps — or might be — an ideal substitute for earlier vehicles of art. It is the purely neutral spot, that serves beauty alone — or might serve it — and knows no other end, or need know none. It has already all the elements of an institution of which we may justly be proud.
All the more irrational, therefore, is it to confound the house, the dwelling, with these constitutionally holy places, and to interchange functions so radically opposite. Everything, or almost everything, that is necessary in the one is out of place in the other. Why then should the layman buy pictures at all ? If we go to the root of the matter, it seems as if he bought them primarily to get rid of them. The disinterestedness of certain rich people who buy works of art to present them to museums, does not modify the grotesqueness of this state of things.
We may ask if our dwellings are better adapted for the display of pictures than those of earlier periods, which contained few, if any, abstract works of art, in our sense of the term.
The dwelling-house of to-day has lost its formal relation to the age. Save for non-social, practical considerations, which express themselves in a certain comfort and in the employment of space to the best advantage, it shows a lack of cohesion with our lives. Contrary to the usage of former times, our sphere of action is now generally outside our houses. This action itself has changed, no less than its field ; mental effort tends more and more to take the place of physical exertion. The men whose activity is most prolific in these days, that is, whose wills have the strongest influence upon production, use their limbs and muscles the least. The intellectual apparatus accordingly requires care and protection in its leisure.
The dwelling has become a place of recuperation, and this determines the character of the busy man's domicile.
As places of recuperation, our dwellings have, as a fact, become better adapted for artistic elements, and even for abstract works of art. We may for the moment set aside the dismal fact that the pure work of art is generally the only artistic thing in the house, and quite without relation to all the rest. Such conditions only make it the more essential, if man is not to renounce every loftier stimulus from without. But if the work in the house is to have any influence, in conditions so far removed from those of the earlier vehicles of art, it must be subordinated to these new conditions. It is not the chief object that draws us to the place containing it, as in the case of a museum ; we do not approach it with the devoutness of the soul athirst for mystic rapture, as formerly in a church. Comfort is the essential in this modern shrine, and a picture that disturbs our sense of well-being is clearly out of place in a house.
This sense of comfort is certainly not to be satisfied merely by artistic qualities. The very works that make the deepest impression upon us, are least adapted to domestic combination, because the sensuous value that might promote satisfaction, is present in them in forms unsuitable to our four walls or our hundred pre- possessions. There are things one admires, and others one wishes to possess. That which decides between them is a whole world, and not a kind of hygiene, which teaches us to live with certain sensations, because they demand intellectual effort and sacrifice.
Art under such conditions ceases to be divine ; she is no longer the enchantress
VOL. I B
io THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART
who brings men to their knees before her, but rather a gentle little housewife, who surrounds us with tender attentions, and eagerly produces the sort of things that will distract tired people after a day's work.
Such a function is beneath the dignity of art. She could not accept it, if she was to remain what she had been in the past. It did not embrace her whole domain ; it belongs by right to utilitarian art.
We have come back to the same point on our circle : If the uses of art change, art itself must change. If it cannot have the place it requires, it becomes meaning- less. If it stands alone, it perishes. To restrict our artistic requirements to abstract painting and sculpture is a folly of the same order as that of the madman in the fable, who wished that everything he touched might turn to gold. Abstract art is a holiday delight. We are not a race of pleasure-seekers, and we are proud to say so. Our most rational idea is to divide, not wealth, but work, to see an era when there will be no drones, when every one will exert himself for the common good. In such a state the amateur will cease to exist.
IV
For what then do artists create, pending what is generally the posthumous consummation — that accumulation of their works described above ?
Some for an unattainable object, every step towards which is marked by tears and blood, an ideal that can only be described in somewhat metaphysical rhetoric : the satisfaction of a conscience that has no relation to extrinsic things, of a supernal ambition, grandiose and dazzling in its conscious determination, in its consistent effort towards the elusive goal, amazing in the unconsciousness with which it achieves results that would seem only possible to the most strenuous toil. Creation for the sake of creation.
A far-seeing idealism sustains them, the hope that they will succeed in giving a new form of beauty. A blind optimism leads them, even when most neglected, to believe that they will be appreciated by some, that some will share the new joys they have discovered. And when the futility of such hopes is demonstrated, when they see their works passed over, or, worse still, bought by purchasers who have none of that intimate delight in their creations on which they had counted, they withdraw into themselves and do their greatest work.
Sometimes that which appears to them in their confident self-knowledge their greatest work, is recognised by the enlightened at last, and becomes an eternal possession, a lasting element in after generations of artists, in whose works it lives in another form, completed by new achievement. It passes into the artistic heritage of the nation, and finally plays its part in national culture. Others fail ; not that their self-knowledge is at fault, but that their talent or their intelligence falls short. Their numeric preponderance is so great, that they completely crowd out the few, and the limited demand of the public for pictures is supplied almost exclusively by them. I suppose that to every thousand painters of the one class, there is not more than one of the other. Imagine such a proportion in any other calling 1 The artist can mislead the public more easily than can a man of any other profession, for setting aside the affinity of the herd for all that is superficial, a sort of halo surrounds the painter ; he profits by a number of institutions very favour
THE MEDIUMS OF ART, PAST AND PRESENT u
able to mediocrity, which give a certain importance to the metier as such, and are readily turned to account by the adroit.
Foremost among these is the art-exhibition, an institution of a thoroughly bourgeois nature, due to the senseless immensity of the artistic output, and the consequent urgency of showing regularly what has been accomplished in the year. This institution may be considered the most important artistic medium of our age.
It would have a certain appositeness as a shop in the grand style, arranged with a luxury befitting the wares. But this purpose, which seems to be included in the general scheme, is quite subsidiary, as may be seen from a glance at the sale statistics.
Artists acquiesce in the system, because if they held aloof, their last means of expression would be denied them. They want, at least, to let their work be seen, and see it themselves, even among that of a thousand others, even for a few months, even under barbaric conditions. What becomes of it after the exhibition is indifferent to them. It is enough if the picture fulfils its purpose at the exhibition, attracts attention, is discussed by the critics, and, perhaps, even — this is the culminating distinction ! — receives a medal.
To secure these results in competition with the thousands who are bent on the same ends, it is above all things necessary that a picture should have certain qualities that distinguish it from the rest. If the artist is bold enough, he makes it very large, or at all events very insistent, that it may strike the eye, even if badly hung.
It is obvious that under such conditions the purpose achieved by competition in 'other domains — that of promoting the selection of the best — can never be fulfilled. A variety of those base impulses, which always urge on the compact majority against the loftier individuality, play their part in the result. Rarely, indeed, has a genius been brought to light through these channels. The greater artists avoid these exchanges, and even the amateur does not frequent them, since quantity is not the only thing he craves.
The remnant of artistic sensibility that lingers in our age bids fair to be systematically crushed out by these exhibitions. If perchance any of the palatial barracks that house them should survive for posterity, they will be more damaging to us than any other relic. There will be persons who will go through these galleries in the spirit in which we visit ruined castles, and the rusty picture-hooks will be to them like gruesome instruments of torture.
Pictures once hung on these hooks . . .
This is the end of the history of pictures. We have, at least, the comfort of knowing that we can sink no lower. Once the symbol of the holiest, diffusing reverence in the church, and standing above mankind like the Divinity itself, the picture has become the diversion of an idle moment ; the church is now a booth in a fair ; the worshippers of old are frivolous chatterers.
TRADITIONS
PAINTING is the art of charming the eye by colour and line ; sculpture charms the eye by means of form in space.
As the eye, in common with every other organ of sense, has a tendency to reflect its perceptions on the understanding, i.e., that accumulation of experience which checks new perceptions by those already accepted, and as it resists every illusion that might jeopardise its earlier acquisitions, the charm of art cannot be summarily explained as illusion. Were this otherwise, susceptibility to its influence would presuppose defective powers of understanding, and this is contradicted by actual facts. Though persons of high attainments have lived all their lives ignorant of the charm of art, it is not, on the other hand, to be denied that the keenest thinkers have been very susceptible to artistic influences. To explain this, we must assume the existence of certain brain-parts having peculiar functions ; these, in some individuals, act simultaneously with the parts on which the concentration of the understanding devolves. When a beautiful new flower meets the eye, the senses announce it to the understanding as a botanical specimen ; in certain spectators, the other portion of the brain will be simultaneously occupied solely with the form and colour of this new thing, regardless of the question whether these qualities belong to a flower, i.e., to a familiar species, which, as such, may suggest all sorts of extra-aesthetic— -for instance, utilitarian — considerations. It may be presumed that all men are provided with this brain-power more or less, that it may be cultivated or allowed to dwindle, and that not only individuals but whole races are more richly endowed with it than others. Like the other brain, it has its store of experiences, and the conscious sum of such experiences known as logic in the one, is called aesthetics in the other. This, like logic, is enlarged by every new experience, by every new enjoyment, and thus enriches not only itself, but every individual enjoyment.
So far, all is simple enough. The difficulty arises from the undeniable relations between the two brains. The great question nowadays is, whether the one can work without the other. It is at least certain that perfect results will not be achieved, either in logic or aesthetics, if the two are divorced. Artistic enjoy- ment may be promoted or hindered by these relations ; there may be works, that set both in motion, that act as a strong stimulus not only to the aesthetic, but also to the intellectual apparatus, and call all the powers of the mind into play. There are works that do not merely impress as beautiful ; — they may even do this to a comparatively slight degree— but with their beauty, they combine a depth of experience that goes beyond all experience achieved by intellectual processes, and gives the soul an instantaneous sense of enlargement and enrichment. Such works were not vouchsafed to the classic age of art, superior as it was to ours in beauty of form. They first became possible, when traditions relaxed somewhat, and permitted an isolated genesis of artistic genius, under circumstances that were even opposed to the spirit of the age : Michelangelo — Rembrandt.
TRADITIONS 13
Michelangelo reveals to the beholder a beauty that emerges from form, whereas the ancients, of whose forms he reminds us, contained beauty in complete solution. The antique stands still and allows us to approach it. Michelangelo hurls beauty into us. A power which seems compounded of the power to create forms inherent in thousands of artists, gives the subject he handles an expression that turns the strongest peculiarities outwards, and makes them credible and acceptable. Faith grows strong, because it accomplishes a work of its own in every spectator, and anchors itself in the soul of each with reflections peculiar to each. It reaches its consummation in a manner directly opposed both to the unreflecting antique worship of beauty and to the mysticism of our early hieratic art. It may become so powerful as to go far beyond all the logical means that approach the same subject, and when, as with Michelangelo, it treats of divinity, it may give mortals a foothold, that will enable them to approach the Godhead by new paths. Rembrandt achieves the same result by means that have no sort of apparent relation to the antique.
This effect is happiest, where it appears utterly unconscious. If art is to have its true value, it must give its first rapture in the sphere that is peculiarly its own, re-acting from this on the intellect, not vice versa. A work may express the deepest truths, and yet fail utterly to satisfy artistic requirements ; a conscious insistence on ideas will always injure the artistic side. Michelangelo did not always hold fast this truth. Wherever he appears as the analyst, his art foregoes something of that legitimate effect he never fails to produce in synthesis. His famous Creation of Man, which is often pronounced his greatest work, is an extraordinary example of intellectual invention. In spite of the mastery with which the composition utilises the idea, the immensity of the giant is not so impressively suggested here as in certain studies of the nude, which are by no means definite reproductions of actual facts, but mere fragments. But this does not prevent them from inspiring thought in those who behold them. The man of a special capacity will be more easily swayed thereby than another ; the direction in which his thoughts will move will be determined by a hundred things — his degree of culture, his temperament, &c., and not least, by his momentary mood. No two persons will follow out the same train of thought before such works, but both will perceive the same force, urging their thoughts onward!
In the new art we can trace two main currents ; in one synthesis predominates, in the other analysis ; the latter preponderates enormously. Indeed, this is the direction in which abstract art has tended to develop ever since the Renaissance. The tendency became more and more pronounced, in proportion as the Germanic nations, with their infinitely younger culture and their introspective genius, turned to the practice of art, while the Latins remained more faithful to the purely sensuous ideal. The results were two traditions : the one relatively artistic, the other relatively literary. The former is, of course, the only essential one from our standpoint. We shall therefore have to concern ourselves especially with this, in order to find points of contact with other aesthetic interests.
Its capital, its principal dwelling, we may say, is at present Paris.
This fact is not to be gainsaid by patriotic feeling. It seems to us a regrettable one, not only because it gives an advantage to our hereditary foe, but because we should deplore such a concentration anywhere, as showing that even art has succumbed to the modern mania for centralisation.
14 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART
It will be well to circumscribe our meaning here.
Of course, it is not suggested that Paris is the only centre of painting or sculpture. It is simply a question of manner. I believe that German painting, as manifested in Thoma, Bocklin, Lenbach, &c., or English painting, as practised, for instance, by the Pre-Raphaelites, is less capable of expansion, of a wide, universal artistic development than that of Paris ; when I say " of Paris," I include in the term many distinguished aliens, who, after studying in Paris, have carried the tendencies of French art back with them to their native lands, extending and nationalising them.
For directly we consider German, or English, or Scandinavian painting purely from the pictorial standpoint, we do it injustice. We would fain determine what is modern, i.e., serviceable to the age. How can we do this with painting speci- fically German, English, Danish, &c.?
It is not only that the material analysed by many artists of these nationalities is remote and has no affinity with the era of railways and of countless other things that give it an aspect so different to that of its predecessors; the manner of analysis might harmonise this or at least avoid glaring discords. But it is just their manner of analysing that is so foreign to us. There is much originality in the process, it is true ; but it is the same manner, modified by individuals, with which the ancestors of these artists achieved identical results with the greatest success several hundred years ago. We know that such and such a picture was not painted centuries ago, solely by reason of certain externals familiar to all students of art history ; no intrinsic tokens make it certain that it could only have been painted in our own day. This art is not the necessary consequence of weighty con- temporary elements, something self-evident and belonging to the age, but rather something opposed to it. We might almost say that it was not created by the age, but in spite of it.
We know, of course, that there are affinities between modern artists and their remotest ancestors — that there are moderns who have succeeded in avoiding these incongruities, though painting the same things as the old masters. It is just the greatest art of all ages that shows these affinities, nay more, that lives by them. There is nothing more economic than the power that augments the artistic wealth of the world. Like the organic forces of Nature, it works by fertilisation. If the stages of development are more obscure here than in Nature, the aim, the strenuous impulse towards purposeful efficiency, is identical in both.
We shall try in the sequel to discover certain fundamental aesthetic elements of ancient art, in order to see where we have gained, where lost, and how it has all happened. We do not propose to do this by the process of art-history ; this would be to repeat an oft-told tale. We shall only linger at one or the other of the stages of this development, notably, at one of the earliest, because it offers the strongest possible contrast to our latest, and because, in spite of this, there are bold dreamers who would bind the two ends together. Whether this is possible is still an open question. At any rate, we will consider them both with this possibility in view.
THE RISE OF PAINTING
THB Christian Church undoubtedly rendered immortal service to art. Her artistic influence began at the moment when the Roman Empire lay in its last throes. Her radical principle, to make everything as unlike as possible to the creations of Rome, enabled her from the first to dictate the course of art to some extent. The aesthetic standpoint was naturally somewhat overlooked in the programme. In the beginning the church was as barbarous as Protestantism. Art was idolatry, and for the Christian, this idolatry was embodied in sculpture, the presentment of heathen divinity, which was accordingly forbidden once for all. Not until Christian Radicalism had been softened by the lapse of a thousand years, did men begin to think more indulgently. But sculpture never quite recovered from the effects of this neglect, and its development as an abstract art was therefore tardier than that of painting. It remained architectonic to the time of our grandfathers.
All that had pertained to it in pre-Christian times among all nations, became the property of painting. The aims of the two arts were by no means identical. Painting was writing, a medium of communication for the primitive purposes of the church. It did not become art, till thought found leisure to express itself in images, and growing wealth led to the decoration of the churches.
Hence it was originally stroke, line, linear signs. Its development was the development of line.
And at the same time its history may be carried back to a history of the supersession of line by plane. All that was taken from the one was added to the other. The relation between the two is the physiological point of the whole history.
Line was the handwriting of style. It rises from the coarsest ornament to the highest expressive power, and becomes the vehicle of the mightiest and most comprehensive of traditions, the Gothic. As it declines, tradition declines with it, and individuality gains the ascendency. Then it takes refuge in planes, which become of supreme importance in our modern, purely abstract art.
MOSAICS
The first stage included mosaics. Planes as yet had no existence for the artist, they were the affair of the craftsman. Contour alone was the vehicle of the formula, and the formula was anonymous, not the work of individuals, but a legacy.
It is difficult, to a certain extent, to imagine the creative act that produced these early mosaics. There was no art, but there was certainly an instinct for interior-effects, the vastness, loftiness, and grace of which fill us with amaze- ment. Who will find words in our copious art-dictionaries to describe the absolutely divine emotion that thrills the quiet tourist in a mosaic interior like that
1 6 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART
of the Baptistery of the Orthodox Church at Ravenna ? Who could suggest the splendour of the gem-like purples, the rhythmic harmony of the simple, earnest faces of the Apostles ? Where may we dream more sweetly of the lovely legends of our faith, than in the chapel of Galla Placidia, before the artless poetry of the representation of the Good Shepherd ? What can be more magnificent than San Vitale ? We are dazzled at the mere thought of what this building must once have been. Wherever, wandering in search of the highest enjoyments, we light on old mosaics, be it in Rome, Sicily, or Constantinople, there comes a moment when we feel more or less definitely as if in comparison to these first written characters of our art, all that has followed had been mere confusion. Is there not something of the same feeling in our attitude to the architectonic form, which bears so many of these characters ? The Romanesque style has never been surpassed in grandeur ; to our generation it seems the sole basis for a modern architecture.
The Byzantines were the first to bring mosaic decoration to perfection. Modern research, blind to all but the analytical development of art, is inclined to neglect their work altogether, insisting much on the beauty and nobility of Early Christian examples, and treating the Byzantine more or less as barbaric aberrations. This attitude is a remnant of that famous classic tendency, which while it pre- served painting and sculpture, perverted the development of architecture, and was not so far overcome as to allow us to look for beauty outside Greece and Rome till our own times. The greatest and most rational achievement in modern aesthetics, the rehabilitation of Gothic and Romanesque art, cannot ignore the Byzantine form ; least of all can it do so in favour of that last and somewhat puerile remnant of the Roman tradition, which the early Christians of necessity carried into our era.
In one point only were these earlier mosaic-workers superior to the Byzantines : in colour. Even here the superiority is not quite indisputable ; for the reticent colour of the Byzantines undoubtedly served the architectonic ideal to perfection. On the other hand, the Byzantines excelled in drawing, if we judge their work rationally, and not with the unnatural determination to divorce it from architecture and consider it as a thing apart. It is absolutely appropriate to the technique. Wherever the Early Christian mosaics, influenced by the antique, or the later mosaics, betray that feeling for nature afterwards developed in painting, the decorative effect is sensibly diminished. The problem of equilibrium as between the requirements of nature and style, which antiquity alone has been able to solve to the satisfaction of both, began here. Directly realism appeared in the mosaics, the magical effect of the technique disappeared.
Nowhere is this more clearly demonstrated than in S. Mark's at Venice, to whose vast series of mosaics every century has contributed, from the tenth to our own ; in other words, the whole of that Christian era with which we are dealing. To the Byzantine conception, persons and things, and all that was represented, were merely vehicles for decorative line, hardly more than those exquisite letters that accompany the pictures, and are more essential for the comprehension of the picture than the subject-matter itself. The modern mosaics take a middle course, and aim chiefly at attracting as strongly as possible. The compositions on the facade are gaudy pictures, in which the space they occupy means only the measure of their extent, and is otherwise a matter of no importance. They serve merely to make the extraordinarily animated facade more restless still, and they attempt to compete with the architecture, instead of to harmonise with it. They
THE RISE OF PAINTING 17
do, perhaps, succeed in putting their rival into the shade, but only by destroying the artistic harmony of the whole. We note a difference at once as we pass into the atrium. Here the Byzantine ideal predominates. We get some prescience of the splendour within, but, in accordance with the old methods, it is only a prescience. It is architecture covered with signs. These signs are un- meaning, if we examine them in detail as we should examine a picture ; their con- ventionality of composition, the very primitive ideas they symbolise, make them incomprehensible to the modern. The architecture alone gives them aesthetic value. One of the arches depicts the story of Noah. The various episodes of the legend are set forth in sections at certain intervals ; each is a decoration in itself. We see figures, animals, waves, but what impresses us above all, is the extraordinary correlation of these lines and the planes they surround ; the lines are placed with such unerring judgment, that we never for a moment ask our- selves what they mean. The subject-matter is so subordinated to them, that we do not even think of protesting against this subordination. Captivated by the purely decorative charm of these signs, we finally come to accept the complex emotions they demand from the understanding. The psychology of religious suggestion finds rich material here.
The six-winged angels between the arches of the right-hand cupola in the atrium are magnificent pieces of decoration. Their wings stream out in the three directions of the pendentives assigned to them ; it is scarcely possible to imagine anything more architectonic, more absolutely appropriate to a given space. They are a perfect translation into planes of the grandiose sculptures of the capitals, with their lions and peacocks, that uphold the arches. The modern mosaic of the sixteenth century in the central cupola seems timid indeed in comparison. The Evangelists are seated on clouds on either side of the enclosing triumphal arch. They reveal all the mediocrity of the epigoni. If the naturalism with which they are treated were carried very much further, the theme would seem none the less unnatural to the spectator. As it is impossible to sit upon clouds, the more realistically such a suggestion is made, the less credible it appears. The representation of the Apostles as life-size figures, lacking all architectonic proportion to the magnificent arch, is positively murderous in its unskilfulness. Early Christian buildings of some 1000 years earlier show what can be done with such arches in mosaic without any ornament. I may cite the triumphal arch of Sant' Apollinare in Classe, near Ravenna, the mosaics of which date from the sixth century.
In the interior of St. Mark's criticism is dumb ; so, too, is what we call artistic perception. We no longer deliberate ; the hand that holds the guide-book closes convulsively, and the brain abjures its deadly waste of time and thinks no more. We can form no idea of such splendour till we see it, and then we seem to be in the presence of something abnormal, impossible, gigantic, terrible. We do not see this golden magnificence — we hear it, feel it, and breathe it. In an instant, a new sense is created — a sense of space. We cease to be individuals, and become atoms, silent particles among other such.
What do we moderns with our aesthetic trivialities know of such grandeur ! If we could fill a room with the finest pictures of our century, if we could collect all that is greatest in Italian and in Northern art in a single gallery, it would remain a gallery, a space devoted to art, something isolated and remote that could never intoxicate the soul as do this barbaric gold and these barbaric symbols of the discredited Byzantines. It may be objected that it is the depth, and not the VOL. i c
i-8 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART
extent, of the emotion produced that is of moment. ... I can imagine heretics who would call this depth weakness, who are brutal enough to prefer the blind impact of such barbarism as this to the solvent knowledge of culture. ... It may certainly make some among us forget our analysis for a moment, and lose our critical bearings, so to speak. But what would we not give, if such emotion, sometimes overcame us in the presence of modern decoration !
Here the art of mosaic shows its strength ; it was created for these galleries, for these arches and cupolas. It works miracles here with the dusky gleam of its gold in the quiet chapels, in this inimitable interior, with the magic glimpses between and above the pillars. There is not a single picture in the church, yet none seems richer in pictures. I am not thinking now of those created by the mosaic-workers, but of those produced as one catches sight of the mosaics through the architecture, pictures that change with every step, with every gleam of light, and are absolutely inexhaustible. Whereas in the atrium the Byzantine decoration appears as the discreet handmaid of architecture, here it is the privileged companion, or indeed the crown of the whole, the speech, the vivifying element of the divine body.
The wealth of this language is extraordinary. It ranges from the loftiest majesty to the most child-like simplicity, from awe-inspiring gloom to smiling sweetness. Below the large modern, ineffective compositions in the two side-aisles, there are on each side five isolated figures, among them, on the left, a youthful Christ, and on the same place, on the right, a youthful Virgin. It is impossible to imagine anything more delicious than these two faces. The fair-haired, aristocratic Christ has a sweetness of expression only to be found in Vivarini's most delicate works, and the Mary with the dark hair and eyes, and the tender lines, might also be by the hand of the great master of Murano. With this graceful loveliness we may contrast the tremendous vigour and dignity of the mosaics over the high altar : the symbols of the Evangelists in the pendentives that divide the cupola of the apse from that of the high altar, and especially that terrific lion, in the creation of which convention has only been used to emphasise the grimness of the beast, who appears as the concentrated expression of all the gloomy majesty that slumbers in the architecture. The bold suppliant who dared to raise his eyes from the ground must have started, as if a glare of lightning had met his gaze, when he saw this monster high above him, and have bowed his neck again meekly, to carry the burden of inarticulate prayer.
In the exquisite chapel of St. Clemente close by we enter into another atmosphere, one of gentle mysticism. A brooding twilight fills the space. The marble rises in gray majesty from the ground. At the spring of the vault the mosaic begins, and shows the solitary figure of the saint in the lunette. Can one ever forget the twilight behind the pillars, through which the bronze lamps gleam, the solemn altar with its shimmer of marble reliefs, the calm saint above ? Over this again the eye is carried through vast arches to the upper storey, to the recurrent glimmer of gold and holy sign, and finally rests high above in the vault, on the swaying ship with the Apostles and the fantastic white sail.
It is curious that the most " modern " of spectators feels no inclination to smile at the naive audacity of certain of these conceptions. And as he has learnt to dissociate religion from art, and prides himself on having lost his reverence for an outworn creed, it can only be aesthetic appreciation that makes him accept the extreme manifestations of this much maligned style. These are plentiful enough.
THE RISE OF PAINTING 19
A favourite motive in various places, which recurs in St. Mark's, is Christ leading the faithful to bliss over the prostrate Satan. This group so teems with grotesque defects of drawing, that in any other connection it would suggest caricature. But here our critical judgment is suspended. Each detail carries on the eye to the next, and bids us grasp the whole. And this gives life to the creation. It is, of course, a very different life from that of the modern picture. Measured by this, it may seem a dead letter, but, on the other hand, the modern work would be dead if applied as it is applied. It is a part of the place that stirs such strange exaltation in the spectator ; these symbols were made for this place, and for it alone. A time came, when men looked upon those mathematical laws which the Byzantines consciously or unconsciously observed as sheer barbarism, and judged it unworthy of the soul to be guided by logic. As if there could be anything more venerable than these eternal mathematical truths ! As a fact, the eye still finds harmonies in these half geometrical pictures, unique creations that evoke unique emotions. In the very group I have just mentioned, there is such a mighty sense of movement, the action of the advancing Saviour, his mournful face turned to the suppliants, the cross held high in his hand, is so convincing, that one is carried away and accepts the grotesque as a matter of course. Consider similar subjects as treated later by the primitive painters : Fra Angelico's Last Judgment, where the angels pace the gardens of Paradise on the right, while sinners are larded, boiled, and roasted on the left. These inevitably strike us as comical, because here mathematics have given place to spiritual sentimentality. Of course, Fra Angelico's conception, a symptom of that milder ideal of Christianity that followed the phase of rigid asceticism, indicates a general advance in culture. But this synchronised with a diminution of suggestive power, an enfeeblement of the forces at the disposal of the Church. The difference is very apparent, even in St. Mark's itself. Wherever we find the work of later centuries, more especially of those when painting was at its apogee, the technical effect is lost. It is lamentable indeed that the most important feature of all, the enthroned Christ of the apsidal cupola, should not be in the pure style. In domed spaces such as this, Byzantine mosaic developed a grandeur truly stupendous. I know nothing more beautiful of the kind than the fragments preserved in the churches of Murano and Torcello, the venerable dependencies of the city of the lagoons.
The ancient mosaic pavement of San Donato at Murano is in itself worth a visit to the melancholy spot. The design is exquisite, geometrical yet arbitrary. Time, working like a mole under the slabs, has made it more arbitrary still. One feels inclined to lie down on the ground, on this strange, Oriental carpet of stone.
Then suddenly, almost casually, one sees far beyond, the gigantic golden apse, and alone therein, a single slender figure, in flowing blue draperies : Our Lady as Intercessor. It does not seem to be a dome in which she is hovering, but a world, and the pale creature floats in the terrible world-solitude, holding her hands up before her face, as if rigid with the burden of her enigmatic prayers. In all our religion there is no grander, deeper mystery, and nowhere has it been more grandly and deeply treated than here. The mosaics in the apse at Torcello have the same vigorous intensity. Here the Virgin supports the Infant Christ, as in the chapel ' of San Zeno at St. Mark's. Below, and separated from her by a banderole, the exquisite lettering of which has the effect of the finest ornament, the twelve Apostles stand in a flowery meadow, and beneath them the splendid gray marble with its almost geometrical zigzag veinings, descends to the
20 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART
choir-stalls, which rise in tiers, and fill the hemicycle of the choir as in an antique theatre. The artistic effect is indescribable. Everything is so arranged as to bring the principal figure into relief. Proportions and colours are gradually strengthened to this end. The Apostles are treated in subdued tones ; white predominates in their draperies, while the slender figure of the Virgin, clad in the traditional deep blue robe, stands out from the golden background, her hands and face being the only passages of light colour. The most beautiful ornament would not be so effective as this simple contrast, the sharp contour against the grandiose gold background, to which an automatic play of light and shade gives a gentle animation. The Apostles all stand facing the spectator on a straight strip of meadow, studded with exquisitely treated conventional flowers. Their draperies are caught back in such a manner that each overhanging hem forms almost identical angles, and this gives throughout the row a scarcely perceptible, yet indispensable undulation to the outline, which contrasts pleasantly with the per- pendicular figures. The meadow with the Apostles is enframed in a beautifully designed border, simpler and more tasteful than the similar border in the apse of St. Mark's.
If we picture to ourselves the cathedral of Torcello, decorated with the same mosaic as the magnificent facade, with its pavement, and its internal architecture, of which certain marvellous fragments still remain, notably on the rood-screen, we shall not lightly judge an art that was lost for ever, yet never replaced. What is it to us that it was practised by slaves, and that its radiant structures rose upon necks bowed beneath the yoke ? The Church, the element that generated this art, has fallen from her high estate, and as we linger in the palaces of her departed glory, we venerate, not her, but the art she called into being. The greatness she created she herself caused to decay. The association of art with religion was as propitious to this great decorative art in its beginning as it was disastrous towards its close. The more the Church drifted from her supernatural sense of supreme aloofness, the more languid became that great decorative impetus which made the house of God a new world, expressing, not only the genius of one man, however great, but the fervour of nations and peoples.
Art has become free ; it has thrown off, not only the bondage of the Church, but that of all subsequent elements which have attempted more or less successfully to take the place of the religious impulse. To-day art is as essentially the work of the individual, as it was formerly that of thousands. It has altered so radically, that the name it once bore is scarcely applicable now. Between the new and the old lies the gulf that separates the individual and the mass. These are distinct conceptions, that no art history can weld together.
GIOTTO: DETAIL OF A FRESCO
IN THE CHAPEL OF THE MADONNA DF.I.L1 ARENA IN PADUA
THE RISE OF PAINTING 21
FROM THE GOTHIC PERIOD TO THE RENAISSANCE
The first step was the transition from mosaic to fresco. It was decisive. The artist himself became the decorator, and undertook the expression of his thoughts ; in his hands thought necessarily underwent a corresponding change.
The rapidity with which the decorative ideals of the mosaicists disappeared is remarkable. In his mosaics, as in his gigantic Madonna-pictures, Cimabue still shows the decorative grandeur of an art directed to the ornamentation of vast interiors. In Giotto's hands, painting is already pictorial.
The example that will best illustrate our present thesis is perhaps Giotto's beautiful and harmonious fresco-series in the Chapel of the Arena at Padua. This work contains the germ of all that later art has laboriously achieved. In such details as that of the traitor's kiss, with its antithesis of the brutal plebeian head of the renegade and the divine face whose eyes seem to pierce the sinner's soul, we are startled by a manifestation of personal conceptions, a deeply dramatic power, worlds apart from Byzantine ideals. But all such effects are isolated. Let us examine the general effect produced by this little interior, which might have been decoratively treated by the simplest methods, and let us remember our first sight of it on entering, before we had found out the pearls among all these timid lines and tints. Did we not feel a desire to turn back at once into the blooming garden about the little house ? Did we not conquer a certain involuntary repulsion by a more or less archasological interest before we could venture nearer ? Then, indeed, after getting at the root of the matter, we possibly went to another uncritical extreme, and looked upon the desire for strong impressions which was disappointed at our entrance, as the impulse of a barbarian. In unsophisticated minds, memory will always retain the twin impressions : the delight in personal elements, which we find here in such imperishable traits, in spite of all ravages, and the yearning for architectonic effects, which was so painfully repulsed.
The Chapel of the Arena was the first picture-gallery : it is the starting- point of what I may call the gallery-characteristics of all our art. The picture has already become something we must look at alone, divorced from its surroundings and governed by its own laws. Art no longer bases itself on the cosmos, but the individual becomes his own cosmos, a world within the other. The very first step of this art was momentous for the decorative ideal. Note the Last Judgment on the facade of the chapel. The composition — not, of course, by Giotto himself — is as weak as the conception that inspired it, and led on to Fra Angelico's versions of the same subject.
Meanwhile, as the land, struggling against disaster, allowed art to become painting, incapable of creating anything but pictures, a marvellous structure was growing up in the barbaric north, the home of the new church. It could not have arisen in Italy, where, in spite of all intellectual reactions, the mighty works of antiquity held the senses spell-bound. The ancient Roman civilisation was not merely a pagan civilisation ; it was above all things Italian, a part of the national being, and the greatest, most idealistic artistic expression of that being. The fact that certain ideas had changed under alien influences, could not suddenly drive the blood of the nation into different channels, anymore than it could alter their faces and racial peculiarities. The growths of the Italian soil could not be anything but Roman.
22 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART
On the other hand, there was nothing in the north that was calculated to check an artistic development of ecclesiastical form. The part assumed by Christianity here was different from that played by the obsolete pagan culture of Italy. It took the form of a revelation, throwing light into the minds of the barbarians, still shrouded in the mists of dawn. A robust people, which had lived hitherto by its own rough strength, encountered Christianity just when its power had manifested itself sufficiently in externals to allow of further development on spiritual lines. The material function of Christianity was at once favourably regarded by the leading spirits, who valued material enlightenment. To them the intellectual advantages offered by Christianity sufficed to make the whole scheme acceptable. And the new doctrine carried out this mission with unexampled circumspection, disseminating practical knowledge, and sciences, with no premonition that the very culture whose foundations it was laying would finally outgrow it, as the last consequence of its work. Thus art, which served it, grew in its hands to some- thing intellectual, not merely suggestive of thought, but itself a fruit of thought. Popular decorative elements blended with what religion had brought, but the distinctive element was a new one, resting on a basis of keen reflection, and thus sharply differentiated from all Roman art. It found its fullest expression in the French architecture of the thirteenth century, known as Gothic architecture. Consciously, and with a science whose healthy influence has worked beneficently even in our own day upon our decadent architecture, a system of construction was evolved that was logical before it became beautiful. The consequences were stupendous; the system found its way into Italy and there accomplished the unimaginable, the subjection of the Italians to the barbarians, and their docile acceptance of that Gothic style, which was antagonistic to all the inherited instincts of the nation.
The audacities of this architecture reduced the solid wall-surfaces to a minimum. There was no room for mosaic. Its place was taken by painted glass, the Hosanna of Gothic art, which found its counterpart in the noble music that swelled upwards to the lofty windows.
Let us compare the Paduan picture-gallery with the Sainte-Chapelle of Paris, that little miracle of glass-painting, where the coloured windows (which are far from being the most beautiful specimens of this Gothic art) constitute the sole decoration and complete the seductive harmony of the place. It seems incom- prehensible that we should have given up the one thing — this splendid unity — to nurture the other — the art that Giotto inaugurated.
It was, nevertheless, inevitable. The tremendous forces of Gothic art were bound to prove self-destructive in the end. The same power that soared heaven- ward in its magnificent buildings, forced every activity upwards, into a sphere where at last there was no possibility of co-operation. In Italy, under Giotto, the pupil of the mosaicist Cimabue, the style became type, a similarity of faces and movements, within the limits of which the individuality of Giotto's pupils could only find expression in delicate inflections. But simultaneously, painting became independent of the wall. The wooden panel grew out of the fresco, and this evolution was the external preparation for the complete isolation of painting. A circumstance that contributed greatly to this result, was that the execution of these pictures was entrusted to the same artists who illuminated the books used in the services of the church. The didactic purpose of the books usurped predominance in the pictures. The ornamentation of the missals, admirably and
THE RISE OF PAINTING 23
intelligently applied as such, with a perfect comprehension of the surfaces to be decorated, and of the relation between pictures and text, was stripped of its original function in a picture, and found no new, clearly defined vocation to replace it. The artist arranged and enlarged. what he had painted in little on the vellum ; the superficial relation to architecture which passed into the picture in the process, came circuitously through the book ; this, of course, had certain decorative elements in common with the structural style. The literary experi- ments of painting are of great antiquity.
Thus was evolved the picture, a composition governed, not by the law of the place that contained it, but by that of a more or less arbitrary frame. This frame still stands in the appointed Holy of Holies, but it is already an independent thing, a church within the church, a place in which is worth the effort of the noblest.
And now the North begins to invade this place too. A school of painting sprang up in Cologne, which expressed the very essence of Gothic art in its altar-pieces. These have none of the minuteness of the illuminators ; their unknown authors were rather stone-masons, penetrated by the ideas of form that governed Northern carving, and seeking to express these anew in pictures. They could not arrest the tragedy of the problem ; their dawning glory heralded the downfall of the building, but they rescued what was most precious therein, pre- serving it to inspire after-generations to renewed creative effort.
From these germs the first genius of the new art, Jan van Eyck, arose a century after Giotto. He gave to painting something universal and all-embracing, elements of such grandeur and nobility that we acquiesce in the ruin of all else, to ensure the survival of this one thing.
With him the material functions of pictorial art changed once more. The planes become more and more significant ; an amazing minuteness of detail reinforces the particular interest of the theme. Such miniature-painting as Van Eyck accomplished in his Virgin in the Temple of the Basle Museum, or his Vierge au Donateur in the Louvre, especially in the exquisitely elaborate background, differed entirely from the work of the mediaeval illuminators, and was hardly ever achieved by the specialists of a later date. Simultaneously Fra Angelico painted the little altar-tabernacles now shown in the monastery of St. Mark's, the minute golden lattice-work with the Virgin behind, works of art full of the pathetic patience only possible in a monk. Compare Fouquet's miniatures at Chantilly with Fra Angelico's. There is nothing minute in the work of the Northern miniaturist, and certainly no sweetness. The eye is delighted by the detail here also, but this disappears in the general effect. Van Eyck's art is the sagest appli- cation of architectonic laws. In his hands, a brush and pigments accomplish what only structural art had hitherto achieved.
Technically also, Van Eyck's methods were new. He invented painting with oils, the medium that caused a revolution, the only medium in which the mighty achievements of the future art were possible, the medium which ensured them an immortality they could not have enjoyed in the form of frescoes.
With the rise of this art, the organic nature of general artistic development ceased. The grouping of artists into Schools was the last remnant of the superficial homogeneity of individuals. It disappeared gradually under the growing worship of personality. The subsequent development necessarily takes on a spasmodic character, the accidental, experimental nature of isolated effort. Italy produced no parallel to the art of Van Eyck, wealthy though it had become again, and
24 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART
fascinating as was the bloom of Fra Angelico's colour. In the North the monk had become a schoolmaster ; here in Italy he remained an artist, until Donatello's generation. His work was both pious and charming, and an admirable decoration for vellum or parchment. But when he made use of large panels, it overflowed with a sugary sweetness that trickled into the art of his successors. Van Eyck is a man beside a doll in comparison ; we need hardly invoke the Adam and Eve of the Ghent altar-piece to illustrate this.
The union of the Italian and Northern Primitives was the happiest of artistic marriages, but the North was the man. There was no danger of loss for the North, but it was different for the other partner. Once more a mighty song swelled across the Alps, the pasan of the Van Eycks, of Van der Goes and Roger van der Weyden ; once more a barbarian conquest was imminent, and this time a final decision was involved.
But meanwhile Italy had recovered her senses, and had become a rich and power- ful country. Her artistic energy had certainly not spent itself in the devout litanies of the monk of San Marco. One day artists who wore no cowls discovered remains of classic sculptures beneath their native soil. In a flash they recognised how they might shake off the foreign domination, and cleanse the house from all traces of the barbarians. The tremendous prestige of classic art unfurled its phoenix wings. No one troubled himself now about the moral import of this art. The Church had become omnipotent, and could venture upon anything. She stood exalted above the petty party-rage of her infancy : a gracious woman, fair and crowned, who loved courtly splendour, and understood the aesthetic value of those relics of her long-since-perished heathen predecessor which she had once looked upon with such abhorrence.
As the final act of her artistic career, Italy essayed the happy experiment of the Renaissance, with stupendous results ; after a struggle of a century she conquered Gothic, and brought the barbarians to her feet. The Renaissance became the style of all Europe.
The spectacle is a familiar one. But we have perhaps rather overlooked its tragic side, and in the fulness of delights showered upon us by the Renaissance, have forgotten what it took from us. The battle of its great leaders is bound up with such important deeds and is so rich in wondrous elements that we forget that what they gave us at last was a many-headed hydra. Our artistic appreciation is coloured by our recognition of the immense advance in culture, the real struggle for real ends, which heralded our new era, and was so richly adorned by art. But in the domain of art the course of victory was not pursued in the normal direction of general culture, as the result of battles already won. On the contrary, it gave up positions already taken, and lost them irretrievably. It was natural that radical changes in social and economic conditions should seek expression in art. As no fitting expression was to be found through the medium of Gothic art, there was a sudden retrogression to a world of forms which lacked the sound basis of this art — a determination to meet natural requirements — and admitted of artistic but not of logical application. Art became more natural, by using the freer forms of the ancients, but at the same time, it verged on the unreal, for the age had no inevitable necessity for these forms. It would be futile to attempt a critical com- parison between Gothic and Renaissance ; the Renaissance manner was not, strictly speaking, a style at all ; there has, in fact, been no style since the Gothic.
From this standpoint, the significance of which is more and more apparent
VAN EYCK: JAN ARNOLF1NI AND HIS WIFE
NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON
THE RISE OF PAINTING 25
to us, the heirs of that epoch, the Renaissance in architecture was no revival, but a brilliant decline. Its essential element is of a negative and dissolvent kind, an experiment that necessarily brought about decentralisation, the primary essential for the development of painting. At one ideal moment we find all the artistic forces assembled. It is the prologue, the freshest, most enthralling act of the whole drama. Masaccio's gravity becomes the boldest poetry in his eager, gifted pupils. This poetry, to which Filippo Lippi, Botticelli and Ghirlandajo contributed their loveliest rhythms, disclosed the sweetest blossom of Italian art ; its virgin charm is eternal. The vernal freshness that characterised it, its hopefulness, its thirst for action so enchant us, that we feel a certain disappointment at the consummation offered us by its more mature successor.
The prologue is like a meeting of the hunt : the sportsmen are all together, but they are waiting eagerly for the signal that will scatter them to the four winds. They are held together only by influences, and these influences unite the arts. Donatello inspires the painters, and the painters are further architects, goldsmiths, and many other things, but they are so individually, accidentally, as a result of their passionate desire for action, their lofty wish to make everything share their enthusiasm. They take part in industry. But their influence is of no permanent benefit to industry. What do they, in their exuberant energy, know of that use and purpose, without which industry pines away ? And while they carry their art unto these mainfold activities, they over-refine in detail, and give an active impulse to that decadence in general art, which their forefathers passively promoted.
It is characteristic of our age, that contemporary artists are mainly concerned with the resuscitation of the Renaissance ideal, and that so many of the artists who have the renewal of general art at heart, are haunted by that epoch, on which, by a pious fraud, they foist the tendency they desire to promote to-day. We cannot demand of the last heirs of that development, which made individuality the highest good, that they should go back to a period when the individual was non- existent. They take the moment when the ideal of a general style was still alive, though various powerful personalities were at work. But they overlook the logical weakness of the moment, the fact that the qualities which distinguished these persons necessarily brought about the disintegration, the evils of which we are now enduring.
An Italian, the latest and greatest, made a final effort to combine the two ideals, to offer the highest that individual art could give, and to unite all the arts to beautify an interior. This was the dream of Michelangelo !
But this giant's life-work served only to bring the tragedy of modern art to a climax. He, the purest, most abstract artist that ever lived, attempted to accom- plish what can never be combined with the abstract. The fact that his noble frescoes in the Sistine Chapel can only be seen by a dislocation of our limbs, and that we have to examine them in photographs in order to enjoy them, suffices to condemn them from the architectonic point of view. There is unquestionably more genius in the finger of God, calling Adam to life, than in the whole work of any of Michelangelo's forerunners ; but the secondary purpose he, the master of all arts, bound up with his art, he never accomplished, because it was impossible for him to avoid the natural consequences of his brilliant gifts. And therefore the decorative effect of his magnificent ceiling is monstrous, just as, in spite of the beauty of the marble figures on the Medici tombs at Florence, the ensemble of limbs and the stones on which they rest, i.e., the sarcophagi as such, are monstrous. The objection, that powers far inferior to his would have sufficed to achieve harmony, VOL. i D
26 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART
is unmeaning, and quite beside the question. If, in our quest for a certain good, we light on another far greater, the fact that we have not found what we set out to look for remains unchanged. Michelangelo was conscious of the tragedy. The number of unfinished works he left prove how greatly he feared to forget the result in the process. He became the bane of the epigoni, who took what could, not satisfy him, and made it a definite formula, from which they evolved the sinister beauty of the Baroque Style — the beginning of the end of European architecture.
WOODEN CRUCIFIX IN BRUNSWICK CATHEORAU
TINTORETTO :
BRUSSELS ML'SKCM
MARTYRDOM OF ST.
THE FIRST FLORESCENCE OF PAINTING
THE victorious struggle of planes against line continued with results more and more decisive in the new painting. The Venetians, Rubens, Rembrandt and Velazquez were its heroes. In the nineteenth century this tendency was carried to its extreme consequence. The result is undoubtedly the most important acqui- sition made by our art. If it were the only one, and if the influence on all aesthetic production had been limited to it alone, its apogee would coincide with the nadir of our power to form style.
This conclusion, a consequence of the Renaissance idea, is happily an error. We shall see later, on which factors the formation of style devolves in our times, at least, in our abstract art. To deduce the style of our day from our pictures would be as absurd as to deduce Gothic art from Gothic pictures. Painting did not create Gothic. The reverse was rather the case. Painting needed the impetus it received from contemporary style, to free itself from that style. Its destinies can therefore at the most only be accounted symptoms of this liberation, this " degothicisation," if I may coin such a word.
On the other hand, the period undoubtedly plays a part in another form in the development of painting, however spasmodic this may seem. Its course may, to a certain extent, be recognised as a phenomenon parallel with the development of the human organ of vision and certain faculties of perception, not in its entirety, but certainly in its most important tendency. The great painters, to whom we owe landscape, from the Dutchmen of the seventeenth century to our own contempo- raries, were undoubtedly right, when they showed that there are other things to see in Nature besides the stylistic line which classicism selected. Our own century played such an important part in the development of landscape, that we may almost consider the creation of the genre as an achievement of our era alone. The importance of light, of air, of all the imponderabilia we require to give probability to a study of nature, developed gradually, almost step by step. Much that the earlier masters saw in Nature, seems, if we place the most trivial modern landscape beside it, an illusion of primitive senses, and it seems legitimate to demand that the increased complexity of our perceptions should find expression in art as well as elsewhere. This necessary scientific accretion, which nevertheless may leave to art all its sources of beauty or even create new ones for it, modifies its technical equipment. The significance of the artistic is unaffected by this modification ; painting governed by scientific considerations alone would lose its artistic value. Science must remain a means, and can never become an end in this connection.
The quasi-material development of painting naturally caused a reaction on the other side. While interest in Nature became more and more intimate, composition entered upon a new phase. Its field of operation altered, became smaller both in a superficial and a literary sense. The Dutchmen of Rembrandt's time had already demonstrated that, to render the quality of a fine piece of stuff, it is not necessary to drape it on an elegantly posed figure, nay more, that arrangement
28 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART
of the drapery is just as unnecessary as the elegant pose ; a Vermeer showed the perfection of art that may lie in the picturesque reproduction of the stuff alone, and how things so unpretentious from the literary point of view may afford far more enjoyment than the huge compositions manufactured in Rubens' workshop.
There was composition, too, of course, in the Vermeer ; without it the artist's gift would not have produced its full effect. But it was not of the lofty classic kind. It concealed itself behind an apparent simplicity of form that suggested mere fidelity to the thing seen. It did not make the arrangement of the picture dependent on the literary argument, but treated it to all appearance quite arbitrarily, though in reality with the most delicate sense of the division of space, which made the illusion of accident an artistic means no less powerful than grandiose composition.
What I call grandiose composition here, in order to make myself easily under- stood, is deliberately constructive painting, which still retains a certain connection with the conventions of antique style, and finds the stately character it desires more especially in reliance upon classical forms.
The definite linear outline was originally the logical organ of this art. The great typical pictures of the Venetians made the first step towards that use of colour which destroys line, and in a still greater degree is this true of Rubens, who practically abolished line. It is remarkable that among the immense series of his gigantic pictures the two that deserve the place of honour are the magnificent unfinished works in the Uffizi, the 'Battle of Ivry, and Henry IV.'s Entry into Paris, works consisting mainly of splashes of colour, in which we divine more than we see, and in which not drawing, but a vigorously wielded brush triumphs. They are far more valuable than the long array of finished flesh-constructions that cover the walls at Vienna, Dresden, Munich and Paris, because they contain to a marvellous degree what Rubens could do, and because his faculty is closely akin to that of the best among our own masters.
The shadow of this personality hangs over the whole of modern art. Rubens stands in his small Flanders like a colossal tree, so firmly rooted and so great that in the three hundred years of his still unchecked growth his boughs have spread over all the little land.
Two strong branches dominate among the rest. One, the larger of the two, stretches out to France. On it, not far from the parent-stem, are perched a couple of lovers in Watteau costume ; farther on is Delacroix. Then the stem makes a mighty knot, and divides into many twigs, on which the buds are only just beginning to burst ; they gleam with the colours of modern French art. The other branch rises, slim and tender, with but little side-growth, northwards to England ; this was grafted by Van Dyck. It was not so vigorous and natural as the other, with whose foliage its own often mingled ; it did not develop in the open air to which the other aspired, but flourished in the lofty sphere of English Court life. It first overshadowed the pale aristocrats that Rubens' pupil painted at the Court of Charles I., and then the more natural and not less stately splendour of Gainsborough and Reynolds.
The law which governs the historical development of powers such as that represented by Rubens is a secret one, mysterious as Nature and comparable to Nature in its noiseless workings. If we go further back, we shall recognise in Rubens the fusion of northern and southern elements, which, before him, first met at the time of Van Eyck. When the pictorial impulse of Italy was in its
RUBENS: THE LION HUNT
HERMITAGE, ST. PETERSBURG
THE FIRST FLORESCENCE OF PAINTING 29
first phase, the North approached her. Venice, in particular, was the scene of the encounter ; here Van Eyck's pupil, Antonello, taught the new creed, and gave the new school so much of his own strenuous individuality that all Italy subsisted on it for generations, and the first great painter of the Venetian school, Bellini, is like a Northern Gothic artist. Later, during the second prime of Flemish painting, when the tradition began to fade in the North, Italy gave back the borrowed fruit. It drew the painters of Antwerp to Venice, and here they took from the offspring of Bellini, from Titian and Veronese, that which the North had denied them : colour. Rubens was the child of this wondrous marriage between North and South, and from him we may date the rise of modern painting. Like every genius, he had a disastrous influence on his immediate followers : Van Dyck was but a feeble epigone, as long as he followed in his master's footsteps. Italianism, which even in Rubens' northern fist was sometimes held in check with difficulty, degenerated into the grossest mannerism among his disciples. Van Dyck first came to his own when he had escaped from Rubens' jurisdiction, and at a first glance he seems to triumph most completely by qualities he did not share with Rubens. The influence of Rubens seemed to have died out, even in Flanders itself.
But it declined in a small domain, only to wax more vigorous in a wider field. The Frenchmen of the eighteenth century drew the sweetest melodies therefrom. They transformed the wanton love-song into dainty and polished verse. Among these airy folks, Rubens looks like a giant with a legion of dwarfs swarming over his thumb. They are careful to take no more from him than they can carry, but even this little is as much as they can manage. Watteau, the greatest of them, was the one most capable of resistance. He went back to the sources of Rubens' art, as if to strengthen himself at these, when the impression of what lay nearer to him became overpowering, and the Venetian element in him appears almost as the masculine antithesis to the soft seductive charm of the Flemish. Fragonard was the first to give himself up wholly to the spell, Fragonard, the most French of all the Frenchmen of his age, in whom everything was pure, picturesque harmony, even his melodious name. But even in his hands the exquisite fruit began to wither. France never tasted it again in such perfection. The art of a much later date which derived from Rubens required another and sedater element.
This, too, was a product of the great period. It gave birth to Velazquez. The whole sum of modern art is manufactured out of Rubens and Velazquez. They are both extremes, protagonists of stupendous powers, almost in excess of their actual accomplishment. We always feel as if we should some day light upon pictures by Velazquez more brilliant than the famous examples, as if everything in the Prado and in London were merely a collection of sketches for some great work surpassing them all. The same may be said of Rubens.
The obvious incompleteness of their accomplishment gives them a remarkable power that, centuries after their deaths, stirs the energy of all creative artists, and that even in their life-time moved their confreres to emulation. Nothing is more natural, than that we should recognise many different hands in the works of Rubens, and that there are so many contemporary variations on the Spaniard's originals. Velazquez himself repeatedly executed variations on the same canvas, and who can say whether the last was the best ?
A third, the greatest of the age and of all ages, came to associate himself with these two, darker, deeper, more complex than the others, incomprehensibly unique
3o THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART
and yet more human in the highest sense. No school bears his name ; there was a Rembrandt. This very fact makes him suspect to the present generation. Because he defies technical analysis, because he was a genius, because his results alone are valuable to us, and not his methods, which only lead the modern painter astray, we are accustomed, among modern artists, where methods are all-important, to see him looked upon with ill-concealed repulsion mingled with veneration, in striking contrast to the boundless admiration expressed for him by the laity.
A thousand things may be urged against Rembrandt, but as a fact they have nothing to do with him. We shall always be beside the mark if we judge him by standards that apply to others. He is but little concerned with painting as we understand it. By its means he created things that are more than the art due to human hands. A Rembrandt makes the air around it vibrate ; it is like some splendidly sonorous voice, the very sound of which is pregnant with wisdom, before we grasp the words it utters.
He painted dignity, of the only kind we can thoroughly understand : the dignity of human beings. It is, of course, the dignity of man. He has but one rival here, Leonardo, whose pictures in the Louvre show the same penetration in approaching woman, the same lofty, purely intellectual — perhaps, here, over- intellectual — conception ; in him we see a profound result of the Latin race, just as Rembrandt was the summing up of the Germanic. Such men as these may boldly accept responsibility for making art purely abstract, and we understand that cathedrals and palaces had to fall, that they might gaze out freely into eternity.
Rembrandt is a direct contradiction to the art which concerns itself with pure beauty of form. He is a strenuous prosaist, who, by the significance of his language, succeeds in lifting us to the heights only attainable to the ancients by the melody of poetic form. To the ideal of beauty of the Greeks he opposed an expression in which everything formal seems to be replaced by a consciousness of knowledge rendered intelligible in some mysterious fashion. It scarcely deals with beauty, it is too intimate for that ; but it is as deeply rooted in our world of emotions and as natural to us as was the worship that rejoiced in the marble to the Greeks. By its means Rembrandt gave the most accurate expression imaginable to the deep moral difference that divides the two cultures, and further a testimony that we need not blush before the ancients, and that it is possible for us to make up for inferior fortune, inferior beauty, inferior power by superior intellectual gifts. From this representative standpoint it matters little that he was a Dutch- man, and how he formed himself or was formed by others. All this was much more important in the case of Rubens, and most of all, in the case of Velazquez, who for this very reason may perhaps be accounted the least among the three.
There is a place in London where pictures by Velazquez and Rubens and Rembrandt hang together. The Wallace Collection is to Northern art what the Uffizi is to that of Florence. Here we may approach our men ; they live and converse together like ordinary mortals. Here is Rembrandt's Parable of the Unmerciful Servant: the old man with the turban speaking to the three, the debtor and the two who have brought him before his master.
He speaks, indeed, to many more.
Rembrandt has been praised for his truth of observation, the vigour of his gestures and facial expression. Even the Anatomy Lesson has been lauded as masterly in this connection. I think that Frans Hals surpassed him in all these qualities, and that Rembrandt showed his greatness by his abandonment of these
REMBRANDT: DR. DEYMAN'S ANATOMY LESSON
RIJKSMUSEUM, AMSTERDAM
THE FIRST FLORESCENCE OF PAINTING 31
cheap ambitions in his maturer years. Certain of his qualities are to be found in a higher degree in other Dutchmen, but he is the architect, the rest are only decorators. They seem mere painters of detail beside him. On one side of the picture I have mentioned hangs Hals* Laughing Cavalier — it seems mere boisterous chatter ; on the other Velazquez' famous Lady with a Fan ; she looks at us, cold and lifeless ; the most exquisite Gainsborough sparkles on the opposite wall ; it has the effect of a costume-picture. These were all painted to please ; they have a touch of make-believe about them ; a rich, a varied and a wondrous make-believe, of course. But they are not so necessary in the final sense as the Rembrandt.
The importance of every man lies in the importance he recognises in others. His value is of the same quality as the value he draws from life ; that which seems momentous to him, is momentous in him. No conscious philosophic profundity is required in the process. Vermeer's little Lace-Maker is a stronger and deeper effort of concentration than acres of symbolic pictures. Instinct guides the hand of the master, but not the ego-instinct, rather that greater, indefinable instinct that illumines a sincere and healthy mind at times, when it can forget the little ego, who wants to paint fine pictures. Rembrandt had such moments, and only one artist since, a painter who has a close spiritual relation to him : Millet. The Wallace picture is like some colossal revelation. We ask ourselves whence these men have come, who are talking together. The famous chiaroscuro probably never played a more important part than here; it gives spirituality to the episode, and provides the cloud on which the Eternal Father was wont to sit in the days of Michelangelo. From out this magic circle the eyes gleam with strange intensity. And not only do the eyes of the four persons look at each other, but their very bodies ; each line of the three servants is eloquent of some relation to the speaker, still more every light, every bit of colour. The play of planes is positively overpowering in its richness. How poor the use of linear effects by means of contour seems in comparison ! Before this we think of the Primitives as truly primitive ; the slender single threads on which they depended seems to have been transformed into a wondrous web, into which all emotions are drawn as into a rich, warm, many-coloured life. This richness gives increased depth to the theme. We discover not only the relations of the three listeners to the speaker, but those of the three to each other. They appear before us as so many generations, classes, species, aspects of the universe. Superficially, this variety is not much insisted upon. The servant and the man-at-arms are of the same age, and are, further, well-known models; one of them is the Joseph of the Berlin Potiphars Wife, the other, unless my memory deceives me, reappears in several portraits. The older man of the three is Rembrandt's brother, whom he so often painted. Delacroix called Nature a dictionary. We might compare Rembrandt's models to the elements of style in classic buildings, elements that resemble each other, yet are perpetually combined to give different results. And, indeed, such pictorial art is only comparable to the noblest works of architecture, that stand outside the domain of trivial significance. Who asks what these men in the picture are talking about, who wishes to know what is happening here ? What the old man is saying may be of the profoundest wisdom ; it could only be dull, trivial stuff if we translated it into words ; just as, on the other hand, an attempt to render Goethe's Faust in colour could only result in feeble painting. But we would fain repeat the experience, and have such solemn moments with our fellow creatures as these four men are having ; if we are artists, we would fain
32 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART
be heard with the same eloquently expressed comprehension as this old man, who with his left hand seems to be casting down the barrier that divides — my soul from thine !
• • • •
Rembrandt had no artistic progeny. He completed himself. Bode rightly assigns the Unmerciful Servant to his last period. It seems the work of one who had lived many times the years of the master. Any further application of the methods of this unique artist could only lead to failure : thus has Nature decreed concerning the giants of art. The sensual, rather than the intellectual, faculty is necessary for propagation, and this is true in art as in Nature. Rubens had a rich store thereof. His successors really did little but cast a veil over the unseemliness of his sensuality, and that of Frans Hals. The talents of the eighteenth-century Frenchmen were admirably suited to the task. This Rubens- esque influence continued into the nineteenth century, and became a more serious but not a less beautiful thing, for which lovers of our modern painting are more than ever thankful. It was the banner upheld by Delacroix to which the revolu- tionary elements rallied against Classicism. It was not the gorgeous representative pictures of the Fleming that determined this reaction ; the vivifying influence was the life that seethed in his frenzied brushing, the riot of his vigorous senses, insisting as with a shout of joyous vitality on the present, the while the Empire determined to turn back once more in pilgrimage to the past.
REMBRANDT: THE UNMERCIFUL SERVAN'
WALLACE COLLECTION, LONDON
THE EMPIRE
THE classical reaction that took place in France at the close of the eighteenth century, when David suddenly gave up painting in the manner of Fragonard, strikes us as inconsistent at a first glance, because it was an outcome of the Revolu- tion. It seems a contradiction that the antique should have become a revolu- tionary symptom, that an obvious retrogression should have been welcomed as the artistic expression of progress. The phenomenon is not to be explained by literary influences alone, nor by the gradual growth of the tendency in the years preceding the Revolution. That at a certain epoch, certain characters in Roman history excited peculiar sympathy and admiration, is not in itself enough to explain the substitution of the toga for modern dress, with a fine contempt for all material differences. What men were seeking in that dramatic moment — the most tremendous, perhaps, in the history of any nation — was a definite form of expression, a speech that could convey something of the dignity to which the people had risen in the Revolution, an art which could fix in plastic form the extraordinary elements of this great period. They were seeking, in fact, the simple ideal of popular art, a sign of the times that all might see from afar.
The art of the great Watteau's successors was altogether alien to such a conception. It found itself suddenly in irreconcilable opposition to its contem- poraries. It is surprising that at a time when the guillotine was so busy its exponents should not have fared worse. For they were the faithful represen- tatives of all anti-revolutionary instincts ; not merely because they were an embodiment of the seductive period of the Monarchy, the most delicate deposit of the gay rococo style that had delighted the Court of Louis, but because their whole mode of thought and form of expression breathed hostility to the revolu- tionaries. In one of the many coarse illustrations of the scenes of horror of the closing century, a dainty cavalier is shown looking delightedly at a print in a bric-a-brac shop, while a Jacobin in a toga, the Phrygian cap on his dishevelled hair, laughingly drives a Roman sword into his ribs from behind. No more striking antithesis could be imagined than the delicate dilettante art of Frago- nard, the decadent sense of enjoyment that found delight in St. Aubm's marvellous prints, and the Roman ideals of the youthful Republic. It almost seems as if the ancient parts of North and South had been reversed, as if culture had evolved the barbarian, and barbarism the man of culture.
The historical criticism that seems so obvious to us now, that sees salvation in the Rubens- Watteau tradition, and looks upon Classicism as an untoward interrup- tion in the development of modern painting, was totally outside the ken of these Republicans. They had all the ingenuousness of youth ; for the social upheaval had made them almost a new people. There was more affinity between a French- man and a native of the United States, than between the Parisian of the Monarchy and the Parisian of the Directory. That this youthfulness was a mere rejuvenes- cence, that the nation was the same in blood and was at the end of its powers, was
VOL. I E
34 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART
shown by the fact that it turned back to the past instead of creating something v new, and that this renascence finally spent itself in a kind of Indian summer. But from their own standpoint the French were right ; not merely because they suddenly bethought them of the few drops of Roman blood in their veins, or because they, perhaps, recognised an alien strain in the Flemish element of the Watteau tradition — what was it to them that history declared this strain to have been present in Gothic art ? — but because they desired at least to feel themselves Latins, if they could not be French, and above all, because they wanted something more in art than luxury, than work belonging only to the rich.
In the case of Napoleon, again, it was not mere prudence that made him take these aspirations of his people into account. A Nero with intelligence, a lusus naturas made up of the most violent inconsistencies, a materialist, but so immense in his materialism that there was not space for him in modernity, a man possessed by a megalomania that the Roman period alone could have tolerated, laid hands on the helm, and conquered the world. The baroque daintiness of his periwigged predecessors could not suffice him for the setting of his drama ; he could not accept artistic consecration from the conquered present that lay writhing at his feet, but compelled the shadows of the gray past to form the nimbus round his throne. When a martial caprice drew him to Italy, it is natural to suppose that he did not pass unheeding through the ruins of an age in which he would fain have lived. To him it was not a foreign, hostile land ; he understood its loftiest art better than the Italians themselves, who looked on with scornful smiles, when he carried off their least prized pictures, the almost unknown early masters of their art. But the traces of Napoleon's passage through Italy are not solely those of the spoiler. His well-considered architectural renovations have something of the tender solicitude of the native prince, adorning his territory.
He took more away with him than Fra Angelico's pictures. Things irre- movable, the mighty relics of antiquity and greatness, stamped themselves deeply on his soul, and he determined to build them anew at home, after his own fashion, in the Napoleonic vein.
And this same man, who carried off the horses from the portal of St. Mark's, gave a code to the moderns, and weakened the lands he could not conquer by falsifying their coinage — was, in short, modern in all his methods.
This modernity masquerading in a toga was inconsequent and prevented the working out of a systematic style. Napoleon had, in fact, no time to achieve style in monumental things ; it did not extend to the complicated buildings of his Roman prototypes, to say nothing of the Egyptians, certain samples of whose art he sent to Paris. What he achieved belongs mainly to the interior of the house — rooms, furniture, classic pictures, portable things . . .
Relatively speaking, architecture fell into the background. Michelangelo's Renaissance had given the world an architecture rather artistic than utilitarian. The Empire concerned itself exclusively with details, and though our recent appreciation of the cold distinction of Napoleonic furniture and ornament was not ill-founded, the artistic essence proper to it seems to slip between our fingers — perhaps this is the very reason of such appreciation.
The Empire style was a convulsive attempt to give a different direction to art-development by those who lacked the power to create it afresh. It is folly to see in this effort a mere classicistic tendency ; it was a presentiment of that which moves us to-day, and begins to take tangible shape before us,
J. L. DAVID: PARIS AND HELEN
GROUP FROM THE PICTURE IN THE LOUVRE, PARIS
THE EMPIRE 35
though as yet we have no formula for it: the socialisation of art ; style, not only in pictures but in everything. The time was not yet ripe. Art was as yet untouched by those factors which the nineteenth century brought into play, those factors which gave material importance to the class that had won political power by the Revolution. The right to a civic styje had been acquired, without the means to make use of that right. The idea of the citizen existed primarily only in the form of address adopted by the Republicans. It was not until he had created his social independence that he could find a form.
And it was because the Empire ideal, in France and Germany at least, failed to capture this fruitful sphere for which it was adapted, in which classicism might have become a means to an end, giving the impetus to a general modern artistic culture, after the manner of other archaistic tendencies of our day ; because it selected the classic form, the worst it could have adopted, since it was the most complete and therefore the least capable of development — for all these reasons it degenerated, expressing itself in details, instead of creating a style.
In painting it revived the definite contour, " la probite de 1'art," as Ingres called it, that structural element, which affords an immediate practical connec- tion with the utilitarian art tendencies of the age, and for the annihilation of which painting in general had more or less consistently worked till this time. Style is line. And modern art was so far advanced, that Classicism could not be a mere echo, and the new line a mere repetition of the old. Capable hands took care that the classic line should become an enduring element in modern painting, and should exercise the most salutary influence to this day, though less directly perhaps than the Delacroix tradition of colour.
The majority of pedagogues can still urge very cogent reasons for the retention of Greek and Latin in the curriculum, not as vehicles of culture in themselves, but as the best possible form of gymnastics for the intellect ; in the same way, the cool neutrality of classic form has its advantages as an educational factor. It is idiotic to expect a student to draw and paint from Nature, as idiotic as it would be to set a man who was taking his first lesson in mechanics before a modern steam- engine in order to make the elements of the science clear to him. The organs that are to do justice to the complex phenomena of Nature, must first be educated ; that in Paris this training is still based upon classic tradition, explains to some ex- tent the enormous difference between the French average of artistic proficiency, and that of other countries. The Frenchman goes to school, and to masters who, be they never so Philistine, know something of the principles of teaching. Lecoq de Boisbaudran, in whose school so many modern artists were formed, painted indifferently himself, but the brilliant system of grammar he managed to instil into his pupils, was none the less beneficial. In Paris, certain definite conceptions are imposed on the ebullient talents, that would prefer to cover large surfaces, regardless of what they represent ; they are given the skeleton that must be the substructure, no matter how completely it may disappear under the luxuriant growth of individuality
INGRES
No pedagogic considerations are necessary to make us do justice to the great men who led the classic movement. The furious strife between Realism and Classicism is at an end. We have dropped our battle-cries and have learnt to see something more in these people than impersonal professors. They were above all, guardians of culture, who worked a kind of cure upon neglected aesthetic instincts. They not only took over an ancient form, renewing and transforming it in a highly original manner ; they received and renewed the sense of form itself. This alone is enough to make Ingres immortal. Under him art became an expres- sion of culture of the utmost purity, whereas under his master David it had reigned by virtue of a turbulent grandeur that bore the unmistakable stamp of the upstart. The creator of the Coronation was a great orator of tremendous power, the true imperial painter, who girded on Roman form as a superficial ornament that left his mighty loins free play. How little he really assimilated it may be seen when he reveals himself, as in several of his portraits ; for instance, the brilliant unfinished picture of the Marquise de Pastouret by her child's cradle at the Chateau de Moreuil in Picardy, or the fine portraits in the Louvre, notably the beautiful picture of Madame de Seriziat with her child. In the extraordinary freshness of the colour and handling, this shows more affinity with FransHals than with Rome.
Ingres, on the contrary, was never realistic like this, even in his most unguarded moments. Lapauze, in his "Dessinsde J. A. D. Ingres de Montauban" quotes the dictum that Poussin would never have been the great artist he was, if he had not professed a "doctrine." With Ingres this " doctrine" was not merely a scientific theory that excites ?. cheap smile to-day, but a conscious organisation of far-reaching artistic instincts. When Ingres became supreme, the great period of imperial activity was past. Men had learnt to reflect. In the land of classic art Napoleon had seen only the territory of predecessors akin to himself in spirit. Meanwhile men had drawn nearer to the soul of classic art, or rather to its divine body. Mengs' copies of the Pompeian frescoes had become widely known. Lord Elgin rescued the Parthenon sculptures, the Germans discovered the ^Eginetan remains. The field of art ex- tended, and with it that of perception. David had been a disguised Roman, Ingres became a Greek, but in a very wide sense, far more universal from the purely aesthetic standpoint than Goethe, for instance. He discovered the Greek spirit in Giotto's frescoes, which he placed above those of Raphael as vehicles of expression, and copied "on his knees" ; and yet he associated himself in friendly fashion with Viollet-le-Duc's tendencies. He followed after line. If later on he concentrated his sympathies more and more on the Greeks, it was because he found in them at first hand what he was seeking. He was as essentially a draughtsman as David was a painter ; nay more, he was the greatest draughtsman the world has known. When the Renaissance discovered the marbles of the ancients, Italians and French- men began to make statues. The age was still vigorous enough to essay the same material as that in which these masterpieces had been carried out. David tried his hand unsuccessfully at sculpture. Ingres forbore, but this renunciation concen-
J. L. DAVID: THE THREE LADIES OF GHENT
(LES TROIS DAMES DE QAND) LOUVRE, PARIS
INGRES 37
trated his expressive force in the more restricted field, till it became a quintessence of extraordinary strength. He appears as a sort of reservoir of line, as one who wished to transmit all the mighty impulse he received to his form. In his Odalisque, his Baigneuse, and his Roger delivrant Angeliqut, he is like a bow strung to its utmost tension, before the elastic vigour of which our minds, enervated by contemplation of the colourists, involuntarily cower, as fearing to be transfixed. His Bain Turc, in the Princesse de Broglie's collection, is equal to Raphael's finest work, as truly one of the most brilliant consummations of our modern art, as were the Vatican frescoes in the art of the Renaissance. Taking him all in all, he was an incomparable artist, in spite of the comparisons he seems to suggest, no epigone, but the poetic embodiment of the instincts of a nation that had conquered the world, and saw in Napoleon's domination a natural symbol of its own greatness, a greatness so far beyond Napoleon that its political downfall remained a mere superficial episode, serving at most to stimulate its energies.
And it was not only the Frenchman in Ingres, but above all, the Northern instinct that manifested itself with greater energy than ever before, almost with the energy of a first encounter with the Greeks. He possessed the North before he possessed the South, and a good deal more than he himself supposed. I can never help thinking of Ingres' pencil portraits before drawings by Holbein, and of Ingres' painting before Vermeer's Lace-maker. The Northern strain in him gave him that intimacy, if we can so describe the quality, which we admire in his portraits of private persons. If nothing of his work remained but the pencil drawings in the Bonnat collection, he would be immortal. No artist has ever seized the thousand aspects of the outward man as did Ingres, and he did it on little pieces of paper and with pencils that gave only the sharpest line. His natural predilections no doubt work decisively here. At twenty he could draw what he liked. Bonnat has one of the earliest sheets, a unique portrait of M. Revoil, a drawing full of colour, that owes nothing to the sharp point. It hangs between the wonderful portraits of M. and Madame Leblanc, and it is difficult to believe that all three are by the same hand. He was eighteen years old when he did it. Many would have been satisfied to rest on such laurels. At twenty he looked upon it as a youthful error, and became Ingres.
Perhaps the Northern element was also the true reason why Ingres never im- presses one as conventional in the narrow sense, and why one always arrives at a personal relation to him. We must not, of course, take the colouristic tendencies of our own day as the criterion by which to condemn all phenomena that do not take colour as the basis of pictorial art, nor judge of Ingres so coarsely as does, for instance, Montrosier, * whose attitude towards Ingres is typical of that of the older generation. He praises the painter's application ! " No confondons pas la patience avec le genie," &c. Montrosier describes how he once stood before a Van Dyck with a " really great " artist, and how the artist laid down the law as follows :
" This artist [Van Dyck] was the painter of the decadence. All his persons have the same gestures. Compare him with Holbein : when the latter paints a miser, his gesture is avaricious ; when he portrays a soldier, it is peremptory ; when the character is a philosopher, it is serious ; when a lover, passionate ..."
And Montrosier adds complacently that nothing could be more judicious, and that the reproach might be addressed to Ingres as pertinently as to Van Dyck !
* "Pcintres Modernes." Paris, l88z.
3# THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART
Finally he says of him what Rousseau said of the woman-writer and woman- painter : " II n'a pas conclu."
Such criticism is beneath contempt. If ever a painter understood the con- clusions that escape this author it was Ingres. We are tempted to ask if ever, even at the time of the Crusades, there were people whose attitude towards culture was so gross as that of the generation which, thank God, is nearing its end. One of its worst crimes is a certain grudging recognition it accords as a last insult to Ingres. We cannot expect a Delacroix to applaud his arch-enemy; we can understand the aversion he inspired in artists occupied with problems of colour. Artists have a right to be idiots ; they owe it to themselves, indeed, and Ingres himself was no exception to this rule. He was not only a prescription, a doctrine, but a gigantic factor, whose eclecticism was a subsidiary thing, yet who, if we take him aright, placed his exemplars in a new and purely aesthetic aspect, that of culture. David was the academician, too essentially different, too uncultured, to give new life to the inheritance from the past. He accepted it without reflection, when he did not disregard it. Raphael Mengs was a German, and took a sentimental view of the ancients ; he was not sufficiently gifted to hand it on. Ingres said — I think his pupil Janmot records the phrase — "II faut manger cela." His quest of pure form in the works of the ancients has been condemned as narrow ; it was really great. He wanted to paint arabesques, not to point a moral.
The principle of his form of expression is no longer a subject of debate. What might have been unseasonable and absurd in others was a great achievement in him, because he succeeded in it. It is strange that the Romanticists should have been so enthralled by Delacroix that they could not even see the intention of the painter of the Odalisque. Baudelaire, of course, could not guess how negli- gible his own romanticism and how indispensable Ingres' non-idealism would some day seem to us. They are always harping on his colour. Baudelaire makes the amazing statement that Ingres had an ambition to shine as a colourist, that he had dreams of competing with Velazquez and Lawrence, &c.* They depreciate him for not having accomplished what no reasonable person can suppose him ever to have attempted. As a fact, Ingres simply tinted his planes, that is to say, he overlaid hismodelewith colour. It is possible that this colour would be very ugly if applied elsewhere ; I have not the courage to assert that it was not the right thing, used as he used it. Ingres once made the very profound remark that a great artist can always get the colour that suits his drawing. Perhaps some day his will be extolled to the skies. As to his painting, on the other hand, there are no longer two opinions. The Madame Granger of the Centennial Exhibition, in which the painter Granger collaborated, is an immortal work, and no great imaginative effort was required in 1 900, to find the way from this to Courbet or to the Sortie de Eal of Bazille, Manet's comrade and pupil. Considerations of this sort, though from my point of view they touch but a small part of Ingres' activity, show how far modern French artists are justified in acclaiming him as the father of Naturalism. t
* Baudelaire's Salon of 1 846, in his " Curiosites Esthitiques."
t Roger Marx sees in him " un realiste impenitent inexorable, le fondateur officiel du naturalisme," agreeing, here with Baudelaire. It is obvious that appreciation of Ingres is vitiated by the French racial instinct. Or at least, such opinions, which are in direct contradiction, again, to those of Montrosier, are only to be explained if we say that the convention, which enabled Ingres to express Kimself to perfection, is so natural to the French, that they lose sight of the immensely specific tendency it induced in him. If there is any comprehensible meaning at all in the term Naturalism, it can only
INGRES: DRAWING OF A
s LADY
INGRES
39
As a fact, his importance is hardly to be overlooked even in the present. Puvis is dead, Degas an old man ; but the medicine offered by the same . hand to these two widely different temperaments is not yet exhausted. The right stomach is necessary if it is to work beneficially ; a constitution that, answering at once to treatment, reacts and gives health to the body. The simile applies perfectly to the doctrine of Ingres. Classicism became a poison everywhere where vigour was lacking, in Germany at the beginning of the last century, in England in our own times. Even here, however, it worked beneficently in so far as it cleared the way, and made room for other things.
be used as an antithesis to inherited rule, and must refer to the unbridled play of instincts, always superadded by Ingres to an accepted formula. Marx's pronouncement is the more remarkable, in that he rightly sees in Ingres' portraits a continuation of those of David. All that is erroneously said of Ingres might be more aptly applied to David, whose sympathy with the less chastened Roman ideal of form made him more or less a Naturalist as compared with Ingres, and who consequently excelled in his portraits, whereas his pupil never succeeded, even in his most brilliant portraits, in eclipsing his Odallique and other works of the same rank. And is not the difference in the disciples of the pair a •triking proof of this contention f No Ingres could have produced a Gros. On the one hand we have the boisterous fugue of a gifted plebeian, on the other the lyric melody of Chasseiiau.
FROM AN ENGRAVING BY DttRBR
GERMAN ART
GERMANY now made atonement for the dependence on French art that had marked the eighteenth century. Since the time of Diirer there had been no great painter in Germany, and even at this era of florescence the essential genius of German art expressed itself rather in design than in painting. On the other hand, Germany was the one country in which the Germanic tradition had remained pure, and where the influence of the Renaissance had been almost imperceptible. The political events of the seventeenth century, the desolation wrought by the Thirty Years War, were not the only causes that deterred her from taking part in the beneficent artistic consummation, the migrations, so to speak, of the artistic in- stincts of various lands, that signalised the seventeenth, and still more, the eighteenth century. She was less impressionable than other countries. They, too, had known the scourge of war ; we have, indeed, instances of nations who produced their greatest painters in periods of deepest political depression. The greatest poets of Germany sang in the darkest days of her history. If there is no parallel to this in her art, it is because her genius is deficient in the pictorial instinct. The German is a musician, a poet, but not a painter. This opinion may be maintained even before the works of the most brilliant of the early German masters, when we see these out of Germany. The Tribuna of the Uffizi in Florence contains marvellous pictures both by Italians and Germans. Diirer's ^Adoration of the Kings and Cranach's Eve are classic examples of the masters, and as it happens, their pictorial qualities reach their highest point of accomplishment in these works, notably in the case of Diirer. (To see Cranach at his greatest, we ought perhaps to supplement the Eve by the Nymph in the Leipzig Museum.) Yet, looking at the two examples we have cited in this place, it is just their pictorial qualities that seem the least admirable of their merits. Marvellous as is the wealth of detail in the Diirer, exquisite as is the cool nudity of the Eve, they seem to belong to a different art from that of the Raphaels and Titians beside them. It is as if accident had provided their authors with the same materials for wholly different purposes, and it seems scarcely possible that their works should have been contemporary with Raphael's. What we admire in the one, we forget entirely before the other. This is not due to a difference of personality, such as that which distinguishes a Raphael from a Leonardo ; it is not the difference of nationality, as in the case of an Antonello and a Bellini, nor the dissimilarities of period and culture — for great as these may be, a simultaneous study not only of Italian and Northern examples, but of the works of all possible cultures, has so accustomed us to them that they have become hardly more than a question of costume. The difference here is one of species, 'irreconcilable as the antithesis on which they partly rest : that of painting and sculpture, the difference between two arts.
German art has never freed itself from the Gothic tradition. Its dearest, most characteristic qualities remained Gothic, even after the Gothic form had
INGRES: MADAME RIVIERE
LOUVRE, PARIS
GERMAN ART 41
disappeared ; in other words, the Germans produced their effects by outline and not by planes. For this reason they show to great advantage in wood-engraving ; Dtirer is more especially impressive in his prints.
It is, of course, the same characteristic which originally differentiated North and South, that which distinguishes a Francis I. by Clouet from a Francis I. by Titian. But that the distinction should have persisted in Germany, when it has died out in all other Northern lands, is certainly remarkable. We may even say that it became more emphatic with time, that certain of the early German masters, Stephan Lochner and his circle, for instance, had a stronger sense of the pictorial than later painters of equal talents, and that in Germany we cannot trace that development of draughtsmanship into painting which we note in Flemish and Dutch art. There are portraits by Holbein that recall Giorgione ; but what Clouet took from him was not his sympathy with paint. No one can hesitate which to prefer as between Francois Clouet and Titian, though both are equally imposing. The pictorial quality in the Francis I. in the Louvre, by Titian, is so seductive, so much more human in its stately splendour, so much more natural in the means by which the expression of greatness is obtained, that it not only seems nearer to us but more important. Clouet's greatness is more a result of a great convention ; Titian's is the overwhelming personality of the artist, which makes the vehicle of his art a material peculiarly his own, and wholly subservient to his purpose, a personality to whose gifted vision a medal was a sufficient source of inspiration for this vital portrait.
The linear convention persists among the Germans ; and in its progress it manifests qualities of design, but never of painting. Take any purely German artist of our age, from Rethel and Schwind to Gebhardt and Thoma, Kraus and Menzel : these are typical Germans, without a drop of foreign blood ; they are all draughtsmen. So, too, was the only German artist of the eighteenth century, Chodowiecki. If we judge them as painters we wrong them ; as painters they seem old-fashioned ; Frenchmen and Dutchmen of the fourth rank excelled them. The smallest pencil drawing by Menzel tells us more of the artist than any of his oily paintings,* interesting though these may be socially and historically, and his immortal illustrations for Kugler's history are far more impressive than his pictures of the same subjects.
It is not surprising that this ancient Germanic tendency should have found complete satisfaction in a Classicism of pure design, indifferent and even hostile to colour, nor that its exponents should finally, under Carstens, have arrived at the logical conclusion of dispensing altogether with colour. Modern criticism has perhaps dealt somewhat perfunctorily with Carstens and his successors, just as it has with the classic phase of Goethe and of Schiller. In the case of the poets, is it not probable that those strong and lucid minds chose more wisely than their descendants can judge ? It is pertinent to ask : would they have done finer work on other lines ? As regards Mengs and Carstens we may answer such a question unhesitatingly in the negative. Mengs did his best work in Italy, and not with his Gallicised portraits. Carstens, Overbeck, and Cornelius again were no geniuses, and they turned their relative gifts to the best possible account. If they had not had a creed for their guidance they would probably have accomplished even less than they did, and we should not have found compensation for their respectable tedium in those happily inspired details which only highly disciplined taste could
* I except certain admirable little early pictures. VOL. I F
42 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART
have achieved. This applies in a still greater degree to Genelli, the greatest man of this little period, whose worse caprices cannot spoil our pleasure in his admirable drawings.
Be this as it may, Winckelmann was inspired by a sound and brilliant instinct, of far greater importance than the very vulnerable principles he and Goethe deduced from it, principles which also evoked a work so typical of the German attitude to art, as Lessing's " Laokoon."
It is surely by a curious irony that the writings of the two Germans, Winckelmann and Mengs, exercised their most fruitful influence on the artists of France. Of course their doctrine harmonised here with an ancient racial instinct— a consideration that was apt to be forgotten at the time of the supremacy of the French language. It was accepted in France, not because those who assimilated it were fit for nothing else, and had nothing to lose ; but because they possessed the just counterpoise, and could maintain their equilibrium against the classical onslaught. Compare David's portraits with those of Cornelius and Carstens. France was trying the classical experiment for the second time. Poussin had been in Rome two hundred years before. A purely pictorial school had arisen in France between the two phases, and though David and Ingres abjured this in their polemics, they were not able to throw it off entirely in practice. The radical difference in the reaction that took place against Classicism in France and Germany is highly characteristic. France had her Gericault and her Delacroix, Germany the " Nazarenes," again a school of draughtsmen, who superposed on the classical line another which was partly a watery Pre-Raphaelism, partly a sentimental early German revival, wholly inadequate for the fresco-painting to which the megalo- mania of Cornelius attempted to apply it. The Munich frescoes are perhaps the sorriest phenomenon of impotence in existence ; lower than this it would be impossible to sink.
Rethel and Schwind were the only strong personalities that rose among the vapid sentimentalities of Dilsseldorf and Munich. Schwind gave vigour to the German note of Steinle and Filhrich. He, again, was a Gothic master, tenderer, softer, more lyrical than his prototypes. He might be called the German Fra Angelico, but he did not play the same part in painting as the Italian. He revived that ancient German strain, the most original manifestation of the German spirit, the Volkslied, giving it artistic expression no less sincere than the limpid fervour of Walther von der Vogelweide. He wrote his pictures, as if they had been poems ; we feel as if we were turning over the pages of some beautiful book as we look at his works. Ludwig Richter brought this book into the cosy atmosphere of homely German living rooms. Is there any one in these days with the courage — or the pen ! — to write such artless things ?
Germany made up in the nineteenth century for what she had missed in the seventeenth — the assimilation of Italian and other ideals. To this tardy development is due her retention of some fragments of the ancient German tradition. This distinguishes Germany from France and England. Neither of these has an original art, though they have original painters. What we describe as French or English now is as definite to us as the difference between black and white ; but each of these conceptions appears upon analysis extremely complicated. Dividing them into their component parts, we can recognise every element, but we find nothing of early French or early English, directly we get away from what is purely superficial and ethnographical — types of faces and so on — and consider the
INGRES: LA GRANDE ODALISQUE
LOUVRE, PARIS
GERMAN ART 43
form of expression. Roughly speaking they are both, and more especially the French, a continuation of the amalgamated painting of Italians, Flemings, Dutch- men, and that great master, Holbein. There are pictures by French Primitives, in the Louvre, notably the superb Martyrdom of St. Denis ascribed to Jean Malouel, so strikingly akin to the Italians of the time of Fra Angelico in colour, if not altogether in composition, that we should not be surprised some day to find them recognised as Italian works. It is only the black-bearded executioner in the so- called Malouel who betrays the hand of the Northener. Fouquet was the first great Frenchman, and though we may wax enthusiastic over the wonderful picture lately acquired by the Berlin Museum, and the magnificent Charles VII. in the Louvre, Fouquet was obviously a continuation of Van Eyck. Nicolas Froment is a pure Fleming, and the coarsest of them all. Clouet grew up near Holbein, Poussin journeyed to Rome, Watteau came from Venice, Delacroix from Rubens ; the landscape painters of 1830 brought the Dutchmen to France, Manet the Spaniards, Degas the Japanese . . . And in spite of all this, how unreasonable should we be not to see one and the same painting in this history, one body, the multitudinous portions of which only serve to make it invincible !
The Germans have no German painting, but they have still an original art. It is true that the actual German ideal seems hardly a new acquisition, fond as we are of describing it as such, but rather an ancient much-prized piece of furniture, which lay forgotten in the attic, while the enemy was plundering the house, until, when the time came to set everything in order again, the worthy housewife, Nationality, brought it triumphantly forth. Unhappily, clean and polish it as we will, it does not suit our new house. The two hundred years or so that it lay in the loft cannot be rubbed away. Now French painting, though somewhat younger, is still old enough. Why then is there no suggestion of the lumber-room in its tradition ? Why is French art always modern, German art always old-fashioned ?
Because France received the necessary new blood by pairing at the right time, when she was fresh and vigorous, and fusion by means of simple natural instincts was possible, whereas Germany remained too long unmated.
Fruitful intercourse began for her in the nineteenth century, for Frederick the Great's French acquisitions remained mere foreign imports during his life, benefi- cent as they proved afterwards to Pesne's circle and Tassaert's pupils, almost against their will. In the nineteenth century, however, this intercourse was not a leavening of the whole mass, as it had been in other lands, but the contact of individuals, and that is why the great Germans stand so high. Germany had no popular requirements to impose upon them ; thrown entirely upon their own resources, they perfected what their forefathers had forgotten, and this they did with individual, and not with national power.
FROM AN ENGRAVING BY DURER
ENGLAND'S CONTRIBUTION
HOGARTH
ENGLAND had amateurs before she possessed an art. Henry VIII. was Holbein's best customer. Charles I.'s advisers bought the finest works of the Italians, Flemings, and Dutchmen. From the time of Van Dyck, the great and little masters of the seventeenth century had a second home on the Thames. If a taste for the arts had been the determining factor, we might well wonder with Macaulay why, at the end of Charles II. 's reign, England had no native artist whose name deserved remembrance. But this very wonder touches a portion of the problem presented by the history of art in the island kingdom. For as a fact this poverty was by no means astonishing, and the present state of things in England is a conse- quence of those same causes which Macaulay overlooked. The start was momentous. All art is to some extent illustration, especially all youthful art. It should be so, just as the first stories that delight a child should be fairy tales. But English art was not. It did not spring from the nation, but came from without. It matters little that its first products were imports, for the same thing happened in other lands. But it was the demand and not only the supply that was an importa- tion. The English tried to graft before they had a stock. If German art resisted inoculation overmuch, English art went to the opposite extreme. The faults of German art were errors of development, the results of a violent interruption in middle age. It had a happy nursery. English art had none. Lacking youth, it lacked also enthusiasm, confident self-surrender to a great cause, the earnest purpose which nerves the powers, gives self-sacrificing earnestness to individualism to help it on its way, and rears, not egotists, but heroes. Every art requires concrete ideals at the beginning, a body that even the poor can grasp and understand, in order to rise to spiritual heights above all material aims. It was only the essays of primitive times in the simplest variations which gave the period of fruition power to materialise the abstractions of its ideal, and to create an art which still points out the path to the future. All the elements of a nation must contribute to successful natural selection. Although in our own times progress inevitably leads to an aristocracy which sells the enjoyment of our highest good at a steadily increasing price, the beginning was always purely democratic, and the remembrance of this past, the knowledge that things were not thus brought about in purely arbitrary fashion, comforts us in the contemplation of our multiple refinements. England's dawning art was not the usual necessary utterance of the race. Not national but plutocratic instincts stood round its cradle. It began with a commercial com- modity, the stereotyped portrait. Having so much, rich people wished to have pictures too.
This origin deprived English painting of the power to speak to the hearts of men. From the first it was by nature what it has now become of necessity : luxury,
45
46 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART
and from this it took its character. To this it has remained faithful to the present day, and this distinguishes it from all other national arts. Luxury does not rob the others of their loftiest heritage, the function of stimulating the noblest impulses of the nation, and of asserting themselves against its baser instincts, of remaining a language to the evolution of which the best contribute, even if the people, having learnt fresh combinations in the course of ages, no longer listen to it. But the art of England at the beginning of the eighteenth century was not only non-lingual, but anti-lingual. It veiled the thing to be expressed, the natural impulse, and offered paint to its customers. Instead of painting faces, it rouged them, dwelt upon costume and social convention, represented people as they wished to be reflected in the mirror of fashionable esteem, and was fashion rather than art.
Two great men were ashamed of this tendency, and attempted to give a more virile tone to their native art. The greater of these was Hogarth. He retrieved what the others had missed, began to speak to his people by its means, was an illustrator. He did not tell his story in conspicuous frescoes ; the age had become too parsimonious for such outlay. We shall see that he nevertheless showed the distinctive characteristics of the great beginners of national artistic manifestations, without belying the century in which he lived or the task of the great personalities of our modern world. Only one of his successors showed a mental vigour equal to his — Constable. These rare spirits tower high above their compatriots, and their very greatness prevented them from giving a rich blessing to their land. They had their origin in opposition to the motive forces of English art-life, and threw back to the elementary, innate peculiarities of the race : they were English- men before they became artists, men strong and wise before, urged by the necessity of expressing themselves according to their temperament, they chose their craft ; they had something to say before they had mastered their language. Hence they were hardly understood in their native land as they deserved to be. But what their fatherland lost, preferring the idols of the day, has been the gain of all Europe. Just these men, who were Englishmen, who meant to speak only to their own people, who are inconceivable in any other land, have found comprehen- sion for their best among foreigners, and borne their richest fruit on alien soil.
It is significant that Hogarth began at once with a reaction. His art was, and had of necessity to be, a negation of all his countrymen had hitherto produced. This was his tragedy, for this negation determined the sterile relation of his unique fecundity to England. We need not ask how far he suffered under it. Tragedy in the history of art does not depend on the fate of individuals. It is an established tact that the negative beginning of his art gave a false direction to the relation of his countrymen to him from the very outset.
The peculiar development of English culture, which, protected by the position of the country, passed into modern materialism more rapidly than that of any other nation, caused a premature expression of problems in art as in other domains. In all progress there is a simultaneous working of analytical and synthetical elements. Every great artist is at once affirmation and denial. The sound economy of national development depends on the adjustment of these conflicting tendencies, so that no stronger negation may be expected from the people than it can bear at a given moment, in order to obtain positive advantage from the expression of genius. Hogarth denied at a stage of development when what the nation needed above all was a positive element. His mockery was directed against a latent national possession, attested by his own art, but the sting came too soon to be recognised as a stimulating
HOGARTH: PEG WOFFINGTON
SIR EDWARD TI-NNANT'S COI.I.IXTION
HOGARTH 47
synthesis. His first achievement, the caricature of William Kent, which dethroned the bugbear of English society, tickled the risible muscles of his countrymen, and this was its only result. Nevertheless, it had a very strong effect, if we may judge by the episodes retailed by contemporaries. Some feared him, and others took a malicious pleasure in his satire. He was looked upon as at least an amusing author. Charles Lamb's dictum, that Hogarth was his favourite reading after Shakespeare, marked the highest degree of appreciation vouchsafed him. It was at once a doubtful tribute to Shakespeare and a depreciation of Hogarth. No one recognised the new world of form in this jester, the enthusiastic affirmation which expressed itself with all the forces of the noblest optimism, and to which negation served merely as the outward husk ; it was not, indeed, possible for any one to recognise it. For such recognition would have implied a culture for which Hogarth himself supplied the first elements. It would be unjust to wonder that he was misjudged. It is certain that Hogarth could only deal as he did with the sting that had been transformed into a paint-brush, and just as certain that his contemporaries could only offer him a sympathy rooted in error, to which all influence on aesthetic culture was denied. Walpole would have been as great a genius as Hogarth him- self, could he have appreciated Hogarth better than he did, and even in such a case his isolated testimony would have had no result. The sphere to which a man's wit reveals itself is removed by many strata from that other in which beauty of form is understood. Even a cultivated race like the French could not do justice to Daumier a century later for the same reason, although Daumier only veiled the national affinity to the antique spirit in the most superficial manner. Recognition of some easily apprehended quality suffices to obscure nobler traits in the consciousness of the people. How much the more certain was this to be the case with a nation whose instinct for artistic things had barely been awakened !
Hogarth himself was hardly conscious of his own importance at first. His inexorable laughter alone seems to have inspired him. He had a pleasure in horrible situations which would remind us of Goya, were he not devoid of any kind of mysticism, a typical carnivorous Englishman, direct, exact, the true son of his native land. He laughed like an Englishman ; he had the characteristic cruelty of English comedy, which still strikes us as a strange world when we see it displayed in the circus by grotesque clowns beating each other black and blue. That which makes the effect is the naturalness, the logical quality in the nonsense of exaggera- tion, the style in the extravagance. This style does not concern itself with compli- cations. It is as evident in the laconic structure of English colloquy as in the dry abruptness with which John Bull gets his own way everywhere. The cabman on the high perch of his hansom commands it no less than the peer in the Upper House. It is a style which impresses by something in it that is self-evident and absolutely non-academic. We should call it barbaric, were it not so logical and so natural.
Hogarth's pictures look like primitive art at a first glance. His early engravings in particular have a thoroughly popular character. The episode is well to the fore. The only recognisable intention is the determination to show everything that happened at the given moment on the given spot. And what a multitude of things are happening ! There is no corner in which we shall not find the contents of some milk-pail splashing over a courtier's brocade, some drunken soldier fondling a •wench, something shattered or destroyed. Everything is absolutely credible, in spite of — nay, indeed, because of — the impossible piling one upon another of
48 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART
every imaginable scene. We do not at once know how far the presentment is art, because at the moment we have not all the data for comparison by which to check our impression ; but one thing is evident, that we are dealing with realities. We have the same sensation here as before Callot's engravings or the elder Breughel's snow-scenes. No one thinks of taking these painted stories for history, and no one doubts their actuality. These things seem to us more true than probable, and pass unchallenged, although if written or described, the same events would provoke a smile at the artlessness of the state- ment. This comes from the fact that these incidents were composed for their own sakes, and not with an eye to the spectator. The actors in them are taking their pleasure, beating, deceiving, and murdering each other for their own satisfaction. No glance ever strays across the footlights to the audience. This is carried so far as to make some of the episodes incomprehensible. We cannot unravel the meaning of certain details in the mummeries of The Fair, or understand quite what is happening in the March to Finchley or the Four Times of the Day. It is difficult to connect the various sections of the great series in the National Gallery and the Soane Museum. There was no lack of commentators in the eighteenth century, and among these the Germans were of course prominent.* The result could but be negative. The value lies in the very things that elude the com- mentator, that escape an analysis of the historical, the humorous, and the satirical elements. Only a very ingenuous mind will suppose that the incidents in Hogarth's pictures were really transcribed, that people displayed their passions with so little reticence, and showed such a lack of restraint under all circumstances. Hogarth did not witness the dramas he depicted. But he grasped the dramatic possibilities of his age in a manner that makes him comparable to Shakespeare, if we set aside the usual significance of the drama, to which Shakespeare gave such a noble interpretation, and turn our thoughts away from that which poetry contributes to the structure of the piece upon the boards, from the specific character of the genre. Shakespeare heard what the people about him were saying, and pondered their speech. And he created his immortal plays because he was able to weld everything he absorbed into an organic whole, because the amalgam was just as strong as the power with which he grasped what the outside world had to offer him. Hogarth had an intense perception of the typical movements of his characters under the stress of emotion ; like Daumier after him, he grasped their fashion of laughing and crying, and brought them into a relation which harmonises with the peculiarity of the parts in a marvellous fashion. We might almost imagine that the artist saw all the details that fascinated him distorted, with jagged broken organs, pressing forward to unite with others, in order that so they might produce a reasonable result, the only thing that seems reality to the artist, form. We care little what story Shakespeare treats, whether he deals with a Brutus, an Othello, or a FalstafF, for
* See Lichtenberg's famous " Ausfuhrliche Erklarung der Hogarthschen Kupferstiche " (Gottingen 1794). The whole of the literature dealing with Hogarth down to our own times is a cheap recapitulation of his wit. His contemporaries are mainly concerned for the morality of their hero, John Trusler, for instance, in "The Works of Mr. Hogarth Moralized" (London, 1768), and Rouquet in the over-rated letters in which he sententiously observes : " N'allez pourtant pas vous imaginer qu'il y ait quelquechose d'obscene, selon les mceurs Angloises, dans les tableaux de Monsieur Hogarth " (Lettres de Monsieur . . . a un de ses amis a Paris pour lui expliquer les estampes de Monsieur Hogarth (London, 1 746). Even the biographers of our day have made Hogarth's moral their text. Armstrong and Dobson were the first to attempt an appreciation of the artist in their important volume (Heinemann, London, 1902).
HOGARTH 49
he remains the same concentrated Englishman, whether he applies his poetry to Roman or to Venetian legend. Neither are we greatly concerned whether tears or smiles predominate in the drama, for we recognise these more general conceptions as the instruments of higher powers, and hence the question as to whether the drama agrees with the traditional event loses its importance for us. Things had to be as the poet has made them. History is false if it teaches us otherwise, or rather, it teaches other things, not those with which he dealt. Thus Hogarth — in a humbler, less perfectly abstract manner — carries conviction by the amalgam which unites his particles. The isolated local significance does not give the sense. The amalgam is just as much a result of the methods of formative art, just as visible, that is to say, as Shakespeare's marvellous power in suiting everything to the organs with which we are best able to absorb his gift. In the one case the power of words rises to abnormal heights, in the other the play of lines and planes and colour. It is not their wit or their situations which make Shakespeare and Hogarth comparable ; the elements in these which seem alike are as different as possible ; it is their common faculty for making their occurrences live before our eyes. They achieved this in different ways. The resemblance springs from a distant affinity in creative impulse, due to the fact that they belonged to the same country. Like Shakes- peare, Hogarth required the incentive he gained from the opposition of his own personality to the activities of his contemporaries, and it is obvious that his passion could not have found expression in still-life. His anecdotes, unessential as they are to the immortal quality of his art, are as inalienably a part of him as are " Hamlet," " Macbeth," and the historical plays a part of Shakespeare. But when we speak thus, we do not look upon the anecdotes as objective, as the material circumstances which stimulated the creation, but we see them as parts of the creator, and make use of them as necessary symbols for certain portions of his nature. We mean Shakespeare when we talk of " Macbeth," and we mean Hogarth to a certain extent when we mention Southwark Fair. The fact that this process is much easier in the case of Shakespeare, that we feel we possess immeasurably more of him than the stories he actually left us, and that the abstraction he accom- plished was far greater than that of Hogarth, places the poet far above the painter. Shakespeare has shown himself in a hundred gradations, whereas, compared with him, Hogarth was content with a narrow scale.
Hence, the incomprehensibility of certain of Hogarth's works, notably the engravings, which preserve the reproductive character of all the prints of the day, does not in the least diminish our enjoyment. We do not understand the details of the episodes, but we grasp the general intention better than the artist's con- temporaries, who got no further than the allusions. Not in these, for which his contemporaries had ten, and we have a hundred, interpretations ready, does the intangible dramatic quality lie, but in the combination of emotions, the eloquent gestures accompanying a varying dance. The strophe about the mystical dance in Milton's " Paradise Lost," which Hogarth quotes in his " Analysis of Beauty," might stand as the motto of his own art :
Mystical dance !
Mazes intricate
Eccentric, intervolved, yet regular
Then most, when most irregular they seem.
Like every great artist, he danced his works, and his rhythm is so powerful that it VOL. i c
5o THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART
helps us too over the passages which our curiosity would fain snatch from the context and hand over to the speculations of the understanding.
The genesis of his works substantiates this basic quality of all Hogarth's art. The drawings for his engravings in the British Museum and in the Fairfax Murray collection, if we compare them with the ultimate prints, show that the primary pre- occupation was neither satire nor comedy, but rhythm. Only a few of these drawings are first sketches. It is evident that Hogarth made a variety of studies before he arrived at his final conception. There are drawings which approach the definitive result very closely, and certainly do not represent the master's first idea, as, for instance, Mr. Fairfax Murray's red chalk drawings for Gin Lane and Beer Street. Even in these we note how Hogarth made the illustrative quality more pronounced in transferring them to the copper-plate. Others reveal the comic element hardly at all, or only in slight indications. The drastic quality lurks, inarticulate as yet, in the play of dancing lines. In the drawing for the eleventh plate of the cycle Industry and Idleness, nearly the whole of the sketches for which are in the British Museum — a collection that adds amazingly to our sum of knowledge of the master — the seething multitude in the public square, with its innumerable heads, dominates the more intimate significance of the plate. The sketch for the shop scene in the same series, which was never carried out on the copper, does not as yet indicate whether the sentiment of this scene was to be grave or gay, but it divides the masses with irresistible clarity, and gives the lines an expressive force that recalls Rembrandt. The manner in which the broadly washed planes flow about the structure of lines again suggests Daumier. Other sheets of the same series are pure dix-huitieme siecle. The spectator's eye participates in the quivering movement of the microscopic curves, and communicates only a beneficent vibration of forms to the mind. In the Banquet — the drawing for the eighth plate — a child seems to have held the pen. Everything sways, even the lines of the architecture. Slightly modified, the outline of the seated figures might represent the wooded background of a drawing by Both. The renunciation of detail might almost be described as playful in its arbitrariness. But all this child-like element is really sincerity and genius. The ensemble is ensured in an incomprehensible fashion. There is no insistence on the psychological significance of any particular group ; the theme is the room with the long table of diners, whose animal function is expressed by a saltatory line. It seems almost as if satire, which is wont to find its objective in human figures, had here made the room alone the butt, giving it the semblance of some rococo face, full of lines and furrows. When we have once grasped this, we shall recognise this same physiognomy in all Hogarth's interiors, even in those where the single faces seek to engage our whole attention.
And further, we shall see in these drawings a fact confirmed by the pictures, and obvious to every one who has studied the artist's work thoroughly, that Hogarth did not keep closely to Nature, and was by no means intent on the direct reflection of the material world. I do not feel at all assured that Muther was right in asserting* that he was in the habit of sketching from the life in gaming-hells, brothels, and dram-shops. I know no drawing of which this might safely be predicated. It is, of course, evident that he did not paint these haunts and their inmates from fancy, and that, like the author of " Moll Flanders," he had an extensive personal knowledge of them. But he did not copy them. 1 am inclined to think that these places and their customs were not very repulsive to him ; it would perhaps not be * " Geschichte der englischen Malerei " (S. Fischer, 1903).
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too much to say that he was at his ease in them, in so far as the morality of this moralist allowed him to be. Hence he had no need to copy them. He had the instinct for these centres which no copying, had it been practised for a hundred years, could have replaced. And what was better still, he had universal instincts, not only for this shady side of life, but for every life ; he had the remarkable faculty for expression which creates plastic forms out of what to ordinary mortals becomes more or less conscious experience.
The biographical notices of Hogarth moreover give us some very definite indica- tions of his relations to Nature. We learn that he worked almost exclusively from memory. He found, he tells us, " that he who could by any means acquire and retain in his memory perfect ideas of the subjects he meant to draw, would have as clear a knowledge of the figure as a man who can write freely hath of the twenty-four letters of the alphabet and their infinite combinations (each of these being composed of lines), and would consequently be an accurate designer. I therefore endeavoured to habituate myself to the exercise of a sort of technical memory, and by repeating in my own mind the parts of which objects were com- posed, I could by degrees combine and put them down with my pencil. Thus with all the drawbacks which resulted from the circumstances I have mentioned, I had one material advantage over my competitors, viz., the early habit I thus acquired of retaining in my mind's eye, without coldly copying it on the spot, whatever I intended to imitate. Sometimes, but too seldom, I took the life for correcting the parts I had not perfectly enough remembered and then I transferred them to my compositions."
The biographers confirm this account of his methods, which the whole character of his art bears out. It contains in itself the master's protest against the pitiful helplessness of his compatriots. An imitativeness devoid of any sort of earnest purpose had found no antidote in the dull reproduction of Nature. Hogarth sought in his calling above all things a means of measuring himself against the world, and in his situation could only do this through a vigorous synthesis. He was of the kind, if not of the stock of Rubens.
His rhythm has many affinities with that of the Fleming. A century and the difference of race divide them. Hogarth has nothing of the royal manner of Marie de' Medici's painter. He was a bourgeois to the core in a bourgeois land, and lived in an age which was endeavouring to supersede the rhetoric of the seventeenth century. Quantitatively, therefore, he bears the same relation to Rubens as the contemporary Frenchmen. But his manner was more closely akin to that of the master. Something of the peasants in the Louvre Kermesse, of that very individual Rubens, lives in his scenes — reduced, of course, and seen through the temperament of the eighteenth century. We are conscious of the decorative rococo element even here, in spite of many a coarse detail. But his decorative gift is less fluid than that of the Frenchmen, and this gives him advantages greater than the countervailing disadvantages. His tougher manner, biting into us as with barbed hooks, makes the deeper impression, whereas we enjoy the pictures of the Watteau school like ripe fruits, melting in the mouth. He never quite loses the obstinacy of the self-taught artist, he seldom shows himself a virtuoso — when he does so it is to a degree almost unimaginable in an Englishman — and never goes without a remainder into the familiar rhythm of the age. He has a movement peculiar to himself — the dix-huitieme siecle expressed in masculine terms. No Frenchman of the period painted a grotesque ; the " heure du berger "
52 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART
could not endure harsh contrasts. Beside Hogarth, the Frenchmen seem to have played always upon one string, leaving the rest of the instrument mute. Hogarth is a larger world, more objective, its outlook more from above. His laughter does not excite our responsive laughter, like the quirks of the jesters. He grasps more, because he feels more strongly, although at the first blush his emotion may seem to us only stronger hate. No Chardin or Fragonard could have painted certain things in his pictures more sweetly than he has done. But these are always tone among other tones, and the harsh shade beside them gives a richer variety. We always feel something of the freshness of a beginning, whereas there is a presage of the end in the sweetness of the alcove-painters.
This is true also in a wider sense. The analysis of art-history brings out many ingredients which seem to present the sharpest contrasts to our perception. Hogarth forces memory to jump from his contemporaries to such remote spirits as Breughel. He is akin to all the grotesque painters. Even during his lifetime his indebtedness to Jan Steen, Teniers, and Ostade, to say nothing of Callot, was recognised. But Breughel is the salt in Hogarth, a constituent which could not be replaced by a second name like the rest. Looking at the drunken woman on the stairs, dropping her child over the balustrade, in Gin Lane, we are reminded of Breughel's Blind Men and similar things. Details in A Medley, the scene in the church, might have been taken from a Witches Sabbath by Breughel or Bosch. Such pages are to be found in all Hogarth's phases. Gin Lane was executed in 1751, A Medley ten years later, and even when the external resemblance vanishes we seem to recognise something of the fantastic Fleming's daring style in the whole manner of thought. And yet I do not know if Hogarth really knew Breughel. The affinity — if it can so be called — has no trace of archaism ; the emotion fills the form to the very brim. It is quite possible that here we have merely similar con- ditions leading to similar results. In any case, this primitive basis is indispensable in the work. It gave the painter his firmness of structure, and prevented the satirist from losing himself in the non-plastic.
Satire was, indeed, positively an advantage to his art. It apparently repressed his artistic intentions only to distribute them the more happily in reality. When we first glance at his interiors we see only the scene. It entices us to find out what is going on there. But directly we get nearer the art takes us captive, and we scarcely note that our original curiosity is being led by the nose. The art manifests itself primarily as an astonishing suggestion of space. It is less in degree in the two earliest cycles, A Harlot's Progress and The Rake's Progress, the first of which is only complete in the engravings. The moral tale predominates here, the scene is more important than the room. In the little cabinet of the Soane Museum we can easily see how the painter's genius expanded, how it became more universal, more pictorial, in its progress from these pictures to the late Election series. On the other hand, there is a certain uncanny power in the details of the earlier works. The gesture not only speaks, but acts. In the sixth part of The Rake's Progress, the scene in the gaming-house, the furious gesture of the ruined spendthrift breaks through the colourless darkness like a magical light. The picture, like many of the others, has darkened very much, and was barbarically painted from the begin- ning. But it still affects us like a glimpse into half-fallen ruins, where details preserved by chance urge our thoughts to reconstruction. Slight as the indications are, they nevertheless give the self-absorption of each group with grim precision, their indifference to the fate of the prodigal, whose scream penetrates to us like the
HOGARTH 53
echo of unseen forces. The primitive detail — primitive not intentionally, but because of the unity of the conception — adds to the effect here, as it so often does in Hogarth's works. The series reveals, further, much more tender gifts. The first picture, in which the young spendthrift makes his arrangements for the rosy future, foreshadows all the artist's future palette. The orange-brown coat of the tailor and his red cap nestle against the silvery grey and blue of the hero's open waistcoat. The blue is worked out in the spotted dress of the old woman, the strongest figure in the composition, and the young one, the " bed-maker's daughter," completes the harmony with her tender pink and yellow and her rich white. This bouquet of colour stands out brilliantly against the Velazquez-like brown of the walls. Hogarth's solicitude for the structure of his rooms can only be compared with that of the best Dutch painters of interiors.
Before such pictures we need a little patience. If we hurry past them, as is our wont in modern exhibitions, we might really note nothing but a painter of anecdotes. But if we linger for a few minutes a remarkable transformation takes place ; the anecdote disappears behind the actual vehicles of charm. This is noticeable in all Hogarth's pictures. Only the consummate painting has survived of the biting satire Calais Gate, in the National Gallery, by which Hogarth took his revenge for his undeserved arrest in the year 1748, when he wished to go to France. We no longer know exactly what the huge joint of roast beef in the arms of the bony servitor means, but we are delighted by the textures of the meat and of the white cloths, and the juxtaposition of these details and the famished faces of the watch does not convey to us only the vague indication of the allusion, but a very definite impression of the flickering fantasy of the scene. Thus the story is not concentrated as the literary painter would concentrate it, but is generalised in a manner worthy of an artist. All that remains to suggest the origin of the picture is the figure of the painter in the background sketching the gate — an allusion to the cause of his arrest.
The consummate colour in the above-mentioned scene of The Rakes Progress, is not common to the whole series. Hogarth fulfilled the promise there given ten years later in the National Gallery masterpiece, the six-act cycle called Marriage a la Mode. The progress lies in the development of the palette and the elimination of all impertinent detail. If we include the first series, A Harlot's Progress, in the comparison, we are conscious of following the evolution of a primi- tive into a master of the most varied effects in a still higher degree. The expansion of the space that has taken place in the second of the Progresses is very considerable. The reduction of the strapping figures, which do not stand in any very convincing relation to their surroundings in the first series, gives a more rhythmic effect to the second. In the third, maturity of colour is added to the rest. This belongs solely to the painter, whereas the first two still betray Hogarth's beginnings as an engraver. The Marriage a la Mode dates from the painter's most prolific period, the time of his own portrait with the dog and the portrait of his sister, and shows the maximum of pictorial charm imaginable in this genre. We feel as if we were contemplating a diminutive fresco, so naturally is the vibration within the one frame carried on into the next, affecting us as the portion of a many-limbed whole, in which the development of the somewhat trivial story of a coquettish woman and a frivolous viveur plays no very important part. In spite of Hogarth's assertion that France did not possess any good colourist — the assertion which goaded Diderot to such a comical outbreak of wrath in his "Salon" of 1765 — we
54 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART
can only suggest the charm of these pictures by means of a French name, the same which Diderot exploited against Webb and Hogarth — Chardin. Not to compare the value of the one with that of the other. That which was the chief attraction of the quiet painter of the Benedicite was ill suited to the English dramatist, and what the latter possessed he owed not to Chardin, even though Chardin, as Diderot justly says, had earned the title of a great colourist long before Hogarth. We might call the six pictures of Marriage a la Mode dramatised episodes out of the same world which suggested the lyrics of Diderot's meditative friend. Chardin seems the freer of the two. His greater culture ensures his greater indifference to the fashionable standard. In these scenes, as a whole Hogarth is almost more dix-huitieme siecle than the Frenchman. The rhythm which whispers faintly in La Pourvoyeuse, still sounds over-loudly in comparison in the tenderest pictures of the Englishman ; but, on the other hand, it has a luxuriance which overflows the narrow confines of the frame. The difference increases on closer comparison. All is straight and simple with Chardin ; he loves vertical lines, everything that gives the quietest movement to his veil of colour. In the documents of the author of " The Analysis of Beauty " the curve predominates. Everything is arched, and the colour is made up of winding chains. It is only in their total results that the palettes resemble each other from a distance, just as certain figures in the pictures of the two artists resemble each other, because they bear the same proportion to the rooms in which they are set. The genesis, however, is perfectly distinct. The interiors themselves have nothing in common, and the persons who inhabit them have perfectly different souls. In the one case they are animated, mercurial temperaments, in the other calm, contemplative figures. Chardin builds up the skeleton of his pictures with clear, well-organised colour-contrasts, and the flesh consists of vaporous veils drawn over the whole ; the airy fabric is woven of microscopic diamond-splinters. Hogarth dresses his little figures as Rubens attires his Popes, and produces correlation by the accumulation of all kinds of materials. The singing fop in the toilette scene of Marriage a la Mode is royally arrayed. Such a minute detail as the trimming on the olive-grey sleeve, in which orange is interwoven with gleaming red and blue, seems — I know not how — to be taken from the vestments of the St. Lievin at Brussels, or some kindred example of Rubensesque splendour. The Countess has always a particular cachet. For the hair-dressing she wears a grayish pink skirt, partly concealed by the rich folds of an orange dressing-gown. An exquisite corset, gray with blue bows, supports her rounded bust, and over it falls the white toilette jacket, with its gray shadows. The mise-en-scene is made up of the thousand important nothings which furnish the existence of triflers. And yet these puppets live ! This is the amazing part of it all — a life among powder-boxes ! The Countess is no clothes-peg. Her face has the seductive animal freshness of the little lady who makes good use of her time. The granulated pink-and-white complexion, set off by the glossy brown hair, reveals energy in the pursuit of pleasure — a diabolical nervous energy. Even in the second picture, Shortly after Marriage, where her ladyship seems very cheerful beside the future cuckold, we divine that her activities will not confine themselves to details of dress, and we feel — I blush to acknowledge it — a guilty sympathy with her sweet audacity. Such a comprehensive individualisation of the eternal feminine on a small scale was undreamt of by Chardin. Guys was the first to give a similar impression.
It is easy to understand that an artist capable of thus extending the traditional
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idea of beauty by virtue of his vital conceptions of the present had small respect for the pictorial wares of his contemporaries, and that once, in jesting reference to the exaggerated estimate of Italian pictures, he wrote : " That grand Venus — as you are pleased to call it — has not beauty enough for the character of an English cook-maid." * Hogarth's unconcealed aversion from Italy is no less interesting in the famous letter than the love of country which may be read between the lines. This ideal attitude towards his native land, manifested on every possible occasion, seems scarcely compatible with the mocking spirit that feared neither God nor man ; yet it was not only the moral basis of the man, but the essential condition of his art. How these two characteristics harmonised without forcing the artist to compromise with the man is the key to Hogarth's psychology and to a true appreciation of his greatness — above all, of his art. For the fact that in his pictures mockery decked itself in beautiful colour and chose agreeable forms does not sufficiently explain the phenomenon. The logic of this combination remains to be discovered.
Hogarth's scenes are the utterances of a satirist who won monumental forms from the things he lashed. We have already noted the introspective attitude of the actors on his stage, the author's objective rendering. But this is not in itself the stylistic force of the pictures. It merely precludes insipidity of style, sentimentality of process, prevents what is injurious, but is not positively pro- gressive. That Hogarth's pictures are not lampoons, but caricatures in the sense in which caricature may be called the basis of all great works of art, is not a result of the objectivity of analytical vision. But is this objectivity in Hogarth really so exclusively abstract, even in its obvious extent, as it would seem to be in a superficial formulation ? In psychological terms, was Hogarth merely concerned to ridicule ? The solution is not to be found in the smug morality of the zealous biographer, intent on human episodes. This is evanescent, and cannot examine conditions that were moral or immoral a hundred and fifty years ago by the standards of to-day. The idea that Hogarth's satire aimed at the reformation of those he satirised, even were it well-founded, could but turn us away from the penetrating recognition of that satire itself. We require instinctive confirmations. If we travel with Hogarth through the scenes of the Marriage a la Mode one thing, at any rate, seems hard to believe — that the creator of the society whose misdeeds he exposes so mercilessly stood entirely aloof therefrom. The details of his life which have come down to us throw no light on the point. The fact of material relation would not give us much information, and we know, indeed, that there can have been no question of this. But the man who called Garrick his best friend, the companion of Pope, whose caricaturist pencil was guided even in his youthful works by the lofty spirit which felt itself drawn to Milton, understood first before he hated. He fulfilled the postulate afterwards formulated by his countryman Carlyle — he saw. His perception pierced through the ludicrous kernel of things and beheld relative force and vitality even among the contemp- tible. The zealot who considered the ethical success of the popular series of engravings, The Four Stages of Cruelty, by which he hoped to inculcate mercy among his countrymen, a higher thing than the proud consciousness of having produced Raphael's cartoons, could not in his best works refrain from treating his
* In a letter said to have been written by Hogarth under the pseudonym " Britophil " to a London newspaper in 1737. Reprinted in extenso in John Nichols' "Genuine Works of William Hogarth, with Biographical Anecdotes" (London 1 808-10).
56 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART
victims with more tenderness than pedagogy demanded. He could not have given such seductive grace to the heroine of the Marriage a la Mode, even in the duel scene, where the wretched woman kneels in her chemise before her wounded husband, if he himself had been quite callous to her charm. Nor should we find such rare tones of the palette in the poor sinner's death-bed scene if the last word had been left to the moralist here. Of course, consciously he may have accepted the part which appears the most natural one. It brought him the facile satisfaction of the worthy citizen who is extolled by his intimates. But splendour remained beautiful to the painter even when it masked vice or absurdity. The frivolity of the upper classes must have been apparent to the healthy mind of this friend of the people in the fashion of the day, and Hogarth lost no opportunity of speaking his mind on this point. He succeeded best in his famous picture of the year 1742, Taste in High Life. Even here, where the moral tendency called for no restraint, where the theme is two old fools, whose puppet-figures could not stir any human emotion in any spectator, even here the decisive strain of Hogarth's subconsciousness mingles with his laughter. The work is by no means exhausted when we have recognised the comicality of the personages. Absurd as is the effect of the hooped skirt on that aged carcase, made up merely of paint and false hair, whose arabesqued hands belong rather to the face than to the body, idiotic as is her partner, to whom all existence, sex included, is com- pressed into the mechanism of a mincing gait, the ludicrous aspect of this monu- mental type of fashion-mania is not maintained before the greater complexity of sensations which it evokes, directly or indirectly, according to the degree of culture of the spectator. For it does not only condemn, though the ridiculous is present in every detail, even in the grotesque pictures on the walls. It has a positive side, though not in the popular manner, not by means of cheap personifications. We do not see " the good " side by side with " the bad," nor bring our examination to an end with a " quod erat demonstrandum." But the good is shown in the evil. The false grace which Hogarth condemns is counteracted by a grace which makes use of the same persons, the same gestures, and welds all the absurd details into a common gesture, which, because it is harmonious, lifts the soul to higher realms, far above those of morals. A microcosm becomes monu- mental, and after the evanescent wit has had its effect we still retain the permanence of a new form, caring nothing from what paradoxes it sprang. The movements of the two grimacing figures make up a magnificent arabesque. The monkey, which breaks the gigantic curve like a rosette, was not set in the foreground merely with a satiric intention, and in the second, I had almost said the third, female figure, even taking it as a detail, there is scarcely a breath of negation ; or, rather, the breath that remains seems merely the spice of this piquant grace. Effeminacy was not merely satirised here. Out of the grotesqueness is evolved a charm which could only have been wrought by the capacity for objectivity of an artistic soul, and finally becomes so strong that we are conscious of titillation rather than of the scourge. Beardsley, who of all Englishmen owes most to the author of Taste in High Life, was the first to essay this kind of objectivity again, on a much smaller scale. Mutatis mutandis ! The sphere of the late-born illustrator of " The Rape of the Lock " no longer required the strong difference between subject and object, and perhaps exaggerated his affection for the objects of his laughter, just as his predecessor had exaggerated his hatred. That which brought the two children of such different worlds together was a common sympathy. We are told that at
HOGARTH 57
the age of twenty Hogarth began his artistic career with an engraving from the same poem of Pope's to which Beardsley owed one of his most exquisite fantasies.
But we must not lose ourselves in admiration of a single fruit of Hogarth's tree, which has perhaps a somewhat excessive attraction for us of to-day ; we must not forget that it is only one of many. The subject of the last great cycle is a world apart from that of the earlier series. It is an electioneering campaign in four acts, the Election series. It dates from the year 1755, ten years after the marriage story, and twenty years after The Rake's Progress. Garrick bought it, and rejoiced in it to the last day of his life. It is now the great treasure of the Soane Museum, where it shares the same gloomy little cabinet which shelters The Rake's Progress and a variety of other things, useful and superfluous. It will be generally agreed that this cycle is the masterpiece of the versatile painter. Though it has nothing of the brilliant fin-de-siecle pleasantry of the pictures we have just been considering, it has retained what is best in these, the same playfully triumphant form. But here the victory implies the curbing of an inconceivable multitude of effects. To get a clear idea of this it would be necessary to see the pictures in a suitable room, where it would be possible to isolate each, and to look at them from a proper distance. To imagine the details we must recall Jan Steen's most grotesque types and kindred things. Faces of this kind swarm, and many a one shows a close resemblance to famous prototypes. In the first picture, for instance, Enter- tainment (the banquet to the electors), the fellow in the red jacket with the glass in his hand at the left-hand table, whose bestial joy draws the tongue out of his throat; or the monstrous old woman on the extreme left, who is making the spruce candidate pay for her political opinions in kind. This robust Dutch note does not appear for the first time in this final series. It is to be found here and there in many earlier pictures and engravings — the Cockpit, for instance — and even in the figure of Bambridge in the Assize picture of 1729, in the National Portrait Gallery. Sometimes we could believe that the heads had been taken directly out of small Dutch pictures and put into Hogarth's. But the way in which they are introduced is the remarkable thing. It might almost be asserted that Hogarth first found the right use for grotesque masks, which are often mere isolated monstrosities in the small Dutch pictures, by employing them as accents in his crowds of figures. The general effect is as unlike Jan Steen as possible ; it is rather — rococo. A skipping rhythm, like a merry streamlet, gliding over all sorts of grotesque stones, which lie in all possible positions beneath the surface of its clear waters ; perceptible in spite of its infinity of detail, always animated to the point of frenzy, and yet a single harmonious surface. A year earlier, in the March to Finchley of the Foundling Hospital, we see how Hogarth compelled repose. Without the recurrent red of the faces and uniforms the picture would fall to pieces. The perspective of the colours completes the arrangement, still somewhat arbitrary here. In the Election series this effect is multiplied. The colour becomes a net of innumerable meshes, which follows the movements of the composition, and the composition, for all the spontaneity of the impression, is so arranged that all the individual movements complete a main direction. In the Entertainment the brownish, granulated gray of the walls and tables gives a firm foundation for this play, which is necessarily much more reticent in colour than in line. Gray-blue shades pre- dominate. The heads, heated to boiling-point by gluttony, may laugh, grin, and scream as boisterously as they will; the pervading reddish-gray tone binds them to
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58 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART
the quiet surface and before the uniform background into an ornament for the table, which stands like a rock in the hurly-burly of the elements. The more lively colour-contrasts appearing here and there are divided almost mathematically. Red appears in the background to the left in the red jacket of the lewd fellow with the glass, in the youth with the cask of the foreground, and to the right in the costume of the decrepit devourer of oysters ; orange to the left in the flag, in the middle in the violoncello, to the right in the carnations of the old woman, &c. We never remark the scheme. Each of the four pictures is a world, a mood in itself, and yet a part of the same story. In the second act, Canvassing for Votes, where hard cash takes the place of wine and oysters, and greed is shown in all its stages from extreme hunger to satiety, the extraordinary energy of the central group with the farmer is only made possible by the repose of its surroundings. On the one side a voting paper is thrust suddenly under the farmer's nose, while on the other the host, crimson with persuasive energy, and almost bursting, sets forth the virtues of the rival candidate, the while the worthy man calmly pockets the chinking arguments of each. A conception becomes plastic form forthwith. Each of the three preserves the corporeal entity proper to him — even the spiritual elements are corporeal here — and at the same time the limbs of all three weave themselves into a new mass, a Laokoon in small. In the last two pictures of the series Hogarth enhances the fantastic character of his structural art, and again, as in the others, tones down the wildness of the composition by the mild scale of bluish- gray, orange, and brown. The scene of The Polling, with the swarm upon the steps, and the concentrated variety of individual scenes, is a charming, peaceful landscape, accompanying the uproar with gentle chords. We recognise what Wilson's friend might have become to the English school of landscape painting. Chairing the Member (the apotheosis) rises in my memory as a tumultuous wave of humanity. In the many-storeyed structure, with the fat candidate's arm-chair to crown it, each detail contributes to the rhythm, without detriment to its objective structure. If the boldness of Rubens and his followers, destroying a cosmos to build it up afresh, fills us with admiration, this citizen of a smaller world teaches us to appreciate the tough endurance which raises its pyramids with small stones.
Minuteness of structure was proper to Hogarth, as was also minuteness of material. The idea of a picture grew up in his mind from the sum of single observations, which he was able to seize and to co-ordinate. The converse method, to which his ambition sometimes urged him, the production of an idea independent of his daily sum of verifiable experience, was not so successful in his hands. He had already in his thirties attempted " what the puffers in books call the great style of history painting," the result being the two large pictures now in St. Bartholo- mew's Hospital, which he himself disparaged in later years, and not altogether without cause. Shortly before his fiftieth year, and between that and his sixtieth year, he returned to the charge, goaded by the patronising criticism which persisted in looking upon him as an outsider, and painted several large Scriptural subjects, even producing an altar-piece in 1756.* The Moses before Pharaoh's Daughter, in the Foundling Hospital, seems to me the most interesting of these essays. It is certainly the happiest of the many combinations with Rembrandt attempted by the England of the eighteenth century. We note with satisfaction in the old man to the left of the picture the translation of a veritable Rembrandtesque Jew into a new world, and in the Moses, with his yellowish-red carnations, a relation to the great * A triptych for St. Mary Redcliffe, Bristol. Now in the Fine Arts Academy, Clifton.
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prototype, based upon an earnest comprehension of transmitted treasure. Comical as are the dignified periods in which Reynolds, of all people, stigmatised this departure of Hogarth's as a regrettable aberration,* even a juster optimism might deem them no fresh titles to fame for a master who had manifested so independent a conception of the world. But a more penetrating appreciation would find valuable indications of his personality in these works. Even the weaknesses of great men attest their strength. Here we will be content to note that in Hogarth's extensive life-work these disputable productions are quite insignificant numerically, even if we include among them the: much-debated Sigismunda, the weakest work of his old age.
On the other hand, Hogarth has left abundant proof that his art did not require the " ridicule of life " to manifest its greatness. His portraits are unrivalled in the portrait-ridden art of England. Hogarth as a portrait painter forms a chapter of himself. I have referred the weakness of English painting to the fact that it was a form of luxury, designed, not to be a medium of expression for the artist, but to lend a pleasing elegance to the heads of the sitters. Hogarth was free from this vice. He is distinguished from his colleagues, not because he used other colours, because he was more or less skilful than they, but by his different conception of his calling. He saw in portraiture exactly what he saw in all other painting. He would only take people who amused him as his sitters. Art was not a business to him, but experience, the possibility of giving clear forms to the things that moved him. Hence the most striking quality in all his portraits is their inevitability. This inner quality is not to be replaced in any way, not because it suggests any particularly moral or sentimental reflections to us, but because it is the vehicle of that motive energy which alone urges the highest capacities of the artist to manifest themselves. There is scarcely one among the portraits that was not seen with all the painter's powers. This is at once apparent in the manner in which the people in his pictures fill the space. The Lord Lovat, of 1746, first sits in the arm-chair before he becomes decorative, and sits with all his sitting power. His physiognomy lies not only in the broad, intelligent face, but in the whole body, the exuberant fleshiness of which we divine under the folds of the coat, even in the thick hands with the calculating fingers. Nothing betrays the fact that this man was executed the day after Hogarth painted him. But the energetic vitality of the sitter, who had given the Government plenty of work, is emphasised in all its variety. Hogarth himself pronounced the Captain Coram, of 1739, in the Foundling Hospital (with its extraordinarily expressive face, kneaded with vigorous brush- strokes, and yet soft), his best portrait, because it revealed a certain affinity with the genre of the day, and triumphed by those methods which were common to Hogarth and his colleagues. The judgment seems to us somewhat extravagant now, not because we do not think the Captain Coram a fine work — it is almost unrivalled in its class — but because Hogarth is incomparably more individual in other portraits. I am thinking not so much of works that approximate to the specifically English sentiment of the day, such as the portraits of Garrick, Thornhill,
* "After this admirable artist had spent the greatest part of his life in an active, busy, and, we may add, successful attention to the ridicule of life, after he had invented a new species of dramatic paint- ing, in which probably he will never be equalled . . . ; he very imprudently, or rather presumptuously, attempted the great historical style, for which his previous habits had by no means prepared him : he was indeed so entirely unacquainted with the principles of this style, that he was not even aware that any artificial preparation was at all necessary." [A Discourse, delivered to the Students etc. (London, '789)0
60 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART
and Pellet, evidences of the superiority of a natural instinct to the dexterity of the fashionable artist, or of the proud bearing of the little Duke of Cumberland in the late Sir Charles Tennant's collection, where within a very small space there are details which foreshadow Goya, but rather of certain female portraits, the Miss Arnold in the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge, and the glorious works in the National Gallery. These are imperishable documents of the most patrician English spirit, contemporary with the portraits of Reynolds' school, and so far above the best works of that circle that it is inconceivable why a country, simultaneously pro- ducing such distinct grades of artistic merit, should not have pronounced for the better of the two. Hogarth's woman is not the doll which the others endow with fine clothes and pretty gestures and insipid ideas. She speaks, works, bestirs herself before our eyes, expresses herself with all the instincts of