INDIVIDUALITY OR THE PERSONAL ELEMENT
THE fact that “the report about nature” which we have called “truth”
varies with the reporter is of vital importance to us in comprehending
the measure of exactness in the result. It is something that must be
reckoned with in every thought, deed, and utterance, for its presence is
potent in all human endeavor. Two astronomers, to use the accepted
illustration, taking the time of the passage of a series of stars over
the same meridian, will not precisely agree in their arithmetical
results. However accurate, unbiassed, and mechanical in action they may
seek to be, it happens that one takes the time earlier or later than the
other. Consequently there is always a variation in the product, which
has to be rectified by adding a constant. This is what is called the
personal equation—a something we have heard about in literature and art
as well as in science.
Perhaps you may remember that in the writing class of our youth when the
motto, “Evil communications corrupt good manners,” was given us as an
example to copy, we all wrote the motto, and we all tried to follow the
exact form of the copper-plate pattern before us; but somehow our
performances differed one from another. In some the letters were large,
in others they were small; the angle was flatter, the line was firmer,
or the shading heavier. We used to think it merely a matter of practice,
and fancied if we kept at it long enough we could ultimately write
exactly like the copper-plate pattern. But I wonder if we thought quite
correctly about that. Certainly there are thousands of people who have
been writing all their lives and have had practice enough, but these are
the ones that show the most marked variations from the model. Each one
writes in a manner peculiarly his own. And these handwritings that vary
so radically interest us very much. We see all sorts of striking
peculiarities in them suggestive of their authors, and we even have
so-called scientists who read character out of them, or into them, I
will not say which. The cause of the variation is not far to seek. It is
the personal element appearing in the work and influencing it. If we
would get the same result in all handwritings we must eliminate the
personal element or, if you please, reckon with the personal equation.
This quality which creates the variance in handwriting is met with even
more positively in painting. For painting is, after all, only an
elaborated picture-writing, more flexible, perhaps, than letter-writing,
and, therefore, more easily bent by a personality; but in the main
influenced by the same principles as regards the variation of the
characters. We all write the letter “A” and they are all “A’s,” but each
is different from the other, just as all landscape painters paint hills
and trees and they are all hills and trees, yet each is different again.
If three painters, say Turner, Rousseau, and Claude Monet, could be
brought together and induced, each for himself, to paint a given tree,
there can be no doubt that all three of the paintings would represent
the tree and be true enough representations into the bargain; but they
would not be at all like one another. The Turner would undoubtedly give
the height, the branching outline, the grace and grandeur of the tree;
but in flattened form, perhaps in silhouette against a yellow evening
sky. In any event and under any circumstances we may be sure that it
would be a Turnerian tree. And the Rousseau would be correspondingly
true to Rousseau’s peculiar point of view. It would probably have an
emphasis of mass and volume; it would be as deep through as broad
across, it would be firm in its rooting, massive in its trunk and
branches, heavy in its foliage, rich in its coloring. But Claude Monet,
painting the same tree, would not see the things that appealed to Turner
and Rousseau, or if he did he would disregard them. He would overlook
form and line and body, perhaps lose them entirely in studying the
sunlight falling upon the foliage, in painting the colored reflections
cast by sky and ground and water, in surrounding the tree with colored
air and giving it a setting in an atmospheric envelope. Undoubtedly we
should be able to recognize the original tree in any one of the three
counterfeit presentments. Each would differ from the other and yet no
one of them be false. There would be three different truths about the
one tree—three different phases of the one fact. And undoubtedly we
should be able to say just which painter painted each picture. How?
Because we should recognize in each the point of view peculiar to its
maker—we should recognize the individuality of the painter.
If we consider this same tree as part of a landscape—consider it in
connection with foreground, background, and sky—we shall see that the
chance for the display of individuality is even greater. The choice of
the painter as to how the tree shall be seen determines at the very
start the character of the representation. If it is placed in the
foreground and spreads in a pattern of branches and leaves high up
against the sky, we have one phase of tree-truth, one kind of picture
which may perhaps resemble, in a way, the work of Harpignies, if it is
placed in the middle distance, a shadowy form against a pale morning
sky, with a feeling of heavy air and rising mists, we have another phase
of truth, something which may represent Corot; if it is seen in the far
background against a yellow twilight sky, tall, dark, motionless, we
have still another phase of truth which may stand for Daubigny. Any
change in the position of the tree, any change in foreground or
sky-line, in light or reflection or atmosphere, would represent a new
angle of vision and hence a new truth. And the preference of the painter
for any particular phase of the manifestation, any particular truth,
would exhibit what we have called his individuality.[2]
Footnote 2:
This matter of personality and choice is well illustrated by Mr. La
Farge in his “Considerations on Painting.” He says (p. 71): “I
remember myself, years ago, sketching with two well-known men, artists
who were great friends, great cronies, asking each other all the time
how to do this and how to do that! but absolutely different in the
texture of their minds and in the result that they wished to obtain,
so far as the pictures and drawings by which they were well known to
the public are concerned.
“What we made, or rather, I should say, what we wished to note, was
merely a memorandum of the passing effect upon the hills that lay
before us. We had no idea of expressing ourselves or of studying in
any way the subject for any future use. We merely had the intention to
note this affair rapidly, and we had all used the same words to
express to each other what we liked in it. There were big clouds
rolling over hills, sky clearing above, dots of trees and water and
meadow land below; and the ground fell away suddenly before us. Well,
our three sketches were in the first place different in shape; either
from our physical differences, or from a habit of drawing certain
shapes of a picture, which itself usually indicates—as you know or
ought to know—whether we are looking far or near. Two were oblong, but
of different proportions; one was more nearly a square: the distance
taken into the right and left was smaller in the _latter_ case, and,
on the contrary, the height up and down—that is to say, the portion of
land beneath and the portion of sky above—was greater. In each picture
the distance bore a different relation to the foreground. In each
picture the clouds were treated with different precision and different
attention. In one picture the open sky was the main intention of the
picture. In two pictures the upper sky was of no consequence—it was
the clouds and the mountains that were insisted upon. The drawing was
the same—that is to say, the general make of things—but each man had
involuntarily looked upon what was most interesting to him in the
whole sight; and though the whole sight was what he meant to
represent, he had unconsciously preferred a beauty or interest
different from what his neighbors liked.
“The color of each painting was different—the vivacity of colors and
tone, the distinctness of each part in relation to the whole; and each
picture would have been recognized anywhere as a specimen of work by
each one of us, characteristic of our names. And we spent on the whole
affair perhaps twenty minutes. I wish you to understand again that we
each thought and felt as though we had been photographing the matter
before us. We had not the first desire of expressing _ourselves_, and
I think would have been very much worried had we not felt that each
one was true to nature. Of course there is no absolute nature, as with
each slight shifting of the eye, involuntarily we focus more or less
distinctly some part to the prejudice of others. And not only would
this result have been the same if we had gone on painting, but had we
made a drawing, had we made a careful representation or rapid note of
what we saw by lines (that is to say, by an abstraction of the edges
of the surfaces that we saw), anyone could have told the names of the
men who had done it.”
This preference for a peculiar point of view crops out very early in the
painter’s life. The students in an art class, drawing from the living
model on the platform, and each one striving to follow that model
literally, all show it. The sketches indicate by the placing of the
figure upon the paper, the size of the figure, the height or depth of
the shadows, the clearness or vagueness of the outline, that the
personal element—individuality—is present, influencing and practically
dominating the work of everyone in the class-room. And this, too, in
charcoal work, where the color problem is eliminated. Moreover, there
are features of these charcoal sketches, aside from mere _technique_,
that are equally interesting as indicative of the peculiar temperament
behind the pencil. You cannot fail to be struck with the mood or spirit
that creeps into each one of the drawings. On one paper the model looks
pleasant, almost jovial, on another he will appear sad-faced or morose,
on another, romantic as you might conceive a Wagner hero, or classic and
insipid like a Canova marble, and on still another, gross, brutal, or
perhaps foolish-looking. It is not possible that the model could exhibit
all these different moods. The variation is not in him. He presents the
same stolid, tired front common to all models; the mood is added to him
by the personality holding the charcoal.
[Illustration:
VII.—BELLINI, Madonna and Saints. S. M. dei Frari, Venice.
]
We see the same variation among the works of older people—full-fledged
artists, in the world of art. Nowhere is it more apparent than in the
portrait, the one thing which might be thought to call for the
elimination of the painter and a close fidelity to the facts of the
original. But such is the power of preference that the painter almost
invariably emphasizes certain features at the expense of others less
interesting to him; or such is the warp of the vision that certain
qualities appear abnormal, certain prominences appear unduly
accentuated. There are portraits of the Duchess of Devonshire and of
Mrs. Siddons (Plate 19) by both Reynolds and Gainsborough, but how very
different they are! With Reynolds both of the characters are healthy,
robust, good-natured, somewhat loud and stormy; with Gainsborough they
are both delicate, subdued, refined, even melancholy. And think of the
portraits in the Louvre of Francis I. by different hands, where only a
slight thread of resemblance holds them together; or, better still, the
portraits of Napoleon I., painted by the classic painters of his reign
who believed in the utter effacement of the artist in favor of the facts
before him. How very different in form, feature, mood, and character
Napoleon appears in each picture. He is classic; he is romantic; he is
thin, fat, amiable, moody, fiery, dreamy. David, Delaroche, Gros, no
matter what their theories in art, could not keep themselves out of the
representation. All that any one of them could do was to give his
individual impression of the model before him. Necessarily each was
tinctured by a predilection or a bias. It could not have been otherwise.
What is the cause of the variation in results to be seen in the
portrait? Why, for instance, do the photographs of Queen Victoria show
substantially the same thing, while the portraits of her by painters
show different things? Because the cameras are all made of practically
the same material, have the same sensitiveness, and receive light in the
same way; whereas men are not made of the same material, have not the
same sensitiveness, and receive varying degrees of light according to
their lucidity or absorbent power, which is sometimes called genius. No
two people are fashioned precisely after the same pattern. They vary in
intellectual, emotional, and physical make-up. And let a painter strive
as he may to record an exact fact before him, he cannot escape the
action of his inherent faculties. These may be brighter, clearer,
keener, than those of other painters, or they may be duller and feebler;
but at least they are different, and he must use what nature has given
him. He was equipped originally to see with his own eyes, think with his
own brain, and work with his own hands. Is it not very apparent then
that the eye may warp the vision and report peculiarly to the brain,
which in turn may tell the hand to work thus and so? And the result in
art is what? Why, the individual view of one man; or nature passed
through the alembic of that man’s personality.[3]
Footnote 3:
“Our eyes, our ears, our sense of smell, of taste, differing from one
person to another, create as many truths as there are men upon earth.
And our minds, taking instructions from these organs, so diversely
impressed, understand, analyse, judge, as if each of us belonged to a
different race. Each one of us, therefore, forms for himself an
illusion of the world; and the writer (the painter, too) has no other
mission than to reproduce faithfully this illusion, with all the
contrivances of art that he has learned and has at his command.”—GUY
DE MAUPASSANT, _Fortnightly Review_, March, 1888, p. 366.
[Illustration:
VIII.—CORREGGIO, Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine. Louvre, Paris.
]
How shrewdly Coleridge discerned the truth in that definition of art
which I am so very fond of quoting because of its exactness. He says
that painting is of “a middle quality between a thought and a thing—the
union of that which is nature with that which is exclusively human.”
That is it, precisely. Art is an illusion of nature produced by a
personality. Human individuality must be in it because it cannot very
well be kept out of it. Whatever we do, we speak ourselves. For a time
we may act a part—copy someone else—but sooner or later the mask falls
and we stand revealed in the form and manner nature designed for us. We
are all peculiar in our make-up physically, mentally, and æsthetically.
To the European all Chinamen look alike, and possibly to Chinamen all
Americans look alike; but we know there is a variation. We may seem as
like as peas in a peck measure, but we differ in the conformation of a
wrinkle. Out of a hundred acquaintances on the street how easy it is to
recognize each one apart from his fellows. There is a peculiarity in
look or walk or bearing that betrays the man. And of those hundred
acquaintances each one, as we have already noted, writes in an
individual way and you are able to distinguish the handwritings by the
variations in the muscular action of the hands. Suppose you should have
read to you extracts from a hundred famous authors, do you think you
would have much difficulty in recognizing Shakespeare from Victor Hugo,
Carlyle from Cardinal Newman, or Walter Scott from Swinburne? Could you
possibly mistake an essay by Bacon for an essay by Macaulay, or could
you by any chance confuse a sermon by Canon Liddon with a sermon by
Spurgeon? I think not, for the individuality of mind and thought is even
more positive and assertive than the individuality of the physical
presence.
If you are acquainted with pictures you can enter a gallery in which you
have never been before, and standing in the middle of the room you can
pick out at a distance the Corots, the Diazes, the Monets, the Millets,
the Delacroixs—yes, the Rubenses, the Van Dycks, the Holbeins, and the
Titians. And this, too, with a large degree of accuracy. You are very
likely to be right in your ascriptions. Why? Because you know the
artistic individualities of each one of those painters—know just how
they see, think, feel, and paint—as you know the personal appearance of
an acquaintance upon the street, or recognize his handwriting upon the
face of an envelope. When the question of a picture’s attribution comes
up, when it is of moment whether a work is by a Raphael or a Perino del
Vaga, by a Velasquez or a Mazo, there is an unconscious appeal made to
the spirit of the picture. And this quite aside from a question of
_technique_, aside from any Morellian theory of tools or methods or
models. Does the work reflect the spirit of Raphael? Is the impress of
his individuality to be felt in the canvas? If it is genuine, yes; if by
a follower, no. The sugary little “Reading Magdalene” in the Dresden
Gallery, so long attributed to Correggio, gives not the slightest hint
of that great painter’s individuality; the alleged portrait of Raphael
by himself in the Louvre shows all the blundering stupidity of
Bacchiacca. Whether master or follower, the painter cannot disguise
himself effectively. Back of the work we feel the presence of the
worker. The great artists fashion their art after their own thoughts,
and that which they love the best or feel the deepest speaks out from
the canvas until at last we recognize the poet in his poem, the sculptor
in his marble, the painter in his picture.
These qualities of individuality in art are much like the same qualities
in real life, and we may perhaps fancy in the picture that which we find
admirable in the personal acquaintance. For instance, the traits of
frankness and straightforwardness which we all love in a friend, are
they not just as apparent in Carpaccio the painter? And just as lovable?
The way in which Carpaccio tells the history of St. Ursula or St.
George—so frank in spirit and yet so cunning of hand—reminds one somehow
of a chapter from Sir John Maundevile or Roger of Wendover. How naif he
is with his gorgeously robed Venetians (Plate 6)! How earnest he is
about the dignity of the types, the nobility of the faces, the sobriety
of the action! His sincerity is as great as that of Giotto, and his
absolute unconsciousness—his lack of egotism—as apparent as that of Fra
Angelico. At the foot of the “Presentation” in the Venetian Academy is
that little angel playing upon a lute which you have all seen in
reproductions so many times. You must have noticed that the angel was
not playing for public applause, but for the glory of the Madonna
standing above. There is no thought of you or of me, or anyone outside
of the Madonna and the group of saints. That quality of unconsciousness
we need not attribute to angels. It is no characteristic of theirs so
far as we know; but it was a quality of Victor Carpaccio, the Venetian
painter.
Think for a moment of the “Madonna and Saints” in the sacristy of the
Frari by Giovanni Bellini (Plate 7). How absolutely honest and unabashed
she looks! This is not the Madonna of Sorrows, not the pathetic Madonna
of Botticelli; but a purely human mother, proud of her boy—a mother and
not ashamed. And the little cherubs playing on musical instruments at
the foot of the throne, how child-like they are with their serious
faces, their little fat cheeks and round childish legs! Everything in
and about the picture tells you of the sane, healthy mind and art of
Giovanni Bellini. The Madonna’s honesty is Bellini’s honesty; the view
of the cherubs as merely beautiful and graceful children of this earth
is Bellini’s view; yes, the gorgeous coloring of the patterned
background, the superb architecture, even the rich ornamentation of the
framing are Bellini’s taste. We cannot, if we would, escape the man. He
is omnipresent in his work. Why should he not be? The story in
literature becomes fascinating through the personality and skill of the
story-teller; why should not the theme in art be beautiful through the
individuality and skill of the painter?
Those of you who have been in Rome and have studied in the Sistine
Chapel know with what a feeling of awe the great figures on the ceiling
inspire one. You feel the presence of a mighty spirit within the walls,
hovering about the vaulted space, in the very air of the chapel itself.
What is it? Surely, nothing in the architecture or the lighting of the
chapel; nothing in the subjects of the frescoes, for they are familiar
subjects in art. It is the impress of a commanding individuality that
you feel. Michael Angelo lives here in his pictures. Those great forms
of the Prophets and Sibyls lost in thought, brooding over the evil of
their days, isolated in their grandeur, living on in gloomy solitude,
how very like they are to what we know of Michael Angelo himself! Notice
the fore-shortened hand and arm of the “Delphic Sibyl” (Plate 21) and
how symbolic of strength it is, how like to the power that lay in the
arm, hand, and mind of the master himself! Follow the outline of the
figure of the newly created Adam—perhaps the grandest piece of drawing
in all pictorial art—and how that summarized, synthetized line speaks
the comprehensive grasp, scope, knowledge, and plastic feeling of the
great draughtsman.
So it is that individuality creeps into the work of art and tinges the
whole character of it. Of the thousands of pictures we pass before in
public galleries the great majority of them are merely records of
individual tastes, beliefs, aspirations, emotions. In other words they
are partial autobiographies of the painters, showing countless moods of
human nature. Some of them are grave, some gay, some refined, some
fierce, some grandiloquent, some resplendent. Almost every shade of
sentiment and feeling, almost every quality personal to the man, can be
recorded in art. And this, without premeditated thought, without
extravagant effort, without conscious action. The note of a bird
discloses its kind not more unconsciously than the hand of the artist
tells the quality of the man.
If all the lives of Rembrandt were swept out of existence we should
still be able to reconstruct his individuality from his pictures. His
must have been an intensely emotional nature. For not in the “Supper at
Emmaus” alone do we find the sorrow-stained face. The portraits of
himself are only too often sad-eyed and passion-wrung; and there is in
the National Gallery, London, one of his portraits of an old woman with
a lace cap and a white ruff (No. 775 of the Catalogue) that shows a
mouth and chin quivering with emotion, and eyes that seem red with
weeping. The man was tragic in his passionate power. He could not
suppress it. Even when he laughs you feel that he is doing so to avoid a
moan. We have little record of the life of Giorgione, but from two or
three of his pictures we know he must have been quite the reverse of
Rembrandt. His “Madonna,” at Castelfranco (Plate 24) and his “Concert,”
in the Louvre (in Giorgione’s style if not by his hand), tell us his
Theocritean nature—loving life for its pastoral beauty, revelling in
sunshine, shadow and color, careless of everything but the pure joy of
living. We know still less about Correggio, but his pictures (Plate 8)
say to us that he was of a similar faun-like nature—a man who grew
eloquent over the grace and charm of women and children, and cared
little or nothing for the religious themes of his time.
And so we might go on down the long line of paintings, recognizing in
each picture the note that harmonized with the painter’s
individuality. What, for instance, is more apparent than the charm of
Corot as seen in his landscapes (Plate 9)? His pictures delight us by
their alluring qualities of calmness, radiance, unity. They are fair
dreams of splendor in which dawn and twilight glow through a silver
veil of atmosphere, in which the winds are hushed and the waters are
stilled and that peace that passeth understanding, that joy which is
beyond price, have fallen upon the dwellers in Arcadia Charm in its
various manifestations has been the possession of not a few painters.
Many of the Italians—Leonardo, Filippino, Lorenzo Costa,
Sodoma—possessed it; the eighteenth century Englishmen—Wilson,
Gainsborough, Romney—were not without it; and the modern landscape
painters—Daubigny (Plate 16), Cazin, Homer Martin, Tryon—have shown it
in almost all their work. Serenity is a quality allied to charm in
that it is restful and hence an attractive feature. All the great men
possessed it. Raphael was primarily its exponent in Rome as Giorgione
in Venice. The superb repose of Titian and Velasquez is akin to it;
and the calm of the Parthenon marbles is part of the same spirit.
Refinement is another characteristic that may be shown in painting as
readily as in print. It has nothing to do with fine furniture, fine
clothes, and a pretty face. A picture may possess all the elegance of
the latest fashion and still be the epitome of vulgarity. Refinement
in art means the delicacy, the distinction of feeling that a painter
may possess and show in his work. Terburg made it apparent in so
simple a thing as the drawing of a chair leg or a table-cloth, Chardin
showed it in his pots, pans and dishes, and it is obvious to the most
obtuse in Van Dyck’s portraits of men, women and children. (Plate 18.)
A tenderness of feeling as well as of touch has been exhibited many
times in painting. Dürer shows it in his “Christ on the Cross” (Plate
10), and Botticelli suggests it in almost every picture he ever
painted, whether sacred or profane (Plate 29). Just so with
sensitiveness, which we see so beautifully shown in the portraits by
Lorenzo Lotto, or impetuosity as revealed in the great dramatic
canvases by Tintoretto, or liveliness as seen in the garden scenes of
Pater or the soubrette figures of Fragonard. The words describe the
spirit of the pictures and they also suggest the nature of the
painter.
[Illustration:
IX.—COROT, Landscape. Louvre, Paris.
]
And note too, if you please, that the disagreeable and unpleasant
qualities of the individual crop out in painting as in social life. How
many modern painters do we know whose works exhale the atmosphere of the
Folies-Bergères and the Bal Bullier. Their subjects may be pure enough
or refined enough; they may picture decent people, high life, and
fashionable surroundings, and yet do it with an unwholesome mind and a
tell-tale brush. There are painters (their names need not be mentioned)
who cannot paint a lady without showing the _cocotte_, nor a gentleman
without showing the blackguard, nor a child without showing a certain
sophistication—a precocious knowledge of evil—altogether unhappy. The
coarseness of Jan Steen or Brouwer may be passed over as incidental to
his time. It is coarse, but neither vulgar nor immoral. But not so the
brutality of the modern cosmopolite who boasts so openly in his pictures
that he has no faith in the virtue of women nor the respectability of
men.
And what vulgarity we see in every modern exhibition, whether held in
Chicago, London, or Paris! Painters there are, born and bred no one
knows where or how, who depict Oxford professors or statesmen with the
air and attitude of flunkies, or duchesses with the smirk of shop-girls.
And painters there are, too, who, assuming for their characters the
elegance of luxury, paint pictures that seem to reek of perfumes,
scented soaps, and manicured finger-nails. Such men seem to leave an
unhappy impress upon the trees and mountains, and their point of view
vulgarizes the blue sky. They may be very brilliant handlers of the
brush—indeed they are often excellent craftsmen—but their vision is
sadly warped and their minds are tainted. There are, for instance, few
workmen more fascinating in craftsmanship than Goya. He could paint
beautifully and convincingly, but when you go to Spain and see the mass
of his painting you will be surprised at the blood and flame and
brutality of it. The man’s mind, at times, was hideous, unearthly,
poisoned with bitterness. On the contrary take the work of Carlo Dolci
or Sassoferrato and you meet with super-saturated sentimentality and
mawkishness. Neither was a bad painter for his age and people, but his
mental attitude was lacking in force—perhaps had not enough brutality
about it.
And human conceit exudes as readily from the painter’s brush as from the
writer’s pen. You have no trouble in recognizing conceit in a book. It
is only too apparent. And yet all that clever painting, that _bravura_
of the brush, that elaborate flourish of the little men who try to make
a great noise and attract attention to themselves, is mere pictorial
conceit. And there is so much of it in modern painting. It seems
sometimes as though the exhibitions were more than half made up of
flippant displays of dexterity, which have no other aim than to show how
very clever the painter can be and still avoid seriousness.
But I need not stop longer to discuss disagreeable characteristics in
art. They are not our quest in any sense and they are referred to here
merely to suggest anew that the man—be he weak or strong, good or bad,
noble or ignoble, serious or flippant—eventually appears in his work.
Individuality will speak out though the individual may not be aware of
it.
And this is as it should be. The disagreeable personality misleads for
only a short time. Eventually it is ignored in art as in social life.
And that which is really good in painting is the better for the strong
individuality behind it. The frank statement of personal feeling or
faith, the candid autobiography, has added more to the real knowledge of
life, and has done more to show people how to live, than all the long
volumes of scientific history, of which we have enough and to spare in
every library. When a person speaks of himself he knows his subject at
least, and can speak of it truly; but when he speaks of dead-and-gone
Alexanders and Cæsars, he is speculating in “perhapses” and “possiblys.”
And so in painting, when a person paints what he individually sees and
is impressed by, he is likely to produce something worthy of attention;
but when he takes up some formula of truth laid down by a school or a
camera he is merely repeating a something he has not seen, and
simulating a feeling he has not known.
Even the positive assertion—the insistent assertion—of one’s own view is
often welcome in art. I think we all like the self-reliance, the
steadfastness of belief of the individual—assuming, of course, that he
is right and not therefore merely obstinate. When Delacroix was opposed
by the classic painters of his day because he saw nature in patches of
color and light, instead of in outlines and linear extensions, he
declared defiantly: “The whole world cannot prevent me from seeing
things in my own way.” He insisted upon it that his “way” was a right
way, even if different from that of Ingres. He was seeking to picture
something peculiar to himself, in a manner entirely his own. Listen to
him again: “I am at my window and I see the most beautiful landscape;
the idea of a line never comes into my head. The lark sings, the river
glitters, the foliage murmurs; but where are the lines that produce
these charming sensations?” There you have the individual point of view,
and in the 1840’s it was a very unusual view. It was the self-reliant
quality of the man, which enabled him to discard the outworn conception
of his contemporaries and create a something new; and it is largely by
the creative faculty arising from the desire to say something new, that
we distinguish genius from mediocrity or eccentricity.
For you know that people whom we call “queer” can be just as individual
as others, and yet not accomplish anything of importance. There is an
individuality of genius which consists in original impression and
statement; and there is an eccentricity of foolishness which produces
only the bizarre. It is not difficult, however, to distinguish between
them. For, as we have already noted, true individuality is always
creative. It builds up, has a definite aim, proceeds to a definite goal;
whereas, eccentricity is disordered, disposed to be meaningless,
inclined to produce brilliant fragments that have no connection with
each other. We see the same qualities exhibited in the social characters
of real life, and gossip says that such a man is a “genius” or that
another is “eccentric.” It is by some outward manifestation or action,
akin to expression in painting, that gossip arrives at its conclusion;
and it is usually a correct conclusion.
Then, too, there are painters who lose their individuality—throw it
aside to take up with the view of some other person who seems to have
achieved more popularity. The majority of men break down in their ideals
long before they are old. They may have possessed talent, and given
voice to it in early years; but it has been unnoticed, perhaps unheard.
They may have had impressions of their own; but perhaps they have not
proved attractive to the masses, or have not received the immediate
recognition to which their producers perhaps thought them entitled. Then
they make the irretrievable mistake of trying to follow someone whose
impressions seem to be in public demand. It may be that they follow
Raphael or Titian or Velasquez; but no matter how good a painter they
may choose for a model, they have already committed artistic suicide. No
one in this world of ours ever became great by echoing the voice of
another, repeating what that other has said. Are there not countless
illustrations of this—illustrations by whole schools of painters and
sculptors in the history of art? What was the art of Rome, following as
it did the art of Greece? What was the art of those who followed Michael
Angelo, Raphael, and Correggio? What was the seventeenth-century art of
France, following that of Italy? What was David and classicism,
following ancient Rome? What is to-day the value of all these French
peasants and Seine landscapes for which Millet and Corot set the
patterns, and in the imitation of which America has contributed her
modicum of strength? It is all a vapid and somewhat meaningless copying
that may furnish canvases to hide a break in the wall-paper of a
drawing-room, but as original art counting for naught. And why? Simply
because it lacks in individuality—lacks in originality of aim and
statement.
That last statement may be almost as fittingly applied to those who
literally imitate nature as to those who imitate some other painter. It
adds nothing to our store of knowledge, nothing to our appreciation of
beauty, to have the painter reproducing line upon line and shade upon
shade and color upon color the exact scene from nature. “A mere copier
of nature,” says Sir Joshua, “can never produce anything great; can
never raise and enlarge the conceptions or warm the heart of the
spectator.” The insistence upon fact crowds the man out of the picture.
Individuality does not appear, except perhaps in a manner of handling
which shows the artisan rather than the artist. The Denners and
Meissoniers and Gerard Dous have no individualities that you can trace
in their pictures. You know they were workmen and that is about all.
Realism with them, as with all devoted followers of the “truth to
nature” theory, is an attempt at eliminating the personal element, an
attempt at approximating the working of a machine. Of course the attempt
is never fully realized, but it may be carried far enough to destroy
whatever might have been stimulating or exalted in the picture.
[Illustration:
X.—DÜRER, Christ on the Cross. Dresden Gallery.
]
And just so with those painters who produce academic art or, as it has
been known for many years, classic art. It is based upon an abstraction,
an ideal taken from memories or remains of Greek art; and it is
produced, in a scholastic way, according to an unwritten canon of
academic proportions. Bouguereau and Lefebvre are the last notable
exponents of it in France, and excellent craftsmen they are, too; but
somehow their pictures always remind one of the book-keeper’s
handwriting. They are very good as official handicraft—excellent
drawings after a model—but they seem to lack character. They have no
more force than the pretty girl on the outside of the handkerchief box,
for whose existence, indeed, they are largely responsible. The want of
stamina and vitality in their pictures may be accounted for readily
enough, because again the man is absent. The work is mapped out by rule
and done by academic precept. As for the feeling and the enthusiasm of
the painter they are not apparent, and the product is accordingly
colorless, mechanical, somewhat insipid.
This academic art is just as impersonal as the so-called realistic art,
but, of course, neither of them is impersonal through the ignorance of
their producers. It is a part of their creed that the painter should be
absolutely “wiped out of the canvas,” and that the picture is complete
only when the means of its production (including the painter) are no
longer apparent in the work. The realist believes that nature is above
all, the most beautiful of all beauties, and that the best the painter
can do is to copy her in all humility of spirit. The academician
believes that the academic rule—the consensus of tradition as to what
constitutes beauty in art—is better than any one painter’s eyes and
hand, and that the best the moderns can do is to follow the greatest of
the ancients, namely, the Greeks. But we have seen the impossibility of
absolute realism in art and we can imagine the futility of copying an
art of the past to be applied to a people of the present. In practice
neither kind of art has proved satisfying. The insistence upon academic
and realistic formulas has always led to denials and revolts. The
bitterest quarrels in art have hinged upon whether painting should be
personal or impersonal, whether a man should follow a model, a rule, an
inexorable law, or whether he should create and be a law unto himself.
We have been told many times that the struggles and neglect of the
Delacroixs, the Corots, and the Millets were due to the stupid public
that refused to recognize them; but on the contrary, it was the stupid
academicians of the _École des Beaux Arts_ who would not understand them
and denounced them. The protestants did not conform to the academic
standard—they did not recite by rote.
Great art never has admitted a law; it will not be bound down to a model
or a formula; it will not tolerate a rule if it can gain by breaking it.
It is primarily the expression of man’s delight in what he sees or
feels, and every man must express himself in his own way and in his own
language. Indeed, the longer we ponder over the subject the surer we are
to agree in substance with Véron that “of every work of art we may truly
say that its chief value consists in the personal character of its
author.”
These different kinds of art—realism, classicism, individualism—we
frequently hear spoken of in metaphysical terms, which one hesitates to
use for fear of producing confusion. When a person begins talking about
“the real” and “the ideal,” “the objective” and “the subjective,” we are
at once all at sea; because those words seem to have been used to define
everything in the art world, and no two definitions mean quite the same
thing. But as we may consider impersonal art hereafter, perhaps it is as
well to say that it is often referred to as objective art. That is to
say, it is as much as possible a realization of the object or thing
painted. It is the outer view, seeing things beautiful in external
nature. Personal art, on the contrary, is usually referred to as
subjective art. It is the inner view, seeing things beautiful in the
mind’s impression or the heart’s emotion. The interest in the one case
centres in the representation of the model; in the other case it
emanates from the expression of the painter himself.
Of course, the work of art does not necessarily hinge upon this question
of personality or impersonality in the picture. There is the decorative
quality that counts for much; there is something in subject that may be
of importance; and there is, too, the style of the work, which may be
strong enough to overcome other and perhaps detracting features. We have
not yet finished with our consideration of the picture, and are not yet
ready to draw a conclusion. It may be that conclusions in art are the
better for not being “drawn” too rigidly. The arts which depend so
largely upon varying personalities and temperaments cannot be summed up
and proved with the exactness of a mathematical problem. Sometimes from
a mass of illustrations one may extract a few general principles, and if
we succeed in doing that we shall be taking at least one step forward in
the appreciation of art.
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