encouragement. With a sympathy that is absolutely reckless of grammar,
he knows from experience 'what an amount of study and mental strain _are_
involved in painting a bad picture honestly'; he exhorts them (Sententia
No. 267) to 'go on quite bravely and sincerely making mess after mess
from Nature,' and while sternly warning them that there is something
wrong if they do not 'feel _washed out_ after each drawing,' he still
urges them to 'put a new piece of goods in the window' every morning. In
fact, he is quite severe on Mr. Ruskin for not recognising that 'a
picture should denote the frailty of man,' and remarks with pleasing
courtesy and felicitous grace that 'many phases of feeling . . . are as
much a dead letter to this great art teacher, as Sanskrit to an Islington
cabman.' Nor is Mr. Quilter one of those who fails to practice what he
preaches. Far from it. He goes on quite bravely and sincerely making
mess after mess from literature, and misquotes Shakespeare, Wordsworth,
Alfred de Musset, Mr. Matthew Arnold, Mr. Swinburne, and Mr. Fitzgerald's
Rubaiyat, in strict accordance with Sententia No. 251, which tells us
that 'Work must be abominable if it is ever going to be good.' Only,
unfortunately, his own work never does get good. Not content with his
misquotations, he misspells the names of such well-known painters as
Madox-Brown, Bastien Lepage and Meissonier, hesitates between Ingres and
Ingres, talks of _Mr_. Millais and _Mr_. Linton, alludes to Mr. Frank
Holl simply as 'Hall,' speaks with easy familiarity of Mr. Burne-Jones as
'Jones,' and writes of the artist whom he calls 'old Chrome' with an
affection that reminds us of Mr. Tulliver's love for Jeremy Taylor. On
the whole, the book will not do. We fully admit that it is extremely
amusing and, no doubt, Mr. Quilter is quite earnest in his endeavours to
elevate art to the dignity of manual labour, but the extraordinary
vulgarity of the style alone will always be sufficient to prevent these
Sententiae Artis from being anything more than curiosities of literature.
Mr. Quilter has missed his chance; for he has failed even to make himself
the Tupper of Painting.
Sententiae: Artis: First Principles of Art for Painters and Picture
Lovers. By Harry Quilter, M.A. (Isbister.)
[A reply to this review appeared on November 23.]
A SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY THROUGH LITERATURE
(Pall Mall Gazette, December 1, 1886.)
This is undoubtedly an interesting book, not merely through its eloquence
and earnestness, but also through the wonderful catholicity of taste that
it displays. Mr. Noel has a passion for panegyric. His eulogy on Keats
is closely followed by a eulogy on Whitman, and his praise of Lord
Tennyson is equalled only by his praise of Mr. Robert Buchanan.
Sometimes, we admit, we would like a little more fineness of
discrimination, a little more delicacy of perception. Sincerity of
utterance is valuable in a critic, but sanity of judgment is more
valuable still, and Mr. Noel's judgments are not always distinguished by
their sobriety. Many of the essays, however, are well worth reading. The
best is certainly that on The Poetic Interpretation of Nature, in which
Mr. Noel claims that what is called by Mr. Ruskin the 'pathetic fallacy
of literature' is in reality a vital emotional truth; but the essays on
Hugo and Mr. Browning are good also; the little paper entitled Rambles by
the Cornish Seas is a real marvel of delightful description, and the
monograph on Chatterton has a good deal of merit, though we must protest
very strongly against Mr. Noel's idea that Chatterton must be modernised
before he can be appreciated. Mr. Noel has absolutely no right
whatsoever to alter Chatterton's' yonge damoyselles' and '_anlace_ fell'
into 'youthful damsels' and '_weapon_ fell,' for Chatterton's archaisms
were an essential part of his inspiration and his method. Mr. Noel in
one of his essays speaks with much severity of those who prefer sound to
sense in poetry and, no doubt, this is a very wicked thing to do; but he
himself is guilty of a much graver sin against art when, in his desire to
emphasise the meaning of Chatterton, he destroys Chatterton's music. In
the modernised version he gives of the wonderful Songe to AElla, he mars
by his corrections the poem's metrical beauty, ruins the rhymes and robs
the music of its echo. Nineteenth-century restorations have done quite
enough harm to English architecture without English poetry being treated
in the same manner, and we hope that when Mr. Noel writes again about
Chatterton he will quote from the poet's verse, not from a publisher's
version.
This, however, is not by any means the chief blot on Mr. Noel's book. The
fault of his book is that it tells us far more about his own personal
feelings than it does about the qualities of the various works of art
that are criticised. It is in fact a diary of the emotions suggested by
literature, rather than any real addition to literary criticism, and we
fancy that many of the poets about whom he writes so eloquently would be
not a little surprised at the qualities he finds in their work. Byron,
for instance, who spoke with such contempt of what he called 'twaddling
about trees and babbling o' green fields'; Byron who cried, 'Away with
this cant about nature! A good poet can imbue a pack of cards with more
poetry than inhabits the forests of America,' is claimed by Mr. Noel as a
true nature-worshipper and Pantheist along with Wordsworth and Shelley;
and we wonder what Keats would have thought of a critic who gravely
suggests that Endymion is 'a parable of the development of the individual
soul.' There are two ways of misunderstanding a poem. One is to
misunderstand it and the other to praise it for qualities that it does
not possess. The latter is Mr. Noel's method, and in his anxiety to
glorify the artist he often does so at the expense of the work of art.
Mr. Noel also is constantly the victim of his own eloquence. So facile
is his style that it constantly betrays him into crude and extravagant
statements. Rhetoric and over-emphasis are the dangers that Mr. Noel has
not always succeeded in avoiding. It is extravagant, for instance, to
say that all great poetry has been 'pictorial,' or that Coleridge's
Knight's Grave is worth many Kubla Khans, or that Byron has 'the splendid
imperfection of an AEschylus,' or that we had lately 'one dramatist
living in England, and only one, who could be compared to Hugo, and that
was Richard Hengist Horne,' and that 'to find an English dramatist of the
same order before him we must go back to Sheridan if not to Otway.' Mr.
Noel, again, has a curious habit of classing together the most
incongruous names and comparing the most incongruous works of art. What
is gained by telling us that 'Sardanapalus' is perhaps hardly equal to
'Sheridan,' that Lord Tennyson's ballad of The Revenge and his Ode on the
Death of the Duke of Wellington are worthy of a place beside Thomson's
Rule Britannia, that Edgar Allan Poe, Disraeli and Mr. Alfred Austin are
artists of note whom we may affiliate on Byron, and that if Sappho and
Milton 'had not high genius, they would be justly reproached as
sensational'? And surely it is a crude judgment that classes Baudelaire,
of all poets, with Marini and mediaeval troubadours, and a crude style
that writes of 'Goethe, Shelley, Scott, and Wilson,' for a mortal should
not thus intrude upon the immortals, even though he be guilty of holding
with them that Cain is 'one of the finest poems in the English language.'
It is only fair, however, to add that Mr. Noel subsequently makes more
than ample amends for having opened Parnassus to the public in this
reckless manner, by calling Wilson an 'offal-feeder,' on the ground that
he once wrote a severe criticism of some of Lord Tennyson's early poems.
For Mr. Noel does not mince his words. On the contrary, he speaks with
much scorn of all euphuism and delicacy of expression and, preferring the
affectation of nature to the affectation of art, he thinks nothing of
calling other people 'Laura Bridgmans,' 'Jackasses' and the like. This,
we think, is to be regretted, especially in a writer so cultured as Mr.
Noel. For, though indignation may make a great poet, bad temper always
makes a poor critic.
On the whole, Mr. Noel's book has an emotional rather than an
intellectual interest. It is simply a record of the moods of a man of
letters, and its criticisms merely reveal the critic without illuminating
what he would criticise for us. The best that we can say of it is that
it is a Sentimental Journey through Literature, the worst that any one
could say of it is that it has all the merits of such an expedition.
Essays on Poetry and Poets. By the Hon. Roden Noel. (Kegan Paul.)
COMMON-SENSE IN ART
(Pall Mall Gazette, January 8, 1887.)
At this critical moment in the artistic development of England Mr. John
Collier has come forward as the champion of common-sense in art. It will
be remembered that Mr. Quilter, in one of his most vivid and picturesque
metaphors, compared Mr. Collier's method as a painter to that of a
shampooer in a Turkish bath. {119} As a writer Mr. Collier is no less
interesting. It is true that he is not eloquent, but then he censures
with just severity 'the meaningless eloquence of the writers on
aesthetics'; we admit that he is not subtle, but then he is careful to
remind us that Leonardo da Vinci's views on painting are nonsensical; his
qualities are of a solid, indeed we may say of a stolid order; he is
thoroughly honest, sturdy and downright, and he advises us, if we want to
know anything about art, to study the works of 'Helmholtz, Stokes, or
Tyndall,' to which we hope we may be allowed to add Mr. Collier's own
Manual of Oil Painting.
For this art of painting is a very simple thing indeed, according to Mr.
Collier. It consists merely in the 'representation of natural objects by
means of pigments on a flat surface.' There is nothing, he tells us, 'so
very mysterious' in it after all. 'Every natural object appears to us as
a sort of pattern of different shades and colours,' and 'the task of the
artist is so to arrange his shades and colours on his canvas that a
similar pattern is produced.' This is obviously pure common-sense, and
it is clear that art-definitions of this character can be comprehended by
the very meanest capacity and, indeed, may be said to appeal to it. For
the perfect development, however, of this pattern-producing faculty a
severe training is necessary. The art student must begin by painting
china, crockery, and 'still life' generally. He should rule his straight
lines and employ actual measurements wherever it is possible. He will
also find that a plumb-line comes in very useful. Then he should proceed
to Greek sculpture, for from pottery to Phidias is only one step.
Ultimately he will arrive at the living model, and as soon as he can
'faithfully represent any object that he has before him' he is a painter.
After this there is, of course, only one thing to be considered, the
important question of subject. Subjects, Mr. Collier tells us, are of
two kinds, ancient and modern. Modern subjects are more healthy than
ancient subjects, but the real difficulty of modernity in art is that the
artist passes his life with respectable people, and that respectable
people are unpictorial. 'For picturesqueness,' consequently, he should
go to 'the rural poor,' and for pathos to the London slums. Ancient
subjects offer the artist a very much wider field. If he is fond of
'rich stuffs and costly accessories' he should study the Middle Ages; if
he wishes to paint beautiful people, 'untrammelled by any considerations
of historical accuracy,' he should turn to the Greek and Roman mythology;
and if he is a 'mediocre painter,' he should choose his 'subject from the
Old and New Testament,' a recommendation, by the way, that many of our
Royal Academicians seem already to have carried out. To paint a real
historical picture one requires the assistance of a theatrical costumier
and a photographer. From the former one hires the dresses and the latter
supplies one with the true background. Besides subject-pictures there
are also portraits and landscapes. Portrait painting, Mr. Collier tells
us, 'makes no demands on the imagination.' As is the sitter, so is the
work of art. If the sitter be commonplace, for instance, it would be
'contrary to the fundamental principles of portraiture to make the
picture other than commonplace.' There are, however, certain rules that
should be followed. One of the most important of these is that the
artist should always consult his sitter's relations before he begins the
picture. If they want a profile he must do them a profile; if they
require a full face he must give them a full face; and he should be
careful also to get their opinion as to the costume the sitter should
wear and 'the sort of expression he should put on.' 'After all,' says
Mr. Collier pathetically, 'it is they who have to live with the picture.'
Besides the difficulty of pleasing the victim's family, however, there is
the difficulty of pleasing the victim. According to Mr. Collier, and he
is, of course, a high authority on the matter, portrait painters bore
their sitters very much. The true artist consequently should encourage
his sitter to converse, or get some one to read to him; for if the sitter
is bored the portrait will look sad. Still, if the sitter has not got an
amiable expression naturally the artist is not bound to give him one, nor
'if he is essentially ungraceful' should the artist ever 'put him in a
graceful attitude.' As regards landscape painting, Mr. Collier tells us
that 'a great deal of nonsense has been talked about the impossibility of
reproducing nature,' but that there is nothing really to prevent a
picture giving to the eye exactly the same impression that an actual
scene gives, for that when he visited 'the celebrated panorama of the
Siege of Paris' he could hardly distinguish the painted from the real
cannons! The whole passage is extremely interesting, and is really one
out of many examples we might give of the swift and simple manner in
which the common-sense method solves the great problems of art. The book
concludes with a detailed exposition of the undulatory theory of light
according to the most ancient scientific discoveries. Mr. Collier points
out how important it is for an artist to hold sound views on the subject
of ether waves, and his own thorough appreciation of Science may be
estimated by the definition he gives of it as being 'neither more nor
less than knowledge.'
Mr. Collier has done his work with much industry and earnestness. Indeed,
nothing but the most conscientious seriousness, combined with real
labour, could have produced such a book, and the exact value of common-
sense in art has never before been so clearly demonstrated.
A Manual of Oil Painting. By the Hon. John Collier. (Cassell and Co.)
MINER AND MINOR POETS
(Pall Mall Gazette, February 1, 1887.)
The conditions that precede artistic production are so constantly treated
as qualities of the work of art itself that one sometimes is tempted to
wish that all art were anonymous. Yet there are certain forms of art so
individual in their utterance, so purely personal in their expression,
that for a full appreciation of their style and manner some knowledge of
the artist's life is necessary. To this class belongs Mr. Skipsey's
Carols from the Coal-Fields, a volume of intense human interest and high
literary merit, and we are consequently glad to see that Dr. Spence
Watson has added a short biography of his friend to his friend's poems,
for the life and the literature are too indissolubly wedded ever really
to be separated. Joseph Skipsey, Dr. Watson tells us, was sent into the
coal pits at Percy Main, near North Shields, when he was seven years of
age. Young as he was he had to work from twelve to sixteen hours in the
day, generally in the pitch dark, and in the dreary winter months he saw
the sun only upon Sundays. When he went to work he had learned the
alphabet and to put words of two letters together, but he was really his
own schoolmaster, and 'taught himself to write, for example, by copying
the letters from printed bills or notices, when he could get a candle
end,--his paper being the trapdoor, which it was his duty to open and
shut as the wagons passed through, and his pen a piece of chalk.' The
first book he really read was the Bible, and not content with reading it,
he learned by heart the chapters which specially pleased him. When
sixteen years old he was presented with a copy of Lindley Murray's
Grammar, by the aid of which he gained some knowledge of the structural
rules of English. He had already become acquainted with Paradise Lost,
and was another proof of Matthew Prior's axiom, 'Who often reads will
sometimes want to write,' for he had begun to write verse when only 'a
bonnie pit lad.' For more than forty years of his life he laboured in
'the coal-dark underground,' and is now the caretaker of a Board-school
in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. As for the qualities of his poetry, they are its
directness and its natural grace. He has an intellectual as well as a
metrical affinity with Blake, and possesses something of Blake's
marvellous power of making simple things seem strange to us, and strange
things seem simple. How delightful, for instance, is this little poem:
'Get up!' the caller calls, 'Get up!'
And in the dead of night,
To win the bairns their bite and sup,
I rise a weary wight.
My flannel dudden donn'd, thrice o'er
My birds are kiss'd, and then
I with a whistle shut the door
I may not ope again.
How exquisite and fanciful this stray lyric:
The wind comes from the west to-night;
So sweetly down the lane he bloweth
Upon my lips, with pure delight
From head to foot my body gloweth.
Where did the wind, the magic find
To charm me thus? say, heart that knoweth!
'Within a rose on which he blows
Before upon thy lips he bloweth!'
We admit that Mr. Skipsey's work is extremely unequal, but when it is at
its best it is full of sweetness and strength; and though he has
carefully studied the artistic capabilities of language, he never makes
his form formal by over-polishing. Beauty with him seems to be an
unconscious result rather than a conscious aim; his style has all the
delicate charm of chance. We have already pointed out his affinity to
Blake, but with Burns also he may be said to have a spiritual kinship,
and in the songs of the Northumbrian miner we meet with something of the
Ayrshire peasant's wild gaiety and mad humour. He gives himself up
freely to his impressions, and there is a fine, careless rapture in his
laughter. The whole book deserves to be read, and much of it deserves to
be loved. Mr. Skipsey can find music for every mood, whether he is
dealing with the real experiences of the pitman or with the imaginative
experiences of the poet, and his verse has a rich vitality about it. In
these latter days of shallow rhymes it is pleasant to come across some
one to whom poetry is a passion not a profession.
Mr. F. B. Doveton belongs to a different school. In his amazing
versatility he reminds us of the gentleman who wrote the immortal
handbills for Mrs. Jarley, for his subjects range from Dr. Carter Moffatt
and the Ammoniaphone to Mr. Whiteley, Lady Bicyclists, and the
Immortality of the Soul. His verses in praise of Zoedone are a fine
example of didactic poetry, his elegy on the death of Jumbo is quite up
to the level of the subject, and the stanzas on a watering-place,
Who of its merits can e'er think meanly?
Scattering ozone to all the land!
are well worthy of a place in any shilling guidebook. Mr. Doveton
divides his poems into grave and gay, but we like him least when he is
amusing, for in his merriment there is but little melody, and he makes
his muse grin through a horse-collar. When he is serious he is much
better, and his descriptive poems show that he has completely mastered
the most approved poetical phraseology. Our old friend Boreas is as
'burly' as ever, 'zephyrs' are consistently 'amorous,' and 'the welkin
rings' upon the smallest provocation; birds are 'the feathered host' or
'the sylvan throng,' the wind 'wantons o'er the lea,' 'vernal gales'
murmur to 'crystal rills,' and Lempriere's Dictionary supplies the Latin
names for the sun and the moon. Armed with these daring and novel
expressions Mr. Doveton indulges in fierce moods of nature-worship, and
botanises recklessly through the provinces. Now and then, however, we
come across some pleasing passages. Mr. Doveton apparently is an
enthusiastic fisherman, and sings merrily of the 'enchanting grayling'
and the 'crimson and gold trout' that rise to the crafty angler's
'feathered wile.' Still, we fear that he will never produce any real
good work till he has made up his mind whether destiny intends him for a
poet or for an advertising agent, and we venture to hope that should he
ever publish another volume he will find some other rhyme to 'vision'
than 'Elysian,' a dissonance that occurs five times in this well-meaning
but tedious volume.
As for Mr. Ashby-Sterry, those who object to the nude in art should at
once read his lays of The Lazy Minstrel and be converted, for over these
poems the milliner, not the muse, presides, and the result is a little
alarming. As the Chelsea sage investigated the philosophy of clothes, so
Mr. Ashby-Sterry has set himself to discover the poetry of petticoats,
and seems to find much consolation in the thought that, though art is
long, skirts are worn short. He is the only pedlar who has climbed
Parnassus since Autolycus sang of
Lawn as white as driven snow,
'Cypress black as e'er was crow,
and his details are as amazing as his diminutives. He is capable of
penning a canto to a crinoline, and has a pathetic monody on a
mackintosh. He sings of pretty puckers and pliant pleats, and is
eloquent on frills, frocks and chemisettes. The latest French fashions
stir him to a fine frenzy, and the sight of a pair of Balmoral boots
thrills him with absolute ecstasy. He writes rondels on ribbons, lyrics
on linen and lace, and his most ambitious ode is addressed to a Tomboy in
Trouserettes! Yet his verse is often dainty and delicate, and many of
his poems are full of sweet and pretty conceits. Indeed, of the Thames
at summer time he writes so charmingly, and with such felicitous grace of
epithet, that we cannot but regret that he has chosen to make himself the
Poet of Petticoats and the Troubadour of Trouserettes.
(1) Carols from the Coal-Fields, and Other Songs and Ballads. By Joseph
Skipsey. (Walter Scott.)
(2) Sketches in Prose and Verse. By F. B. Doveton. (Sampson Low,
Marston and Co.)
(3) The Lazy Minstrel. By J. Ashby-Sterry. (Fisher Unwin.)
A NEW CALENDAR
(Pall Mall Gazette, February 17, 1887.)
Most modern calendars mar the sweet simplicity of our lives by reminding
us that each day that passes is the anniversary of some perfectly
uninteresting event. Their compilers display a degraded passion for
chronicling small beer, and rake out the dust-heap of history in an
ardent search after rubbish. Mr. Walter Scott, however, has made a new
departure and has published a calendar in which every day of the year is
made beautiful for us by means of an elegant extract from the poems of
Mr. Alfred Austin. This, undoubtedly, is a step in the right direction.
It is true that such aphorisms as
Graves are a _mother's dimples_
When we complain,
or
The primrose wears a constant smile,
And captive takes the heart,
can hardly be said to belong to the very highest order of poetry, still,
they are preferable, on the whole, to the date of Hannah More's birth, or
of the burning down of Exeter Change, or of the opening of the Great
Exhibition; and though it would be dangerous to make calendars the basis
of Culture, we should all be much improved if we began each day with a
fine passage of English poetry. How far this desirable result can be
attained by a use of the volume now before us is, perhaps, open to
question, but it must be admitted that its anonymous compiler has done
his work very conscientiously, nor will we quarrel with him for the fact
that he constantly repeats the same quotation twice over. No doubt it
was difficult to find in Mr. Austin's work three hundred and sixty-five
different passages really worthy of insertion in an almanac, and,
besides, our climate has so degenerated of late that there is no reason
at all why a motto perfectly suitable for February should not be equally
appropriate when August has set in with its usual severity. For the
misprints there is less excuse. Even the most uninteresting poet cannot
survive bad editing.