The question is rather What is the practice of the artist than What
ought to be the practice of the artist. When, in some future epoch
of thought, these questions about fine art shall be more generally
understood by the writers and thinkers than they now are, it may become
possible for some Ruskin of the future to preach an acceptable creed as
to the proper mission of the artist; but it has not been possible for
the Ruskins of the past or of the present to do so, simply because they
have failed to understand the conditions under which the artist does
his work. There is very little use in exhorting a man to better things
until you are able to sympathize with what he is already engaged upon.
Now, it requires but a limited observation of artists to ascertain that
they are little occupied in narration, in description, in preaching,
in devotion, or in jesting; but a very long continued and minute
observance of their ways will leave the beholder in the same mind about
these, and more and more convinced that artists are chiefly occupied in
producing works of art and nothing else. And what are the works of art
which they are trying to produce? In the matter of painting, which is
our present subject, it is unfortunate that the word _impression_ has
been used in a special sense as describing the way of work of a certain
special body of painters, because it more accurately described the way
in which most painters work than any other single word will suggest
it. The object of the landscape-painter is commonly to paint something
upon his canvas which will convey to the spectator an impression which
he, the landscape-painter, has already received from external nature.
That impression may have come upon him during the watches of the night,
as he thought about what he had seen by day; or it may have come upon
him instantaneously as he faced a piece of hill-side with trees, or
a single old tree. Suppose it even to be a sunset sky, with miles of
ocean illuminated by the colored fire above; it is with no hope of
adequately representing that sea and sky that he sits down to paint,
but he proposes to paint an impression which that sea and sky have made
upon his sensitive mind, and which he thinks will be interesting when
painted. That, then, is the landscape-painter's subject. Not the whole
truth, nor even any essential part of the truth, about a hay-stack
or a mountain-range, but an interesting artistic impression made upon
the artist's mind by the hay-stack or the mountain-range. Here, as in
literature, there are nobler subjects and less noble subjects; but here
much less than in literature is the nobility of the work of art affected
by the nobility of the subject. In two pictures by Homer Martin, one
represents the stretch of an Adirondack lake, with mountain and forest
and a great wealth of varied cloud-form in the sky above; while the
other represents only the ridge of a hill seen from a point so low that
the ridge cuts the sky and nothing else is seen against the sky but the
tops of a few trees which grow on the farther slope. It is impossible
to say which of the two pictures is the nobler. The bigger and fuller
picture may, indeed, be a greater work of art than the smaller one could
ever be, and yet that is so very small a fact! What the artist has done
is, first, to make a design out of the material afforded him by a broad
landscape and the varied sky, and in the other instance to make a design
out of a monotonous grassy slope, a few tree-tops, left unaccounted for
except by the beholder's intelligence, and a very uniform gray firmament
beyond. Who shall say which is the nobler design of the two?
Mr. George Moore has published an essay well worthy of consideration,
in which he undertakes to show that the "failure of the nineteenth
century" in painting is that it has assumed the necessity of taking
a subject in the literary sense, in the moral sense, in the sense of
those frequenters of picture-galleries who prefer the picture which
is to them the most like a novel, or a pathetic poem in words. The
assumption is, and it is certainly a safe one, that those persons who
are attracted to these pictures in order that they may study archæology
or feel a religious thrill, or be made curious and inclined to look up
the facts in either story, or, finally, to feel the domestic pathos of
the scene at the sick child's bedside—those students of art are on the
wrong track, and will never discover what, in most cases, the painter
is after when he paints a picture. Italian art and Dutch art had died
before "the subject" had appeared, and it was not until the end of the
eighteenth century that this evil thing "really began to make itself
felt, and like the potato blight, it soon became clear that it had come
to stay." And the conclusion is that if the painter would now produce
pictures worthy of himself he must reject the temptation to attract
spectators by tickling their feelings or showing off his learning, and
must paint pictures with painter's subjects only.