Considerations on the Decline of Italian Art
THOSE who know the Italians will see no sign of decay about them. They
are the quickest witted people in the world, and at the same time have
much more of the old Roman steadiness than they are generally credited
with. Not only is there no sign of degeneration, but, as regards
practical matters, there is every sign of health and vigorous
development. The North Italians are more like Englishmen, both in body
and mind, than any other people whom I know; I am continually meeting
Italians whom I should take for Englishmen if I did not know their
nationality. They have all our strong points, but they have more grace
and elasticity of mind than we have.
Priggishness is the sin which doth most easily beset middle-class and
so-called educated Englishmen: we call it purity and culture, but it does
not much matter what we call it. It is the almost inevitable outcome of
a university education, and will last as long as Oxford and Cambridge do,
but not much longer.
Lord Beaconsfield sent Lothair to Oxford; it is with great pleasure that
I see he did not send Endymion. My friend Jones called my attention to
this, and we noted that the growth observable throughout Lord
Beaconsfield’s life was continued to the end. He was one of those who,
no matter how long he lived, would have been always growing: this is what
makes his later novels so much better than those of Thackeray or Dickens.
There was something of the child about him to the last. Earnestness was
his greatest danger, but if he did not quite overcome it (as who indeed
can? It is the last enemy that shall be subdued), he managed to veil it
with a fair amount of success. As for Endymion, of course if Lord
Beaconsfield had thought Oxford would be good for him, he could, as Jones
pointed out to me, just as well have killed Mr. Ferrars a year or two
later. We feel satisfied, therefore, that Endymion’s exclusion from a
university was carefully considered, and are glad.
I will not say that priggishness is absolutely unknown among the North
Italians; sometimes one comes upon a young Italian who wants to learn
German, but not often. Priggism, or whatever the substantive is, is as
essentially a Teutonic vice as holiness is a Semitic characteristic; and
if an Italian happens to be a prig, he will, like Tacitus, invariably
show a hankering after German institutions. The idea, however, that the
Italians were ever a finer people than they are now, will not pass muster
with those who know them.
At the same time, there can be no doubt that modern Italian art is in
many respects as bad as it was once good. I will confine myself to
painting only. The modern Italian painters, with very few exceptions,
paint as badly as we do, or even worse, and their motives are as poor as
is their painting. At an exhibition of modern Italian pictures, I
generally feel that there is hardly a picture on the walls but is a
sham—that is to say, painted not from love of this particular subject and
an irresistible desire to paint it, but from a wish to paint an academy
picture, and win money or applause.
The same holds good in England, and in all other countries that I know
of. There is very little tolerable painting anywhere. In some kinds,
indeed, of black and white work the present age is strong. The
illustrations to “Punch,” for example, are often as good as anything that
can be imagined. We know of nothing like them in any past age or
country. This is the one kind of art—and it is a very good one—in which
we excel as distinctly as the age of Phidias excelled in sculpture.
Leonardo da Vinci would never have succeeded in getting his drawings
accepted at 85 Fleet Street, any more than one of the artists on the
staff of “Punch” could paint a fresco which should hold its own against
Da Vinci’s Last Supper. Michael Angelo again and Titian would have
failed disastrously at modern illustration. They had no more sense of
humour than a Hebrew prophet; they had no eye for the more trivial side
of anything round about them. This aspect went in at one eye and out at
the other—and they lost more than ever poor Peter Bell lost in the matter
of primroses. I never can see what there was to find fault with in that
young man.
Fancy a street-Arab by Michael Angelo. Fancy even the result which would
have ensued if he had tried to put the figures into the illustrations of
this book. I should have been very sorry to let him try his hand at it.
To him a priest chucking a small boy under the chin was simply
non-existent. He did not care for it, and had therefore no eye for it.
If the reader will turn to the copy of a fresco of St. Christopher on p.
209, he will see the conventional treatment of the rocks on either side
the saint. This was the best thing the artist could do, and probably
cost him no little trouble. Yet there were rocks all around him—little,
in fact, else than rock in those days; and the artist could have drawn
them well enough if it had occurred to him to try and do so. If he could
draw St. Christopher, he could have drawn a rock; but he had an interest
in the one, and saw nothing in the other which made him think it worth
while to pay attention to it. What rocks were to him, the common
occurrences of everyday life were to those who are generally held to be
the giants of painting. The result of this neglect to kiss the soil—of
this attempt to be always soaring—is that these giants are for the most
part now very uninteresting, while the smaller men who preceded them grow
fresher and more delightful yearly. It was not so with Handel and
Shakespeare. Handel’s
“Ploughman near at hand, whistling o’er the furrowed land,”
is intensely sympathetic, and his humour is admirable whenever he has
occasion for it.
Leonardo da Vinci is the only one of the giant Italian masters who ever
tried to be humorous, and he failed completely: so, indeed, must any one
if he tries to be humorous. We do not want this; we only want them not
to shut their eyes to by-play when it comes in their way, and if they are
giving us an account of what they have seen, to tell us something about
this too. I believe the older the world grows, the better it enjoys a
joke. The mediæval joke generally was a heavy, lumbering old thing, only
a little better than the classical one. Perhaps in those days life was
harder than it is now, and people if they looked at it at all closely
dwelt upon its soberer side. Certainly in humorous art, we may claim to
be not only _principes_, but _facile principes_. Nevertheless, the
Italian comic journals are, some of them, admirably illustrated, though
in a style quite different from our own; sometimes, also, they are
beautifully coloured.
As regards painting, the last rays of the sunset of genuine art are to be
found in the votive pictures at Locarno or Oropa, and in many a wayside
chapel. In these, religious art still lingers as a living language,
however rudely spoken. In these alone is the story told, not as in the
Latin and Greek verses of the scholar, who thinks he has succeeded best
when he has most concealed his natural manner of expressing himself, but
by one who knows what he wants to say, and says it in his mother-tongue,
shortly, and without caring whether or not his words are in accordance
with academic rules. I regret to see photography being introduced for
votive purposes, and also to detect in some places a disposition on the
part of the authorities to be a little ashamed of these pictures and to
place them rather out of sight.
[Picture: Paradiso! Paradiso!]
Sometimes in a little country village, as at Doera near Mesocco, there is
a modern fresco on a chapel in which the old spirit appears, with its
absolute indifference as to whether it was ridiculous or no, but such
examples are rare.
Sometimes, again, I have even thought I have detected a ray of sunset
upon a milkman’s window-blind in London, and once upon an undertaker’s,
but it was too faint a ray to read by. The best thing of the kind that I
have seen in London is the picture of the lady who is cleaning knives
with Mr. Spong’s patent knife-cleaner, in his shop window nearly opposite
Day & Martin’s in Holborn. It falls a long way short, however, of a good
Italian votive picture: but it has the advantage of moving.
I knew of a little girl once, rather less than four years old, whose
uncle had promised to take her for a drive in a carriage with him, and
had failed to do so. The child was found soon afterwards on the stairs
weeping, and being asked what was the matter, replied, “Mans is all
alike.” This is Giottesque. I often think of it as I look upon Italian
votive pictures. The meaning is so sound in spite of the expression
being so defective—if, indeed, expression can be defective when it has so
well conveyed the meaning.
I knew, again, an old lady whose education had been neglected in her
youth. She came into a large fortune, and at some forty years of age put
herself under the best masters. She once said to me as follows, speaking
very slowly and allowing a long time between each part of the
sentence;—“You see,” she said, “the world, and all that it contains, is
wrapped up in such curious forms, that it is only by a knowledge of human
nature, that we can rightly tell what to say, to do, or to admire.” I
copied the sentence into my notebook immediately on taking my leave. It
is like an academy picture.
But to return to the Italians. The question is, how has the deplorable
falling-off in Italian painting been caused? And by doing what may we
again get Bellinis and Andrea Mantegnas as in old time? The fault does
not lie in any want of raw material: the drawings I have already given
prove this. Nor, again, does it lie in want of taking pains. The modern
Italian painter frets himself to the full as much as his predecessor
did—if the truth were known, probably a great deal more. It does not lie
in want of schooling or art education. For the last three hundred years,
ever since the Carracci opened their academy at Bologna, there has been
no lack of art education in Italy. Curiously enough, the date of the
opening of the Bolognese Academy coincides as nearly as may be with the
complete decadence of Italian painting.
[Picture: By an Italian Schoolboy]
This is an example of the way in which Italian boys begin their art
education now. The drawing which I reproduce here was given me by the
eminent sculptor, Professor Vela, as the work of a lad of twelve years
old, and as doing credit alike to the school where the lad was taught and
to the pupil himself. {147}
So it undoubtedly does. It shows as plainly the receptiveness and
docility of the modern Italian, as the illustrations given above show his
freshness and naïveté when left to himself. The drawing is just such as
we try to get our own young people to do, and few English elementary
schools in a small country town would succeed in turning out so good a
one. I have nothing, therefore, but praise both for the pupil and the
teacher; but about the system which makes such teachers and such pupils
commendable, I am more sceptical. That system trains boys to study other
people’s works rather than nature, and, as Leonardo da Vinci so well
says, it makes them nature’s grandchildren and not her children. The boy
who did the drawing given above is not likely to produce good work in
later life. He has been taught to see nature with an old man’s eyes at
once, without going through the embryonic stages. He has never said his
“mans is all alike,” and by twenty will be painting like my old friend’s
long academic sentence. All his individuality has been crushed out of
him.
I will now give a reproduction of the frontispiece to Avogadro’s work on
the sanctuary of S. Michele, from which I have already quoted; it is a
very pretty and effective piece of work, but those who are good enough to
turn back to p. 93, and to believe that I have drawn carefully, will see
how disappointing Avogadro’s frontispiece must be to those who hold, as
most of us will, that a draughtsman’s first business is to put down what
he sees, and to let prettiness take care of itself. The main features,
indeed, can still be traced, but they have become as transformed and
lifeless as rudimentary organs. Such a frontispiece, however, is the
almost inevitable consequence of the system of training that will make
boys of twelve do drawings like the one given on p. 147.
If half a dozen young Italians could be got together with a taste for
drawing like that shown by the authors of the sketches on pp. 136, 137,
138; if they had power to add to their number; if they were allowed to
see paintings and drawings done up to the year A.D. 1510, and votive
pictures and the comic papers; if they were left with no other assistance
than this, absolutely free to please themselves, and could be persuaded
not to try and please any one else, I believe that in fifty years we
should have all that was ever done repeated with fresh naïveté, and as
much more delightfully than even by the best old masters, as these are
more delightful than anything we know of in classic painting. The young
plants keep growing up abundantly every day—look at Bastianini, dead not
ten years since—but they are browsed down by the academies. I remember
there came out a book many years ago with the title, “What becomes of all
the clever little children?” I never saw the book, but the title is
pertinent.
[Picture: Avogadro’s View of S. Michele]
Any man who can write, can draw to a not inconsiderable extent. Look at
the Bayeux tapestry; yet Matilda probably never had a drawing lesson in
her life. See how well prisoner after prisoner in the Tower of London
has cut this or that out in the stone of his prison wall, without, in all
probability, having ever tried his hand at drawing before. Look at my
friend Jones, who has several illustrations in this book. The first year
he went abroad with me he could hardly draw at all. He was no year away
from England more than three weeks. How did he learn? On the old
principle, if I am not mistaken. The old principle was for a man to be
doing something which he was pretty strongly bent on doing, and to get a
much younger one to help him. The younger paid nothing for instruction,
but the elder took the work, as long as the relation of master and pupil
existed between them. I, then, was making illustrations for this book,
and got Jones to help me. I let him see what I was doing, and derive an
idea of the sort of thing I wanted, and then left him alone—beyond giving
him the same kind of small criticism that I expected from himself—but I
appropriated his work. That is the way to teach, and the result was that
in an incredibly short time Jones could draw. The taking the work is a
_sine quâ non_. If I had not been going to have his work, Jones, in
spite of all his quickness, would probably have been rather slower in
learning to draw. Being paid in money is nothing like so good.
This is the system of apprenticeship _versus_ the academic system. The
academic system consists in giving people the rules for doing things.
The apprenticeship system consists in letting them do it, with just a
trifle of supervision. “For all a rhetorician’s rules,” says my great
namesake, “teach nothing, but to name his tools;” and academic rules
generally are much the same as the rhetorician’s. Some men can pass
through academies unscathed, but they are very few, and in the main the
academic influence is a baleful one, whether exerted in a university or a
school. While young men at universities are being prepared for their
entry into life, their rivals have already entered it. The most
university and examination ridden people in the world are the Chinese,
and they are the least progressive.
Men should learn to draw as they learn conveyancing: they should go into
a painter’s studio and paint on his pictures. I am told that half the
conveyances in the country are drawn by pupils; there is no more mystery
about painting than about conveyancing—not half in fact, I should think,
so much. One may ask, How can the beginner paint, or draw conveyances,
till he has learnt how to do so? The answer is, How can he learn,
without at any rate trying to do? If he likes his subject, he will try:
if he tries, he will soon succeed in doing something which shall open a
door. It does not matter what a man does; so long as he does it with the
attention which affection engenders, he will come to see his way to
something else. After long waiting he will certainly find one door open,
and go through it. He will say to himself that he can never find
another. He has found this, more by luck than cunning, but now he is
done. Yet by and by he will see that there is _one_ more small,
unimportant door which he had overlooked, and he proceeds through this
too. If he remains now for a long while and sees no other, do not let
him fret; doors are like the kingdom of heaven, they come not by
observation, least of all do they come by forcing: let them just go on
doing what comes nearest, but doing it attentively, and a great wide door
will one day spring into existence where there had been no sign of one
but a little time previously. Only let him be always doing something,
and let him cross himself now and again, for belief in the wondrous
efficacy of crosses and crossing is the corner-stone of the creed of the
evolutionist. Then after years—but not probably till after a great
many—doors will open up all round, so many and so wide that the
difficulty will not be to find a door, but rather to obtain the means of
even hurriedly surveying a portion of those that stand invitingly open.
I know that just as good a case can be made out for the other side. It
may be said as truly that unless a student is incessantly on the watch
for doors he will never see them, and that unless he is incessantly
pressing forward to the kingdom of heaven he will never find it—so that
the kingdom does come by observation. It is with this as with everything
else—there must be a harmonious fusing of two principles which are in
flat contradiction to one another.
The question whether it is better to abide quiet and take advantage of
opportunities that come, or to go further afield in search of them, is
one of the oldest which living beings have had to deal with. It was on
this that the first great schism or heresy arose in what was heretofore
the catholic faith of protoplasm. The schism still lasts, and has
resulted in two great sects—animals and plants. The opinion that it is
better to go in search of prey is formulated in animals; the other—that
it is better on the whole to stay at home and profit by what comes—in
plants. Some intermediate forms still record to us the long struggle
during which the schism was not yet complete.
If I may be pardoned for pursuing this digression further, I would say
that it is the plants and not we who are the heretics. There can be no
question about this; we are perfectly justified, therefore, in devouring
them. Ours is the original and orthodox belief, for protoplasm is much
more animal than vegetable; it is much more true to say that plants have
descended from animals than animals from plants. Nevertheless, like many
other heretics, plants have thriven very fairly well. There are a great
many of them, and as regards beauty, if not wit—of a limited kind indeed,
but still wit—it is hard to say that the animal kingdom has the
advantage. The views of plants are sadly narrow; all dissenters are
narrow-minded; but within their own bounds they know the details of their
business sufficiently well—as well as though they kept the most
nicely-balanced system of accounts to show them their position. They are
eaten, it is true; to eat them is our bigoted and intolerant way of
trying to convert them: eating is only a violent mode of proselytising or
converting; and we do convert them—to good animal substance, of our own
way of thinking. But then, animals are eaten too. They convert one
another, almost as much as they convert plants. And an animal is no
sooner dead than a plant will convert it back again. It is obvious,
however, that no schism could have been so long successful, without
having a good deal to say for itself.
Neither party has been quite consistent. Who ever is or can be? Every
extreme—every opinion carried to its logical end—will prove to be an
absurdity. Plants throw out roots and boughs and leaves; this is a kind
of locomotion; and as Dr. Erasmus Darwin long since pointed out, they do
sometimes approach nearly to what may be called travelling; a man of
consistent character will never look at a bough, a root, or a tendril
without regarding it as a melancholy and unprincipled compromise. On the
other hand, many animals are sessile, and some singularly successful
genera, as spiders, are in the main liers-in-wait. It may appear,
however, on the whole, like reopening a settled question to uphold the
principle of being busy and attentive over a small area, rather than
going to and fro over a larger one, for a mammal like man, but I think
most readers will be with me in thinking that, at any rate as regards art
and literature, it is he who does his small immediate work most carefully
who will find doors open most certainly to him, that will conduct him
into the richest chambers.
Many years ago, in New Zealand, I used sometimes to accompany a dray and
team of bullocks who would have to be turned loose at night that they
might feed. There were no hedges or fences then, so sometimes I could
not find my team in the morning, and had no clue to the direction in
which they had gone. At first I used to try and throw my soul into the
bullocks’ souls, so as to divine if possible what they would be likely to
have done, and would then ride off ten miles in the wrong direction.
People used in those days to lose their bullocks sometimes for a week or
fortnight—when they perhaps were all the time hiding in a gully hard by
the place where they were turned out. After some time I changed my
tactics. On losing my bullocks I would go to the nearest accommodation
house, and stand occasional drinks to travellers. Some one would ere
long, as a general rule, turn up who had seen the bullocks. This case
does not go quite on all fours with what I have been saying above,
inasmuch as I was not very industrious in my limited area; but the
standing drinks and inquiring was being as industrious as the
circumstances would allow.
To return, universities and academies are an obstacle to the finding of
doors in later life; partly because they push their young men too fast
through doorways that the universities have provided, and so discourage
the habit of being on the look-out for others; and partly because they do
not take pains enough to make sure that their doors are _bonâ fide_ ones.
If, to change the metaphor, an academy has taken a bad shilling, it is
seldom very scrupulous about trying to pass it on. It will stick to it
that the shilling is a good one as long as the police will let it. I was
very happy at Cambridge; when I left it I thought I never again could be
so happy anywhere else; I shall ever retain a most kindly recollection
both of Cambridge and of the school where I passed my boyhood; but I
feel, as I think most others must in middle life, that I have spent as
much of my maturer years in unlearning as in learning.
The proper course is for a boy to begin the practical business of life
many years earlier than he now commonly does. He should begin at the
very bottom of a profession; if possible of one which his family has
pursued before him—for the professions will assuredly one day become
hereditary. The ideal railway director will have begun at fourteen as a
railway porter. He need not be a porter for more than a week or ten
days, any more than he need have been a tadpole more than a short time;
but he should take a turn in practice, though briefly, at each of the
lower branches in the profession. The painter should do just the same.
He should begin by setting his employer’s palette and cleaning his
brushes. As for the good side of universities, the proper preservative
of this is to be found in the club.
If, then, we are to have a renaissance of art, there must be a complete
standing aloof from the academic system. That system has had time
enough. Where and who are its men? Can it point to one painter who can
hold his own with the men of, say, from 1450 to 1550? Academies will
bring out men who can paint hair very like hair, and eyes very like eyes,
but this is not enough. This is grammar and deportment; we want it and a
kindly nature, and these cannot be got from academies. As far as mere
_technique_ is concerned, almost every one now can paint as well as is in
the least desirable. The same _mutatis mutandis_ holds good with writing
as with painting. We want less word-painting and fine phrases, and more
observation at first-hand. Let us have a periodical illustrated by
people who cannot draw, and written by people who cannot write (perhaps,
however, after all, we have some), but who look and think for themselves,
and express themselves just as they please,—and this we certainly have
not. Every contributor should be at once turned out if he or she is
generally believed to have tried to do something which he or she did not
care about trying to do, and anything should be admitted which is the
outcome of a genuine liking. People are always good company when they
are doing what they really enjoy. A cat is good company when it is
purring, or a dog when it is wagging its tail.
The sketching clubs up and down the country might form the nucleus of
such a society, provided all professional men were rigorously excluded.
As for the old masters, the better plan would be never even to look at
one of them, and to consign Raffaelle, along with Plato, Marcus Aurelius
Antoninus, Dante, Goethe, and two others, neither of them Englishmen, to
limbo, as the Seven Humbugs of Christendom.
While we are about it, let us leave off talking about “art for art’s
sake.” Who is art that it should have a sake? A work of art should be
produced for the pleasure it gives the producer, and the pleasure he
thinks it will give to a few of whom he is fond; but neither money nor
people whom he does not know personally should be thought of. Of course
such a society as I have proposed would not remain incorrupt long.
“Everything that grows, holds in perfection but a little moment.” The
members would try to imitate professional men in spite of their rules,
or, if they escaped this and after a while got to paint well, they would
become dogmatic, and a rebellion against their authority would be as
necessary ere long as it was against that of their predecessors: but the
balance on the whole would be to the good.
Professional men should be excluded, if for no other reason yet for this,
that they know too much for the beginner to be _en rapport_ with them.
It is the beginner who can help the beginner, as it is the child who is
the most instructive companion for another child. The beginner can
understand the beginner, but the cross between him and the proficient
performer is too wide for fertility. It savours of impatience, and is in
flat contradiction to the first principles of biology. It does a
beginner positive harm to look at the masterpieces of the great
executionists, such as Rembrandt or Turner.
If one is climbing a very high mountain which will tax all one’s
strength, nothing fatigues so much as casting upward glances to the top,
nothing encourages so much as casting downward glances. The top seems
never to draw nearer; the parts that we have passed retreat rapidly. Let
a water-colour student go and see the drawing by Turner, in the basement
of our National Gallery, dated 1787. This is the sort of thing for him,
not to copy, but to look at for a minute or two now and again. It will
show him nothing about painting, but it may serve to teach him not to
overtax his strength, and will prove to him that the greatest masters in
painting, as in everything else, begin by doing work which is no way
superior to that of their neighbours. A collection of the earliest known
works of the greatest men would be much more useful to the student than
any number of their maturer works, for it would show him that he need not
worry himself because his work does not look clever, or as silly people
say, “show power.”
The secrets of success are affection for the pursuit chosen, a flat
refusal to be hurried or to pass anything as understood which is not
understood, and an obstinacy of character which shall make the student’s
friends find it less trouble to let him have his own way than to bend him
into theirs. Our schools and academies or universities are covertly, but
essentially, radical institutions and abhorrent to the genius of
Conservatism. Their sin is the true radical sin of being in too great a
hurry, and of believing in short cuts too soon. But it must be
remembered that this proposition, like every other, wants tempering with
a slight infusion of its direct opposite.
I said in an early part of this book that the best test to know whether
or no one likes a picture is to ask one’s self whether one would like to
look at it if one was quite sure one was alone. The best test for a
painter as to whether he likes painting his picture is to ask himself
whether he should like to paint it if he was quite sure that no one
except himself, and the few of whom he was very fond, would ever see it.
If he can answer this question in the affirmative, he is all right; if he
cannot, he is all wrong. I will close these remarks with an illustration
which will show how nearly we can approach the early Florentines even
now—when nobody is looking at us. I do not know who Mr. Pollard is. I
never heard of him till I came across a cheap lithograph of his Funeral
of Tom Moody in the parlour of a village inn. I should not think he ever
was an R.A., but he has approached as nearly as the difference between
the geniuses of the two countries will allow, to the spirit of the
painters who painted in the Campo Santo at Pisa. Look, again, at
Garrard, at the close of the last century. We generally succeed with
sporting or quasi-sporting subjects, and our cheap coloured coaching and
hunting subjects are almost always good, and often very good indeed. We
like these things: therefore we observe them; therefore we soon become
able to express them. Historical and costume pictures we have no genuine
love for; we do not, therefore, go beyond repeating commonplaces
concerning them.
[Picture: Funeral of Tom Moody]
I must reserve other remarks upon this subject for another occasion.