We have heard the words "great artist" used so often and so carelessly
that their tremendous significance escapes. The present is a time when
it is necessary to consider the meaning, latent and manifest, of the
words, for we are about to look on the drawings of the late Charles
Keene.
In many the words evoke the idea of huge canvases in which historical
incidents are depicted, conquerors on black horses covered with gold
trappings, or else figures of Christ, or else the agonies of martyrs.
The portrayal of angels is considered by the populace to be especially
imaginative, and all who affect such subjects are at least in their
day termed great artists. But the words are capable of a less vulgar
interpretation. To the select few the great artist is he who is most
racy of his native soil, he who has most persistently cultivated his
talent in one direction, and in one direction only, he who has
repeated himself most often, he who has lived upon himself the most
avidly. In art, eclecticism means loss of character, and character is
everything in art. I do not mean by character personal idiosyncrasies;
I mean racial and territorial characteristics. Of personal
idiosyncrasy we have enough and to spare. Indeed, it has come to be
accepted almost as an axiom that it does not matter much how badly you
paint, provided you do not paint badly like anybody else. But instead
of noisy idiosyncrasy we want the calm of national character in our
art. A national character can only be acquired by remaining at home
and saturating ourselves in the spirit of our land until it oozes from
our pens and pencils in every slightest word, in every slightest
touch. Our lives should be one long sacrifice for this one
thing--national character. Foreign travel should be eschewed, we
should turn our eyes from Paris and Rome and fix them on our own
fields; we should strive to remain ignorant, making our lives
mole-like, burrowing only in our own parish soil. There are no
universities in art, but there are village schools; each of us should
choose his master, imitate him humbly, striving to continue the
tradition. And while labouring thus humbly, rather as handicraftsmen
than as artists, our personality will gradually begin to appear in our
work, not the weak febrile idiosyncrasy which lights a few hours of
the artist's youth, but a steady flame nourished by the rich oil of
excellent lessons. If the work is good, very little personality is
required. Are the individual temperaments of Terburg, Metzu, and Peter
de Hoogh very strikingly exhibited in their pictures?
The paragraph I have just written will seem like a digression to the
careless reader, but he who has read carefully, or will take the
trouble to glance back, will not fail to see, that although in
appearance digressive, it is a strict and accurate comment on Charles
Keene, and the circumstances in which his art was produced. Charles
Keene never sought after originality; on the contrary, he began by
humbly imitating John Leech, the inventor of the method. His earliest
drawings (few if any of them are exhibited in the present collection)
were hardly distinguishable from Leech's. He continued the tradition
humbly, and originality stole upon him unawares. Charles Keene was not
an erudite, he thought of very little except his own talent and the
various aspects of English life which he had the power of depicting;
but he knew thoroughly well the capacities of his talent, the
direction in which it could be developed, and his whole life was
devoted to its cultivation. He affected neither a knowledge of
literature nor of Continental art; he lived in England and for
England, content to tell the story of his own country and the age he
lived in; in a word, he worked and lived as did the Dutchmen of 1630.
He lived pure of all foreign influence; no man's art was ever so
purely English as Keene's; even the great Dutchmen themselves were not
more Dutch than Keene was English, and the result is often hardly less
surprising. To look at some of these drawings and not think of the
Dutchmen is impossible, for when we are most English we are most
Dutch--our art came from Holland. These drawings are Dutch in the
strange simplicity and directness of intention; they are Dutch in
their oblivion to all interests except those of good drawing; they are
Dutch in the beautiful quality of the workmanship. Examine the rich,
simple drawing of that long coat or the side of that cab, and say if
there is not something of the quality of a Terburg. Terburg is simple
as a page of seventeenth-century prose; and in Keene there is the same
deep, rich, classic simplicity. The material is different, but the
feeling is the same. I might, of course, say Jan Steen; and is it not
certain that both Terburg and Steen, working under the same
conditions, would not have produced drawings very like Keene's? And
now, looking through the material deep into the heart of the thing, is
it a paradox to say that No. 221 is in feeling and quality of
workmanship a Dutch picture of the best time? The scene depicted is
the honeymoon. The young wife sits by an open window full of sunlight,
and the curtains likewise are drenched in the pure white light. How
tranquil she is, how passive in her beautiful animal life! No complex
passion stirs in that flesh; instinct drowses in her just as in an
animal. With what animal passivity she looks up in her husband's face!
Look at that peaceful face, that high forehead, how clearly conceived
and how complete is the rendering! How slight the means, how
extraordinary the result! The sunlight floods the sweet face so
exquisitively stupid, and her soul, and the room, and the very
conditions of life of these people are revealed to us.
And now, in a very rough and fragmentary fashion, hardly attempting
more than a hurried transcription of my notes, I will call attention
to some three or four drawings which especially arrested my attention.
In No. 10 we have a cab seen in wonderful perspective; the hind wheel
is the nearest point, and in extraordinarily accurate proportion the
vehicle and the animal attached to it go up the paper. The cabman
turns half round to address some observation to the "fare", an old
gentleman, who is about to step in. The roof of the cab cuts the body
of the cabman, composing the picture in a most original and striking
manner. The panels of the cab are filled in with simple straight
lines, but how beautifully graduated are these lines, how much they
are made to say! Above all, the hesitating movement of the old
gentleman--how the exact moment has been caught! and the treatment of
the long coat, how broad, how certain--how well the artist has said
exactly what he wanted to say! Another very fine drawing is No. 11.
The fat farmer stands so thoroughly well in his daily habit; the great
stomach, how well it is drawn, and the short legs are part and parcel
of the stomach. The man is redolent of turnip-fields and rick-yards;
all the life of the fields is upon him. And the long parson, clearly
from the university, how well he clasps his hands and how the very
soul of the man is expressed in the gesture! No. 16 is very wonderful.
What movement there is in the skirts of the fat woman, and the legs of
the vendor of penny toys! Are they not the very legs that the gutter
breeds?
No. 52: a big, bluff artist, deep-seated amid the ferns and grasses.
The big, bearded man, who thinks of nothing but his art, who lives in
it, who would not be thin because fat enables him to sit longer out of
doors, the man who will not even turn round on his camp-stool to see
the woman who is speaking to him; we have all known that man, but to
me that man never really existed until I looked on this drawing. And
the treatment of the trees that make the background! A few touches of
the pencil, and how hot and alive the place is with sunlight!
But perhaps the most wonderful drawing in the entire collection is No.
89. Never did Keene show greater mastery over his material. In this
drawing every line of the black-lead pencil is more eloquent than
Demosthenes' most eloquent period. The roll and the lurch of the
vessel, the tumult of waves and wind, the mental and physical
condition of the passengers, all are given as nothing in this world
could give them except that magic pencil. The figure, the man that the
wind blows out of the picture, his hat about to leave his head, is not
he really on board in a gale? Did a frock coat flap out in the wind so
well before? And do not the attitudes of the two women leaning over
the side represent their suffering? The man who is not sea-sick sits,
his legs stretched out, his hands thrust into his pockets, his face
sunk on his breast, his hat crushed over his eyes. His pea-jacket, how
well drawn! and can we not distinguish the difference between its
cloth and the cloth of the frock of the city merchant, who watches
with such a woful gaze the progress of the gathering wave? The weight
of the wave is indicated with a few straight lines, and, strangely
enough, only very slightly varied are the lines which give the very
sensation of the merchant's thin frock coat made in the shop of a
fashionable tailor.
It has been said that Keene could not draw a lady or a gentleman. Why
not add that he was neither a tennis player nor a pigeon shot, a
waltzer nor an accomplished French scholar? The same terrible
indictment has been preferred against Dickens, and Mr. Henry James
says that Balzac failed to prove he was a gentleman. It might be well
to remind Mr. James that the artist who would avoid the fashion plate
would do well to turn to the coster rather than the duke for
inspiration. Keene's genius saved him from the drawing-room, never
allowing his gaze to wander from where English characteristics may be
gathered most plentifully--the middle and lower classes.
I find in my notes mention of other drawings quite as wonderful as
those I have spoken of, but space only remains to give some hint of
Keene's place among draughtsmen. As a humorist he was certainly thin
compared to Leech; as a satirist he was certainly feeble compared to
Gavarni; in dramatic, not to say imaginative, qualities he cannot be
spoken of in the same breath as Cruikshank; but as an artist was he
not their superior?