No fact is more painful to the modern mind than that men are not born
with equal brains; and every day we grow more and more determined to
thwart Nature's desire of inequality by public education. Whether
everybody should be taught to read and write I leave to
politicians--the matter is not important; but that the nation should
not be instructed in drawing, music, painting, and English literature
I will never cease to maintain. Everything that has happened in
England for the last thirty years goes to prove that systematised
education in art means artistic decadence.
To the ordinary mind there is something very reassuring in the words
institutions, professors, examinations, medals, and titles of all
kinds. All these things have been given of late years to art, and
parents and guardians need no longer have any fear for those confided
to their charge: the art of painting has been recognised as a
profession! The principal institution where this profession is
practised is called the Royal Academy. It owes its existence to the
taste of a gentleman known as George the Third, and it has been
dowered by the State to the extent of at least three hundred thousand
pounds. Professors from Oxford, even bishops, dine there. The members
of this institution put R.A. after their names; the president has been
made a baronet; there was even a rumour that he was going to be made a
lord, and that he was not we must consider as another blow dealt
against the dignity of art.
Literature does not offer so much scope for organisation as painting;
but strenuous efforts are being made to organise it, and, by the aid
of academies, examinations, and crowns, hopes are entertained that,
before long, it will be brought into line with the other professions.
And the journalists too are anxious to "erect their craft to the
dignity of a profession which shall confer upon its members _certain
social status_ like that of the barrister and lawyer". Entrance is to
be strictly conditional; no one is to have a right to practice without
a diploma, and members are to be entitled to certain letters after
their names. A movement is on foot to Churton-Collinise English
literature at the universities, and every month Mr. Walter Besant
raises a wail in the _Author_ that the peerage is not as open to
three-volume novelists as it is to brewers. He bewails the fact that
no eminent man of letters, with the exception of Lord Tennyson, has
been made the enforced associate of brewers and politicians. Mr.
Besant does not think that titles in these democratic days are foolish
and absurd, pitiful in the personality of those who own them by
inheritance, grotesque in the personality of those on whom they have
been conferred. Mr. Besant does not see that the desire of the baker,
the brewer, the butcher, and I may add the three-volume novelist, to
be addressed by small tradesmen and lackeys as "yer lordship", raises
a smile on the lips even of the most _blasé_.
I am advocating an unpopular _régime_ I know, for the majority believe
that art is in Queer Street if new buildings are not being raised, if
official recognition of merits is not proclaimed, and if the
newspapers do not teem with paragraphs concerning the homes of the
Academicians. The wailing and gnashing of teeth that were heard when
an intelligent portion of the Press induced Mr. Tate to withdraw his
offer to build a gallery and furnish it with pictures by Messrs.
Herkomer, Fildes, Leader, Long, are not forgotten. It was not urged
that the pictures were valuable pictures; the merit or demerit of the
pictures was not what interested, but the fact that a great deal of
money was going to be spent, and that titles, badges, medals, crowns,
would be given to those whose pictures were enshrined in the new
temple of art. The Tate Gallery touched these folk as would an
imposing review of troops, a procession of judges, or a coronation in
Westminster Abbey. Their senses were tickled by the prospect of a
show, their minds were stirred by some idea of organisation--something
was about to be organised, and nothing appeals so much to the vulgar
mind as organisation.
An epoch is represented by a word, and to organise represents the
dominant idea of our civilisation. To organise is to be respectable,
and as every one wants to be respectable, every one dreams of new
schemes of organisation. Soldiers, sailors, policemen, members of
parliament, independent voters, clerks in the post office, bus
drivers, dockers, every imaginable variety of worker, domestic
servants--it is difficult to think of any class that has not been
organised of late years.
There is a gentleman in parliament who is anxious to do something in
the way of social organisation for the gipsies. The gipsies have not
appealed to him; they have professed no desire to have their social
status raised; they have, I believe, disclaimed through their king,
whoever he may be, all participation in the scheme of this benevolent
gentleman. Nor does any sense of the absurdity of his endeavour blight
the worthy gentleman's ardour. How should it? He, like the other
organisers, is an unreasoning instrument in a great tendency of
things. To organise something--or, put it differently, to educate
some one--is to day every man's ambition. So long as it is not
himself, it matters no jot to him whom he educates. The gipsy under
the hedge, the artist painting under a hill, it matters not. A
technical school of instruction would enable the gipsy to harness his
horse better than he does at present; and the artist would paint much
better if he were taught to stipple, and examined by salaried
professors in stipple, and given prizes for stippling. The general
mind of our century is with education and organisation of every kind,
and from this terrible general mind art seems unable to escape. Art,
that poor little gipsy whose very condition of existence is freedom,
who owns no code of laws, who evades all regulations, who groups
himself under no standard, who can live only in disastrous times, when
the world's attention is drawn to other things, and allows him life in
shelter of the hedges, and dreams in sight of the stars, finds himself
forced into a uniform--poor little fellow, how melancholy he looks on
his high stool in the South Kensington Museum, and notwithstanding the
professors his hand drops from the drawing-board, unable to accomplish
the admired stipple.
But solemn members of parliament are certain that official recognition
must be extended to art. Art is an educational influence, and the
Kensington galleries are something more than agreeable places, where
sweethearts can murmur soft nothings under divine masterpieces. The
utilitarian M.P. must find some justification for art; he is not
sensible enough to understand that art justifies its own existence,
that it is its own honour and glory; and he nourishes a flimsy lie,
and votes that large sums of money shall be spent in endowing schools
of art and founding picture galleries. Then there is another
class--those who have fish to fry, and to whom art seems a convenient
frying-pan. Mr. Tate craves for a museum to be called Tate's; or, if
his princely gift gained him a title, which it may, the museum would
be called--What would be an appropriate name? There are men too who
have trifles to sell, and they talk loudly of the glories of modern
art, and the necessity of a British Luxembourg.
That France should have a Luxembourg is natural enough; that we should
have one would be anomalous. We are a free-trading country. I pass
over the failure of the Luxembourg to recognise genius, to save the
artist of genius a struggle with insolent ignorance. What did the
Luxembourg do for Corot, Millet, Manet, Degas, Monet, Renoir, Sisley,
Pissaro? The Luxembourg chose rather to honour such pretentious
mediocrities as Bouguereau, Jules Lefebvre, Jules Breton, and their
like. What has our Academy done to rescue struggling genius from
poverty and obscurity? Did it save Alfred Stevens, the great sculptor
of his generation, from the task of designing fire-irons? How often
did the Academy refuse Cecil Lawson's pictures? When they did accept
him, was it not because he had become popular in spite of the Academy?
Did not the Academy refuse Mr. Whistler's portrait of his mother, and
was it not hung at the last moment owing to a threat of one of the
Academicians to resign if a place was not found for it? Place was
found for it seven feet above the line. Has not the Academy for the
last five-and-twenty years lent the whole stress and authority of its
name to crush Mr. Whistler? Happily his genius was sufficient for the
fight, and it was not until he had conquered past all question that he
left this country. The record of the Academy is a significant one. But
if it has exercised a vicious influence in art, its history is no
worse than that of other academies. Here, as elsewhere, the Academy
has tolerated genius when it was popular, and when it was not popular
it has trampled upon it.
We have Free Trade in literature, why should we not have Free Trade in
art? Why should not every artist go into the market without title or
masquerade that blinds the public to the value of what he has to sell?
I would turn art adrift, titleless, R.A.-less, out into the street and
field, where, under the light of his original stars, the impassioned
vagrant might dream once more, and for the mere sake of his dreams.