IMAGINATION OF THE ARTIST
IN our consideration of the varying points of view held by painters we
have been placing the responsibility for the variations upon the human
eye. The argument has been that people see differently one from another;
and from that you have perhaps inferred that there is a difference in
the construction of eyes. It is true that there may be a physical
difference through imperfections of sight, as when one is near-sighted
or has some astigmatism or is color-blind. But defective vision does not
account for the individual view and is not a factor in the present
consideration. The physical make-up of the eye may be assumed as
practically the same with all men. The retina is merely a mirror which
receives an impression of a scene or object. But the reception of the
impression is not the beginning and the end of seeing. The complete act
requires a mental recognition of what is seen—requires perception. The
word “seeing” then should be understood as meaning not only the
mirror-work of the retina, but the perception of that work by the mind.
In the matter of perception there may be differences among men and still
be no great display of what we have called individuality. Some people
perceive much while others seem almost blind. You know that the eyes of
an unconscious person may be wide open, with the retinas mirroring
everything, and yet the mind perceiving nothing. And so people who are
quite conscious may look at things and not see them. The blue shadows
cast upon the snow were, no doubt, seen centuries ago, but not perceived
until the very recent time of the impressionists; and the Hebrews must
have seen the difference between the blue sky and white light as the
Greeks the difference between the hues of yellow and orange without
being aware of what they saw.[4]
Footnote 4:
A most interesting discussion of what the ancient peoples knew of
lights and colors is to be found in Franz Delitzsch, _Iris, Studies in
Color, etc._, Edinb., 1899.
The eyes of the workmen who select the skeins of colors for the Gobelin
tapestries are physically not different from other eyes, but they
recognize scores of tints and shades that your perception and mine
cannot grasp at all. This is usually assumed to be the result of the
training of the eye; but the eye cannot be trained like the hand. It is
passive and receptive; not active. The training is that of the mind to
note the sensations of the eye. So far as keenness and clearness of
vision are concerned, I know of no people more remarkable than the
Papago and Yuma Indians, and yet in the Colorado Desert I have
frequently called their attention to the lilac shadows upon sand-banks,
to the pink and yellow hazes of sunset, to the blue-steel glow of
mountain walls at noonday, without ever finding one of them to nod an
affirmative. They know form, outline, movement, and crude color in large
masses, but the refinements of hue, the subtleties produced by
light-and-shade, though doubtless seen by the eye, are not recognized by
the mind.
Much of the fumbling with the paint brush found in present-day pictures
is no doubt due to an inadequate perception of the model. In the studios
you will often hear painters declaring that they can see things clearly
enough, but their “technique bothers them;” they cannot get their
fingers or canvases or colors or brushes to work properly. But the
trouble is really more fundamental. It is their lack of perception that
bothers them. Whenever a person in art or in literature knows his
subject thoroughly there is no difficulty about words or lines or colors
to express it. Men like Leibl and Meissonier, who see acutely every
feature before them, are not worried by a want of technical expression.
That their work, with all its cleverness of hand and keenness of vision,
is somewhat mechanical—lacking in inspiration—may suggest that clearness
of view is not the only requisite of art. It is, no doubt, a valuable
accomplishment with any painter, and yet if the picture tells only a
tale of facts it has fallen short of the highest aim. Keen eyes and a
clever hand will not take the place of that vital quality of all great
art—the imagination of the artist. For the imagination is, perhaps, the
very essence of artistic seeing.
In the ordinary acceptation of the word the imagination is little more
than the image-making power—the ability to see a thing in the mind’s
eye. We all of us have the power in some degree and can summon up scenes
out of the past at will, travelling fair lands that we have not known
for years, and seeing faces that have long been shut away in the grave.
In boyhood, when the imagination is active and disposed to build
air-castles, you doubtless saw yourself many times as the hero of
imaginary deeds of daring, carrying off the beautiful princess from the
enchanted castle, just as older people like Dumas saw the adventurous
D’Artagnan, and painters like Rossetti saw the Blessed Damosel leaning
from the gold bar of Heaven with eyes far
“Deeper than the depth
Of waters stilled at even;
She had three lilies in her hand,
And the stars in her hair were seven.”
Such flights of the imagination as these, you will understand, are
connected and associated with “memories,” of which we shall have
something to say further on; but they are not the less connected with
the image-making power.
When the object or the cause is present before us instead of far back in
the past, the process of image-making is not radically different. We see
and comprehend by an image in the mind. A portrait painter, to take an
example at once from pictures, does not exercise his imagination upon a
sitter by conceiving him as a great lawyer, a great poet, or a great
general. He does not think of him in connection with what he has done or
has been. Nor does he eliminate the Mr. Hyde from his appearance, and
give only the good Dr. Jekyll part of him. That would not be pictorial
imagination so much as pictorial falsehood, the popular belief to the
contrary notwithstanding. What he really does is to look over his sitter
with an eye to his exterior appearance; then he imagines him as he would
look upon canvas, and finally he takes up a brush and tries to paint the
image he sees in his mind. That image in his mind is his conception, his
idea—yes, his ideal, if you choose to use that badly misused word. His
imagination has rounded and shaped the appearance, and just as is the
weakness or the strength of his image-making power so will be the
weakness or strength of his portrait, the execution, for the present,
being disregarded.
[Illustration:
XI.—TURNER, The Fighting Téméraire. National Gallery, London.
]
But now observe, if you please, that the painter, in looking over his
sitter, does not necessarily see him as the lens of a camera might see
him. The imagination may insist upon his seeing less accurately and more
positively—perhaps abnormally. The man before him may have a peculiar
breadth of forehead, an unusual width between the eyes, a hollowness in
the cheek, a pinched look in the nose and mouth; or it may be he has a
foxy eye, a puffed cheek, a flabby, vicious-looking lip, and a
sensual-looking hand. These may be the very features that the
imagination seizes upon and emphasizes. Then when the painter takes up
his brush he paints these features strongly because they appeal to him
strongly. And what is the result? The look—perhaps in the one case
scholarly and thoughtful, like Van Dyck’s “Cornelius Van der Geest”
(Plate 3), or in the other case crafty-looking like Velasquez’s
“Innocent X” (Plate 13)—the look that betrays the character of the
sitter appears in the picture, appears more strongly emphasized than in
the original; and all through the proper exercise of the imagination.
The pictorial imagination almost always lays emphasis upon prominent
features, and may at times distort them without falsifying them as art.
The very first act, the seeing of things pictorially—that is, as they
would appear in a picture rather than as they appear in real life—is
necessarily a translation if not a free rendering. Everyone knows that
George Morland, who saw English tavern-life cut up into beautiful
pictures and hanging upon the walls, did not see accurately or
scientifically; but he certainly saw pictorially and imaginatively. The
actual would have left us cold, where the imaginative excites
admiration.
We can see something akin to this even in the work of the camera. The
ordinary photograph of a flock of sheep is prosaic enough, but we have
all seen photographs of sheep taken when the camera was a little
“off-focus,” when some of the sheep at the side did not get into the
line of light and were somewhat distorted and magnified in bulk. In this
“off-focus” view the sheep immediately become pictorial in appearance,
and we notice how much like Millet’s sheep they look. Of course the
unusual appearance is caused by a perversion of light in the camera, but
I do not know that Millet’s sheep are not caused by a perversion of
sight in the man. Genius is supposed to be closely allied to insanity;
and imagination may be allied to distortion.
Certainly there is in the pictorial view something of the distorted
view. A modern athlete in the gymnasium is a very different athlete from
those that writhe upon the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Did not
Michael Angelo’s imagination see the model abnormally, and thus persuade
his hand to emphasize all the powerful attributes? A running horse as
seen by the instantaneous camera is no doubt accurate enough in all
respects, save the sense of motion. He does not run. The camera arrests
his flight, holds him poised in air momentarily. But Fromentin’s
imagination, as shown in his pictures, saw the horse running, saw him
distorted, drawn out in body from head to tail. You know from the report
of the camera, again, how human beings fall through the air in jumping,
diving, plunging; but what a different report you get from Tintoretto’s
fall of the damned in his “Last Judgment.” There is a tremendous rain of
elongated bodies falling from heaven to hell. The exaggeration of the
imagination is here most apparent, but the result is wonderfully
effective. We are made to feel that the bodies are really falling.
The reason for the pictorial distortion in the instances cited must be
obvious enough. There is no great attempt to present things precisely as
they are in nature. We have already arrived at the conclusion that this
would be impossible. The object presented to the imagination is sought
to be _represented_ by the sign or symbol, and it requires the radical
translation, possibly the distortion of the sign or symbol to show the
imaginative conception. What was the actual bulk of the battle-ship
Téméraire I do not know, but I feel quite sure that Turner in painting
that vessel (Plate 11) saw it in exaggerated proportions, saw it lifted
high out of the water, its height additionally emphasized by the
smallness of the towing tug. In the same way Claude and Poussin saw
trees and groves of phenomenal height and thickness (Plate 26), as
Courbet saw sea waves of astounding bulk, and Claude Monet saw
exaggerated lights and colors upon the towers of Rouen Cathedral. The
exaggeration is quite within the province of the imagination—quite
necessary to all imaginative art. It is more apparent in some painters
than in others, and yet is not the less existent in almost all pictorial
expression. From the caricature of the child to the conception of the
skilled artist there is apparently only a step. The boy in school who
draws the face of a companion on the fly-leaf of his book, giving it
perverted features and a wide smile of countenance, is distorting the
sign to convey a certain ludicrous impression; but the Egyptian sculptor
who carved the mysterious smile upon the face of the Sphinx—that face
which under burning suns and midnight stars has looked out across the
silence for so many centuries—was using the distorted sign, too, using
it imaginatively to tell people his idea of the majesty and serenity of
the sun-god Harmachis.
But however the imagination may distort, it cannot originate anything
entirely new nor create anything outside of human experience. We are
sometimes led to think, by the common use of the word “imagination,”
that it can
“Body forth the forms of things unknown,”
as Shakespeare has put it; but it must be apparent that “out of nothing,
nothing comes,” and that it is impossible to make a body from things
unknown. All the originality of all the great originals in the world’s
history goes no further than the dividing up or the adding to of things
already known. You may make a novel landscape perhaps by shutting out
the sky with a high sky-line, or you may make an angel by adding bird
wings to a human form; but you cannot make an absolutely new form or
create one thing that has not some basis in human life or experience. To
be sure, you may bring to mind the image of a character in fiction or
poetry—Sir Galahad or Roland of Brittany or Amadis de Gaul, for
instance—but after all your image is based upon some previous memories
of knights in armor. Just so with the likeness of Christ. There is no
authentic record of how he looked, either in picture or worded
description, and the type of Christ which we accept to-day has been
derived from Italian art, which in turn received and blended together
two types—one from the Eastern Church at Constantinople and one from the
Western Church at Rome. As for the abnormal creations that seem at times
quite original—the witches of “Macbeth,” the fairies of “Midsummer
Night’s Dream,” the water babies of Kingsley, the elves and gnomes and
dwarfs of Grimm—they are all founded upon the distortion of the human
figure. The wonders of the “Thousand and One Nights,” the City of Brass,
the diamond windows, the hanging gardens, the genii of the clouds, are
not different as regards the manner of their construction. Animal life
too, is made monstrous by the quips of the fancy, but again the dragons
are all snake-formed and the goblins all bat-winged; the centaur is a
combination of man and horse, and Ariosto’s hippogriff is the familiar
winged Pegasus of Greece translated into Italian.
[Illustration:
XII.—ANTONELLO DA MESSINA, Portrait of a Man. Louvre, Paris.
]
In the first exercise of the imagination (that is, by division) we shall
find that the mind conceives a part of an object, for instance, as of
sufficient value to stand by itself. This is separated from the whole,
magnified by emphasis, and finally handed forth as an entity—a new
creation, if you please. We can see this well exemplified in poetry,
where Keats, for instance, not wishing to describe the entire winter
landscape on the Eve of St. Agnes, isolates a few features of the scene
and makes them do service for all.
“Ah, bitter chill it was—
The owl for all his feathers was a-cold,
The hare limped trembling through the frozen grass,
And silent was the flock in woolly fold.”
Here we have an owl, a hare, and a flock of sheep magnified out of all
proportion as regards their importance in the landscape, and standing by
themselves as symbols of a cold winter night. But the suggestiveness of
these features is very effective, very complete—much more so than if an
elaborate description had been given of snow and icicle, moonlight and
sleigh-bells. Claude Monet, when he wishes to show a winter morning on
the Seine, does it with very few objects. There are silent ranks of
trees, a foggy air congealed to hoar-frost, the swollen river with
floating ice crunching and jostling its way; and that is all. But again
what an effective winter morning! The heat of summer he describes just
as summarily by cutting off a square of vivid sunshine falling on a
wheatstack, exaggerating it in brilliancy of color and light, and
allowing it to stand in lieu of a whole landscape. Corot is not
different in thought and method. He throws all his strength upon light
along the hills of morning or evening, and every detail of grass and
tree and human being is sacrificed to it (Plate 9).
There are many ways in which the dividing imagination deals with the
figure in painting. The model may be treated as part of a group, as an
object in landscape, as a whole-length portrait in a room, as a
knee-piece, as a half-length, as a bust, or as a head alone. Nothing
could be further removed from the actual than a man’s head shown in
profile on a coin, but what imaginative art the Greeks made of their
coinage! And what superb heads—superb in their character—the Pisani put
upon their medals! How well each head suggested the whole man! And was
there ever a more virile, living personality, ever a man with a more
lion-hearted look, than Antonello da Messina pictured in the head and
shoulders of that unknown Italian in the Louvre (Plate 12)? Byron’s
ghost portrait of Nimroud as he appears to Sardanapalus in a dream is
more colossal, but it is not more intense or forceful than Antonello’s,
save as language is always more definite than pigment. Here it is:
“The features were a giant’s and the eye
Was still yet lighted; his long locks curled down
On his vast bust whence a huge quiver rose
With shaft-heads feathered from the eagle’s wing
That peeped up bristling through his serpent hair.”
To match in bulk such an imaginative picture, we should have to go back
to the great king-headed bulls that flank the portals of the Assyrian
palaces, or the colossal pharaonic figures in granite that symbolize the
Egyptian kings.
Sculpture affords many good illustrations of parts detached from the
whole and magnified by the imagination into separate creations. The
Colleoni statue at Venice comes to mind instantly. The great commander
and his horse have been taken out of battle and placed upon a pedestal,
yet, isolated as it is, how the statue tells the irresistible strength,
the pushing power of both man and horse! The “Water Nymphs” of Jean
Goujon are separated again in panels, they tell no connected story; but
the serpentine grace of the figures, the rippling flow of the draperies,
how inevitably they bring to mind the native element, the home of the
water people! The Greek youths that ride along the Parthenon frieze, the
wounded lionesses that roar defiance from the Assyrian bas-reliefs, the
Japanese fish that swim in bronze, though cut off from their background
or environment, yet again how perfectly each suggests its habitat
through the magnifying imagination of the artist!
The combining imagination (the building up by additions which enhance
and enliven) is just the reverse of the process we have been
considering. It has to do with associations, with memories; and the
combination is brought about by images from hither and yon, that gather
and join in the mind. There is some confusion just here between what is
imagination in painting and what is mere composition, which Mr. Ruskin
has tried to clear up by asserting that the former is intuitive and the
latter is labored, that one works by genius and the other by laws and
principles. But the distinction itself is somewhat labored, and in its
practical working it seems to have small basis in reality. A gathering
together of antique pavements, marble benches stained with iron rust,
ideal figures clad in Greek garments, with various museum bric-a-brac
illustrative of Greek life, such as we see in the pictures of
Alma-Tadema, is certainly composition. It may be good or bad
composition, it may be academic or naturalistic, it may have been put
together laboriously, piece by piece, or flashed together by a momentary
lightning of the mind; but, whatever the method or however brought
about, one thing seems very certain, and that is, the work, in the hands
of Alma-Tadema, contains not one spark of imagination. The same method
of combining in the mind or working on the canvas with Delacroix or
Turner or even J. S. Cotman would have almost certainly resulted in the
imaginative.
[Illustration:
XIII.—VELASQUEZ, Innocent X. Doria Gallery, Rome.
]
It is a fond fancy of Mr. Ruskin, and also of ourselves, that genius
despises laborious composition and does things with a sudden burst of
inspiration. We think, because the completed work looks easy or reads
easy, that it must have been done easily. But the geniuses of the world
have all put upon record their conviction that there is more virtue in
perspiration than in inspiration. The great poets, whether in print or
in paint, have spent their weeks and months—yes, years—composing,
adjusting, putting in, and taking out. They have known what it was to
“lick things into shape,” to labor and be baffled, to despair and to
hope anew. Goethe may have conceived “Faust” intuitively, but it took
him something like fifty years to record his intuitions. He composed
laboriously, and yet was no less a man of superlative imagination.
Listen a moment to his Prologue to “Faust”:
_Raphael._
“The sun-orb sings in emulation
Mid brother-spheres his ancient round:
His path predestined through creation
He ends with step of thunder-sound.
The angels from his visage splendid
Draw power, whose measure none can say;
The lofty works, uncomprehended,
Are bright as on the earliest day.
_Gabriel._
“And swift, and swift beyond conceiving,
The splendor of the world goes round,
Day’s Eden-brightness still relieving
The awful Night’s intense profound:
The ocean-tides in foam are breaking,
Against the rocks deep bases hurled,
And both, the spheric race partaking,
Eternal, swift, are onward whirled!
_Michael._
“And rival storms abroad are surging
From sea to land, from land to sea,
A chain of deepest action forging
Round all, in wrathful energy.
There flames a desolation, blazing
Before the Thunder’s crashing way;
Yet, Lord, thy messengers are praising
The gentle movement of thy Day.”[5]
Footnote 5:
The original German lies open before me, but I prefer to give the
quotation in a language which will not fail to be understood by all
American readers. It is Bayard Taylor’s translation, and so far as the
imaginative conception is concerned it reproduces the original fairly
well.
Here is the imagination presenting us with a great cosmic picture that
in sublimity I venture to think has no superior in either poetry or
painting; yet it cannot be doubted that it was built up thought by
thought, line upon line; torn down perhaps a dozen times to be modelled
anew with something added or omitted. In other words it has been
composed, not flashed together by intuition.
The combining imagination in painting does not work differently from
this. The picture is built up; and memories often play a prominent part
in the process. One may mingle lines from Greece with colors from Japan
and an atmosphere from Holland if he will. The result might be something
heterogeneous and incongruous, but it would nevertheless be a true
enough display of the imagination. But such a gathering from hither and
yon, such a mingling of many foreign elements, would not be necessary or
essential or even usual in art. Pictures are made in simpler ways. Here,
for example, is a sea-piece from the “Ancient Mariner,” imagined and
composed again, but brought together as a homogeneous whole.
“The western wave was all aflame,
The day was well-nigh done,
Almost upon the western wave
Rested the broad bright sun.”
There the marine would seem to be quite complete, but Coleridge has yet
to heighten the effect of the sunset by introducing a memory of an
impression received perhaps in boyhood. His imagination, having conjured
up the image of the phantom ship, combines it with the burning sunset:
“When that strange shape drove suddenly
Betwixt us and the sun.”
“And straight the sun was flecked with bars
(Heaven’s Mother send us grace!)
As if through a dungeon grate he peered
With broad and burning face.”
The introduction of the “dungeon grate” still further increases the
effect. We now have the flaming sky, the sea, and the skeleton ship
through which the sun mockingly peers, as through dungeon bars, at the
dying crew. The effect is weird, uncanny, unearthly, just what Coleridge
intended it should be. This, I should say, was the imagination adding
and combining. And so far as I can see it is also the intelligent mind
composing.
It would be difficult to find a parallel in painting to this picture
from the “Ancient Mariner.” One thinks at once of Turner’s “Ulysses and
Polyphemus” as resembling the Coleridge conception, because of the sea
and the sun; but the likeness is superficial. In the Turner the spread
of the sea, the golden waves in the foreground, the heave of the
mountains out of the water, the spectral figure on the mountain top, the
far distance of the ocean with the sun on the uttermost verge, are all
highly imaginative; but the real glory of the picture is its decorative
splendor rather than its expressive meaning. The “Fighting Téméraire,”
as we have already noted, is imaginative in the magnitude of the bulk
and there is something of the Coleridge effect in the glare of the red
setting sun that peers through clouds, taking its farewell look at the
old war-ship being towed to its last berth; but the imagination is not
so clear-cut here as with Coleridge (Plate 11).
In some of Turner’s “Approaches to Venice” there is perhaps a better
example of the combining imagination, for Turner never hesitated about
“composing”—putting things into the picture that were not there in
reality; and in the Venetian pictures he sometimes did this with
startling results. I have in mind one of these pictures, where Venice is
seen a mile or more away; but the domes of the Salute and the tops of
the campaniles have been so shifted about to suit Turner’s views of
composition that I have never been able to determine whether the city is
seen from the east or the west. And apparently Turner did not care
anything about geography or topography. His imagination brought up out
of the blue-green sea a city of palaces, builded of marble and hued like
mother-of-pearl, with distant towers shining in the sun—a fairy city
floating upon the sea, opalescent as a mirage, dream-like as an Eastern
story, a glamour of mingled color and light beneath a vast-reaching sky
glowing with the splendor of sun-shot clouds. It is most beautifully
unreal, and yet by dint of its great imagination and suggestion it is
more Venetian than Venice itself. It is that kind of distortion by the
imagination which sacrifices the form to gain the spirit of things.
Here at Venice one can see the work of the combining imagination very
well in some of the old Venetian pictures. Paolo Veronese, for instance,
has upon the ceiling of one of the rooms in the Ducal Palace, a towering
majestic figure, clad in silks and ermines, crowned with pearls and
sceptred with power, seated under a gorgeous canopy in a chair of state,
and representing the glory of Venice. She is a magnificent type of
womanhood, splendid enough in herself to symbolize the splendor of
Venice, but Paolo’s imagination adds to her importance still further by
placing her upon a portion of a great globe representing the world,
while below at her feet are two superb figures representing Justice and
Peace, offering the tributes of the sword and the olive branch (Plate
14).
[Illustration:
XIV.—PAOLO VERONESE, Venice Enthroned. Doge’s Palace, Venice.
]
Another Venetian, Tintoretto, had possibly more imagination than any
other of his school—yes, any other Italian in art-history; and yet it is
not always possible to say just how his ideas originally took form. No
doubt he labored and composed and tried effects by putting things in and
taking them out. No doubt the “Ariadne and Bacchus,” or the “Miracle of
the Slave” (Plate 15) as we see it to-day, was the third or fourth
thought instead of the first; but there is no questioning the exaltation
of the final result. The subject of the Resurrection in his day had
become a tradition in painting, and was usually shown as a square tomb
of marble with a man rising from it between two angels. This stereotyped
tradition had been handed down for centuries; but how greatly Tintoretto
changed it and improved it in his picture in the Scuola San Rocco! He
imagined the side of a mountain, a rock-cut tomb with angels pulling
away the great door, and as it slowly opens the blinding light within
the tomb bursts forth, and the figure of Christ rises swiftly, supported
by the throbbing wings of angels.
However this last-named picture was produced, by combination or
association, at least it is purely pictorial—that is, it deals with
forms, lights, and colors, things that can be seen. I hardly know what
to make of Mr. Ruskin’s remarks upon some of the other pictures by
Tintoretto, in the Scuola San Rocco. He seeks to exemplify the painter’s
ever-fertile imagination by pointing out, in the “Annunciation,” that
the corner-stone of the building is meant by Tintoretto to be that of
the old Hebrew Dispensation, which has been retained by the builders as
the corner-stone of the new Christian Dispensation; and that, in the
“Crucifixion,” the donkey at the back eating the palm-branches recently
thrown down before Christ upon his entry into Jerusalem is a great piece
of imaginative sarcasm. I confess my inability to follow Mr. Ruskin just
here, and I cannot believe that Tintoretto meant anything of the sort
about either the corner-stone or the palm-branches. If he did, it was
perhaps a mistake. The motives would be more literary than pictorial. I
think it all exemplifies Mr. Ruskin’s imagination rather than
Tintoretto’s, and in either case it has little to do with imagination in
painting as generally understood among painters. Painting and the
pictorial conception, it must be repeated, have to do with forms and
colors seen by the eye or in the mind’s eye; they have very little to do
with a sarcasm or a Hebraic mystery.
There is still another phase of imagination which figures in
metaphysical text-books under the name of fancy. It is sometimes called
the passive imagination, apparently for no reason other than
distinction’s sake. It is supposed to be temporary and accidental in its
association of ideas and images, to be light, airy, capricious, perhaps
indefinite; whereas, imagination is said to be more sober, serious,
single in purpose, seeking unity of effect. The illustrations usually
cited are taken from Shakespeare. The “Midsummer Night’s Dream” is said
to be a product of fancy, while “Lear” or “Hamlet” is a work of the
imagination. But again I must confess my inability to comprehend the
distinction. The thought in the one case busies itself with a light or
gay theme, and in the other with a sober or tragic theme; but the mental
process would seem to be the same in either case. The mind may grow
happy over a birth or grieve over a death, but one mind and one
imagination would seem flexible enough to comprehend them both. There is
a difference in art between what is called the serious and what is
called the clever; but the imagination has nothing to do with it. A
figure of a soubrette dashed off in a Parisian studio, and sent in a
hurry to a Salon or Academy exhibition as a “stunning thing,” may be
clever. Mr. La Farge has defined such cleverness as “intelligence
working for the moment without a background of previous thought or
strong sentiment.” And this definition suggests that the serious in art
is just the opposite of the clever. A figure by Millet, such as that of
“The Sower,” is serious just because the intelligence has been working
upon it for many months. But, in spite of calling a Jacquet soubrette
fanciful and a Millet sower imaginative, there would seem to be no
difference in the mental processes. The difference is one of subject,
time, men, original endowment; not a difference in the kind of thought.
The fantastic is also a product of the imagination, but it is a lighter,
more volatile and irresponsible expression than fancy. It is the
imagination just escaping from control, dominated by caprice and leaning
toward the bizarre. The griffins and the spouting dragons along the
gutters of the Gothic churches, and the boar-headed, bird-footed devils
of early art are perhaps fair illustrations of it. In modern painting
Blake and Monticelli came perilously near the fantastic in some of their
creations. Turner in his last years quite lost himself in fantasy, and a
number of the painters in France and England might be named as
illustrating the tendency to the bizarre. When the bizarre is finally
reached we may still recognize it as the working imagination, but
uncontrolled by reason. Our dreams which often strike us as so absurd
are good instances of the play of the imagination unfettered by reason;
and if our dream-land conceptions could be reduced to art we would
undoubtedly have what we have called the bizarre. Caricature and the
grotesque are different again. They are conscious distortions, designed
exaggerations of certain features for effect. They are not ruled so much
by either fancy or caprice as by a sensible view of the extravagant.
[Illustration:
XV.—TINTORETTO, Miracle of Slave. Academy, Venice.
]
There is no metaphysical or æsthetic term to designate an absence of the
imagination, but possibly the words “baroque” or “bombastic” will
suggest the results in art. And there is no lack of material to
illustrate it. Unfortunately the master minds in both poetry and
painting have been few and far between. The names and works that have
come down to us from the past are the survivals from many siftings; and
the few geniuses of the present are perhaps still obscured by the
bombastic performances of smaller men. The Robert Montgomerys and the
Martin Farquhar Tuppers somehow contrive to make a stir and delude the
public into considering them as great originals. They have not
imagination of their own, so they imitate the imaginative utterances and
styles of others. Not one but many styles of many men are thus brought
together in a conglomeration that may deceive the groundlings into
thinking it genuine poetry; but the judicious soon find out its true
character. Of course, all imitators try to imitate the inimitable
individualities. The Montgomerys and the Tuppers aspire to no less than
Shakespeare and Milton. Just so in pictorial art. Vasari, Guido, the
Caracci reached out for the imaginations of Michael Angelo, Raphael, and
Correggio. The result was the contorted bombastic art of the Decadence
than which nothing could be less imaginative and more monstrous. The
mind of a Michael Angelo of necessity distorted the image in the first
place and then a Salviati came along to distort the distortion! The
figure of a Madonna, for instance, is elongated by Correggio for grace,
and Parmigianino following after elongated the elongation! This is what
I have called the bombastic. It is indicative of a lack of imagination.
Modern painting is full of it. The attempts at the heroic that overstep
the sublime and fall into the ridiculous, the rant and high-sounding
utterances of the brush, the inflated figures of allegory and the
vacuous types of symbolism, are all illustrative of it.
But the bombastic and its companion evils in art need no further
consideration at this time. It is not my aim to illustrate the
deficiencies of painting, but to point out its higher beauties, and if
the reverse of the shield is occasionally shown it is but to illustrate
and emphasize the brighter side. Perhaps one may be pardoned for
thinking that sometimes the analysis of error is a potent factor in the
establishment of truth.
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