limbs and the science of representing them; we begin to hear again of
two diseases, endemic in imperial Rome, from which a lively and vigorous
society keeps itself tolerably free--Rarity-hunting and Expertise. These
parasites can get no hold on a healthy body; it is on dead and dying
matter that they batten and grow fat. The passion to possess what is
scarce, and nothing else, is a disease that develops as civilisation
grows old and dogs it to the grave: it is saprophytic. The rarity-hunter
may be called a "collector" if by "collector" you do not mean one who
buys what pleases or moves him. Certainly, such an one is unworthy of
the name; he lacks the true magpie instinct. To the true collector the
intrinsic value of a work of art is irrelevant; the reasons for which he
prizes a picture are those for which a philatelist prizes a
postage-stamp. To him the question "Does this move me?" is ludicrous:
the question "Is it beautiful?"--otiose. Though by the very tasteful
collector of stamps or works of art beauty is allowed to be a fair jewel
in the crown of rarity, he would have us understand from the first that
the value it gives is purely adventitious and depends for its existence
on rarity. No rarity, no beauty. As for the profounder aesthetic
significance, if a man were to believe in its existence he would cease
to be a collector. The question to be asked is--"Is this rare?" Suppose
the answer favourable, there remains another--"Is it genuine?" If the
work of any particular artist is not rare, if the supply meets the
demand, it stands to reason that the work is of no great consequence.
For good art is art that fetches good prices, and good prices come of a
limited supply. But though it be notorious that the work of Velasquez is
comparatively scarce and therefore good, it has yet to be decided
whether the particular picture offered at fifty thousand is really the
work of Velasquez.
Enter the Expert, whom I would distinguish from the archaeologist and
the critic. The archaeologist is a man with a foolish and dangerous
curiosity about the past: I am a bit of an archaeologist myself.
Archaeology is dangerous because it may easily overcloud one's aesthetic
sensibility. The archaeologist may, at any moment, begin to value a work
of art not because it is good, but because it is old or interesting.
Though that is less vulgar than valuing it because it is rare and
precious it is equally fatal to aesthetic appreciation. But so long as I
recognise the futility of my science, so long as I recognise that I
cannot appreciate a work of art the better because I know when and where
it was made, so long as I recognise that, in fact, I am at a certain
disadvantage in judging a sixth-century mosaic compared with a person of
equal sensibility who knows and cares nothing about Romans and
Byzantines, so long as I recognise that art criticism and archaeology
are two different things, I hope I may be allowed to dabble unrebuked in
my favourite hobby: I hope I am harmless.
Art criticism, in the present state of society, seems to me a
respectable and possibly a useful occupation. The prejudice against
critics, like most prejudices, lives on fear and ignorance. It is quite
unnecessary and rather provincial, for, in fact, critics are not very
formidable. They are suspected of all sorts of high-handed
practices--making and breaking reputations, running up and down, booming
and exploiting--of which I should hardly think them capable. Popular
opinion notwithstanding, I doubt whether critics are either omnipotent
or utterly depraved. Indeed, I believe that some of them are not only
blameless but even lovable characters. Those sinister but flattering
insinuations and open charges of corruption fade woefully when one
considers how little the critic of contemporary art can hope to get for
"writing up" pictures that sell for twenty or thirty guineas apiece. The
expert, to be sure, is exposed to some temptation, since a few of his
words, judiciously placed, may promote a canvas from the twenty to the
twenty thousand mark; but, as everyone knows, the morality of the expert
is above suspicion. Useless as the occupation of the critic may be, it
is probably honest; and, after all, is it more useless than all other
occupations, save only those of creating art, producing food, drink, and
tobacco, and bearing beautiful children?
If the collector asks me, as a critic, for my opinion of the Velasquez
he is about to buy, I will tell him honestly what I think of it, as a
work of art. I will tell him whether it moves me much or little, and I
will try to point out those qualities and relations of line and colour
in which it seems to me to excel or fall short. I will try to account
for the degree of my aesthetic emotion. That, I conceive, is the
function of the critic. But all conjectures as to the authenticity of a
work based on its formal significance, or even on its technical
perfection, are extremely hazardous. It is always possible that someone
else was the master's match as artist and craftsman, and of that
someone's work there may be an overwhelming supply. The critic may sell
the collector a common pup instead of the one uncatalogued specimen of
Pseudo-kuniskos; and therefore the wary collector sends for someone who
can furnish him with the sort of evidence of the authenticity of his
picture that would satisfy a special juryman and confound a purchasing
dealer. At artistic evidence he laughs noisily in half-crown periodicals
and five-guinea tomes. Documentary evidence is what he prefers; but,
failing that, he will put up with a cunning concoction of dates and
watermarks, cabalistic signatures, craquelure, patina, chemical
properties of paint and medium, paper and canvas, all sorts of
collateral evidence, historical and biographical, and racy tricks of
brush or pen. It is to adduce and discuss this sort of evidence that the
Collector calls in the Expert.
Anyone whom chance or misfortune has led into the haunts of collectors
and experts will admit that I have not exaggerated the horror of the
diseases that we have inherited from the Classical Renaissance. He will
have heard the value of a picture made to depend on the interpretation
of a letter. He will have heard the picture discussed from every point
of view except that of one who feels its significance. By whom was it
made? For whom was it made? When was it made? Where was it made? Is it
all the work of one hand? Who paid for it? How much did he pay? Through
what collections has it passed? What are the names of the figures
portrayed? What are their histories? What the style and cut of their
coats, breeches, and beards? How much will it fetch at Christie's? All
these are questions to moot; and mooted they will be, by the hour. But
in expert conclaves who has ever heard more than a perfunctory and silly
comment on the aesthetic qualities of a masterpiece?
We have seen the scholars at loggerheads over the genuineness of a
picture in the National Gallery. The dispute rages round the
interpretation of certain marks in the corner of the canvas. Are they,
or are they not, a signature? Whatever the final decision may be, the
picture will remain unchanged; but if it can be proved that the marks
are the signature of the disciple, it will be valueless. If the Venus of
Velasquez should turn out to be a Spanish model by del Mazo, the great
ones who guide us and teach the people to love art will see to it, I
trust, that the picture is moved to a position befitting its mediocrity.
It is this unholy alliance between Expertise and Officialdom[18] that
squanders twenty thousand on an unimpeachable Frans Hals, and forty
thousand on a Mabuse for which no minor artist will wish to take
credit.[19] For the money a judicious purchaser could have made one of
the finest collections in England. The unholy alliance has no use for
contemporary art. The supply is considerable and the names are not
historic. Snobbery makes acceptable the portrait of a great lady, though
it be by Boldini; and even Mr. Lavery may be welcome if he come with the
picture of a king. But how are our ediles to know whether a picture of a
commoner, or of some inanimate and undistinguished object, by Degas or
Cézanne is good or bad? They need not know whether a picture by Hals is
good; they need only know that it is by Hals.
I will not describe in any detail the end of the slope, from the
beginning of the seventeenth to the middle of the nineteenth century.
The seventeenth century is rich in individual geniuses; but they are
individual. The level of art is very low. The big names of El Greco,
Rembrandt, Velasquez, Vermeer, Rubens, Jordaens, Poussin, and Claude,
Wren and Bernini (as architects) stand out; had they lived in the
eleventh century they might all have been lost in a crowd of anonymous
equals. Rembrandt, indeed, perhaps the greatest genius of them all, is a
typical ruin of his age. For, except in a few of his later works, his
sense of form and design is utterly lost in a mess of rhetoric, romance,
and chiaroscuro. It is difficult to forgive the seventeenth century for
what it made of Rembrandt's genius. One great advantage over its
predecessor it did enjoy: the seventeenth century had ceased to believe
sincerely in the ideas of the Classical Renaissance. Painters could not
devote themselves to suggesting the irrelevant emotions of life because
they did not feel them.[20] For lack of human emotion they were driven
back on art. They talked a great deal about Magnanimity and Nobility,
but they thought more of Composition. For instance, in the best works of
Nicolas Poussin, the greatest artist of the age, you will notice that
the human figure is treated as a shape cut out of coloured paper to be
pinned on as the composition directs. That is the right way to treat the
human figure; the mistake lay in making these shapes retain the
characteristic gestures of Classical rhetoric. In much the same way
Claude treats temples and palaces, trees, mountains, harbours and lakes,
as you may see in his superb pictures at the National Gallery. There
they hang, beside the Turners, that all the world may see the difference
between a great artist and an after-dinner poet. Turner was so much
excited by his observations and his sentiments that he set them all down
without even trying to co-ordinate them in a work of art: clearly he
could not have done so in any case. That was a cheap and spiteful
thought that prompted the clause wherein it is decreed that his pictures
shall hang for ever beside those of Claude. He wished to call attention
to a difference and he has succeeded beyond his expectations: curses,
like hens, come home to roost.
In the eighteenth century, with its dearth of genius, we perceive more
clearly that we are on the flats. Chardin is the one great artist.
Painters are, for the most part, upholsterers to the nobility and
gentry. Some fashion handsome furniture for the dining-room, others
elegant knick-knacks for the boudoir; many are kept constantly busy
delineating for the respect of future generations his lordship, or her
ladyship's family. The painting of the eighteenth century is brilliant
illustration still touched with art. For instance, in Watteau,
Canaletto, Crome, Cotman, and Guardi there is some art, some brilliance,
and a great deal of charming illustration. In Tiepolo there is hardly
anything but brilliance; only when one sees his work beside that of Mr.
Sargent does one realise the presence of other qualities. In Hogarth
there is hardly anything but illustration; one realises the presence of
other qualities only by remembering the work of the Hon. John Collier.
Beside the upholsterers who work for the aristocracy there is another
class supported by the connoisseurs. There are the conscientious bores,
whose modest aim it is to paint and draw correctly in the manner of
Raffael and Michelangelo. Their first object is to stick to the rules,
their second to show some cleverness in doing so. One need not bother
about them.
So the power of creating is almost lost, and limners must be content to
copy pretty things. The twin pillars of painting in the eighteenth
century were what they called "Subject" and "Treatment." To paint a
beautiful picture, a boudoir picture, take a pretty woman, note those
things about her that a chaste and civil dinner-partner might note, and
set them down in gay colours and masses of Chinese white: you may do the
same by her toilette battery, her fancy frocks, and picnic parties.
Imitate whatever is pretty and you are sure to make a pretty job of it.
To make a noble picture, a dining-room piece, you must take the same
lady and invest her in a Doric chiton or diploida and himation; give her
a pocillum, a censer, a sacrificial ram, and a distant view of Tivoli;
round your modelling, and let your brush-strokes be long and slightly
curved; affect sober and rather hot pigments; call the finished article
"Dido pouring libations to the Goddess of Love." To paint an exhibition
picture, the sort preferred by the more rigid _cognoscenti_, be sure to
make no mark for which warrant cannot be found in Rubens, Sarto, Guido
Reni, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, Raffael, Michelangelo, or Trajan's
Column. For further information consult "The Discourses" of Sir Joshua
Reynolds, P.R.A., whose recipes are made palatable by a quality
infrequent in his dishes, luminosity.
The intellectual reaction from Classical to Romantic is duly registered
by a change of subject. Ruins and mediaeval history come into fashion.
For art, which is as little concerned with the elegant bubbles of the
eighteenth century as with the foaming superabundance of the Romantic
revival, this change is nothing more than the swing of an irrelevant
pendulum. But the new ideas led inevitably to antiquarianism, and
antiquarians found something extraordinarily congenial in what was
worst in Gothic art. Obedient limners follow the wiseacres. What else is
there for them to follow? Stragglers from the age of reason are set down
to trick out simpering angels. No longer permitted to stand on the laws
of propriety or their personal dignity, they are ordered to sweeten
their cold meats with as much amorous and religious sentiment as they
can exude. Meanwhile the new fellows, far less sincere than the old, who
felt nothing and said so, begin to give themselves the airs of artists.
These Victorians are intolerable: for now that they have lost the old
craft and the old tradition of taste, the pictures that they make are no
longer pleasantly insignificant; they bellow "stinking mackerel."
About the middle of the nineteenth century art was as nearly dead as art
can be. The road ran drearily through the sea-level swamps. There were,
of course, men who felt that imitation, whether of nature or of
another's work, was not enough, who felt the outrage of calling the
staple products of the "forties" and "fifties" art; but generally they
lacked the power to make an effective protest. Art cannot die out
utterly; but it lay sick in caves and cellars. There were always one or
two who had a right to call themselves artists: the great Ingres[21]
overlaps Crome; Corot and Daumier overlap Ingres; and then come the
Impressionists. But the mass of painting and sculpture had sunk to
something that no intelligent and cultivated person would dream of
calling art. It was in those days that they invented the commodity which
is still the staple of official exhibitions throughout Europe. You may
see acres of it every summer at Burlington House and in the Salon;
indeed, you may see little else there. It does not pretend to be art. If
the producers mistake it for art sometimes, they do so in all innocence:
they have no notion of what art is. By "art" they mean the imitation of
objects, preferably pretty or interesting ones; their spokesmen have
said so again and again. The sort of thing that began to do duty for
art about 1840, and still passes muster with the lower middle class,
would have been inconceivable at any time between the fall of the Roman
Empire and the death of George IV. Even in the eighteenth century, when
they could not create significant form, they knew that accurate
imitation was of no value in itself. It is not until what is still
official painting and sculpture and architecture gets itself accepted as
a substitute for art, that we can say for certain that the long slope
that began with the Byzantine primitives is ended. But when we have
reached this point we know that we can sink no lower.
We must mark the spot near which a huge impulse died; but we need not
linger in the fetid swamps--or only long enough to say a word of
justice. Do not rail too bitterly against official painters, living or
dead. They cannot harm art, because they have nothing to do with it:
they are not artists. If rail you must, rail at that public which,
having lost all notion of what art is, demanded, and still demands, in
its stead, the thing that these painters can supply. Official painting
is the product of social conditions which have not yet passed away.
Thousands of people who care nothing about art are able to buy and are
in the habit of buying pictures. They want a background, just as the
ladies and gentlemen of the _ancien régime_ wanted one; only their idea
of what a background should be is different. The painter of commerce
supplies what is wanted and in his simplicity calls it art. That it is
not art, that it is not even an amenity, should not blind us to the fact
that it is an honest article. I admit that the man who produces it
satisfies a vulgar and unprofitable taste; so does the very upright
tradesman who forces insipid asparagus for the Christmas market. Sir
Georgius Midas will never care for art, but he will always want a
background; and, unless things are going to change with surprising
suddenness, it will be some time before he is unable to get what he
wants, at a price. However splendid and vital the new movement may be,
it will not, I fancy, unaided, kill the business of picture-making. The
trade will dwindle; but I suspect it will survive until there is no one
who can afford ostentatious upholstery, until the only purchasers are
those who willingly make sacrifices for the joy of possessing a work of
art.
IV
ALID EX ALIO
In the nineteenth century the spirit seems to enter one of those
prodigious periods of incubation for a type of which we turn
automatically to the age that saw the last infirmity of Roman
imperialism and of Hellenistic culture. About Victorian men and
movements there is something uneasy. It is as though, having seen a
shilling come down "tails," one were suddenly to surprise the ghost of a
head--you could have sworn that "heads" it was. It doesn't matter, but
it's disquieting. And after all, perhaps it does matter. Seen from odd
angles, Victorian judges and ministers take on the airs of conspirators:
there is something prophetic about Mr. Gladstone--about the Newcastle
programme something pathetic. Respectable hypotheses are caught implying
the most disreputable conclusions. And yet the respectable classes
speculate while anarchists and supermen are merely horrified by the
card-playing and champagne-drinking of people richer than themselves.
Agnostics see the finger of God in the fall of godless Paris.
Individualists clamour for a large and vigilant police force.
That is how the nineteenth century looks to us. Most of the mountains
are in labour with ridiculous mice, but the spheres are shaken by storms
in intellectual teacups. The Pre-Raffaelites call in question the whole
tradition of the Classical Renaissance, and add a few more names to the
heavy roll of notoriously bad painters. The French Impressionists
profess to do no more than push the accepted theory of representation to
its logical conclusion, and by their practice, not only paint some
glorious pictures, but shake the fatal tradition and remind the more
intelligent part of the world that visual art has nothing to do with
literature. Whistler draws, not the whole, but a part of the true moral.
What a pity he was not a greater artist! Still, he was an artist; and
about the year 1880 the race was almost extinct in this country.[22]
Through the fog of the nineteenth century, which began in 1830, loom
gigantic warnings. All the great figures are ominous. If they do not
belong to the new order, they make impossible the old. Carlyle and
Dickens and Victor Hugo, the products and lovers of the age, scold it.
Flaubert points a contemptuous finger. Ibsen, a primitive of the new
world, indicates the cracks in the walls of the old. Tolstoi is content
to be nothing but a primitive until he becomes little better than a
bore. By minding his own business, Darwin called in question the
business of everyone else. By hammering new sparks out of an old
instrument, Wagner revealed the limitations of literary music. As the
twentieth century dawns, a question, which up to the time of the French
Revolution had been judiciously kept academic, shoulders its way into
politics: "Why is this good?" About the same time, thanks chiefly to the
Aesthetes and the French Impressionists, an aesthetic conscience,
dormant since before the days of the Renaissance, wakes and begins to
cry, "Is this art?"
It is amusing to remember that the first concerted clamour against the
Renaissance and its florid sequelae arose in England; for the Romantic
movement, which was as much French and German as English, was merely a
reaction from the classicism of the eighteenth century, and hardly
attacked, much less threw off, the dominant tyranny. We have a right to
rejoice in the Pre-Raffaelite movement as an instance of England's
unquestioned supremacy in independence and unconventionality of thought.
Depression begins when we have to admit that the revolt led to nothing
but a great many bad pictures and a little thin sentiment. The
Pre-Raffaelites were men of taste who felt the commonness of the High
Renaissance and the distinction of what they called Primitive Art, by
which they meant the art of the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries. They
saw that, since the Renaissance, painters had been trying to do
something different from what the primitives had done; but for the life
of them they could not see what it was that the primitives did. They had
the taste to prefer Giotto to Raffael, but the only genuine reason they
could give for their preference was that they felt Raffael to be vulgar.
The reason was good, but not fundamental; so they set about inventing
others. They discovered in the primitives scrupulous fidelity to nature,
superior piety, chaste lives. How far they were from guessing the
secret of primitive art appeared when they began to paint pictures
themselves. The secret of primitive art is the secret of all art, at all
times, in all places--sensibility to the profound significance of form
and the power of creation. The band of happy brothers lacked both; so
perhaps it is not surprising that they should have found in acts of
piety, in legends and symbols, the material, and in sound churchmanship
the very essence, of mediaeval art. For their own inspiration they
looked to the past instead of looking about them. Instead of diving for
truth they sought it on the surface. The fact is, the Pre-Raffaelites
were not artists, but archaeologists who tried to make intelligent
curiosity do the work of impassioned contemplation. As artists they do
not differ essentially from the ruck of Victorian painters. They will
reproduce the florid ornament of late Gothic as slavishly as the steady
Academician reproduces the pimples on an orange; and if they do attempt
to simplify--some of them have noticed the simplification of the
primitives--they do so in the spirit, not of an artist, but of the
"sedulous ape."