OF THE REAL NATURE OF GREATNESS OF STYLE.
Sec. 1. I doubt not that the reader was ill-satisfied with the conclusion
arrived at in the last chapter. That "great art" is art which
represents what is beautiful and good, may not seem a very profound
discovery; and the main question may be thought to have been all the
time lost sight of, namely, "What is beautiful, and what is good?" No;
those are not the main, at least not the first questions; on the
contrary, our subject becomes at once opened and simplified as soon as
we have left those the _only_ questions. For observe, our present task,
according to our old plan, is merely to investigate the relative
degrees of the _beautiful_ in the art of different masters; and it is
an encouragement to be convinced, first of all, that what is lovely
will also be great, and what is pleasing, noble. Nor is the conclusion
so much a matter of course as it at first appears, for, surprising as
the statement may seem, all the confusion into which Reynolds has
plunged both himself and his readers, in the essay we have been
examining, results primarily from a doubt in his own mind _as to the
existence of beauty at all_. In the next paper I alluded to, No. 82
(which needs not, however, to be examined at so great length), he
calmly attributes the whole influence of beauty to custom, saying, that
"he has no doubt, if we were more used to deformity than to beauty,
deformity would then lose the idea now annexed to it, and take that of
beauty; as if the whole world shall agree that Yes and No should change
their meanings. Yes would then deny, and No would affirm!"
Sec. 2. The world does, indeed, succeed--oftener than is, perhaps,
altogether well for the world--in making Yes mean No, and No mean
Yes.[5] But the world has never succeeded, nor ever will, in making
itself delight in black clouds more than in blue sky, or love the dark
earth better than the rose that grows from it. Happily for mankind,
beauty and ugliness are as positive in their nature as physical pain
and pleasure, as light and darkness, or as life and death; and, though
they may be denied or misunderstood in many fantastic ways, the most
subtle reasoner will at last find that color and sweetness are still
attractive to him, and that no logic will enable him to think the
rainbow sombre, or the violet scentless. But the theory that beauty was
merely a result of custom was very common in Johnson's time. Goldsmith
has, I think, expressed it with more force and wit than any other
writer, in various passages of the Citizen of the World. And it was,
indeed, a curious retribution of the folly of the world of art, which
for some three centuries had given itself recklessly to the pursuit of
beauty, that at last it should be led to deny the very existence of
what it had so morbidly and passionately sought. It was as if a child
should leave its home to pursue the rainbow, and then, breathless and
hopeless, declare that it did not exist. Nor is the lesson less useful
which may be gained in observing the adoption of such a theory by
Reynolds himself. It shows how completely an artist may be unconscious
of the principles of his own work, and how he may be led by instinct to
_do_ all that is right, while he is misled by false logic to _say_ all
that is wrong. For nearly every word that Reynolds wrote was contrary
to his own practice; he seems to have been born to teach all error by
his precept, and all excellence by his example; he enforced with his
lips generalization and idealism, while with his pencil he was tracing
the patterns of the dresses of the belles of his day; he exhorted his
pupils to attend only to the invariable, while he himself was occupied
in distinguishing every variation of womanly temper; and he denied the
existence of the beautiful, at the same instant that he arrested it as
it passed, and perpetuated it for ever.
Sec. 3. But we must not quit the subject here. However inconsistently or
dimly expressed, there is, indeed, some truth in that commonly
accepted distinction between high and low art. That a thing should be
beautiful is not enough; there is, as we said in the outset, a higher
and lower range of beauty, and some ground for separating into various
and unequal ranks painters who have, nevertheless, each in his
several way, represented something that was beautiful or good.
Nor, if we would, can we get rid of this conviction. We have at all
times some instinctive sense that the function of one painter is
greater than that of another, even supposing each equally successful
in his own way; and we feel that, if it were possible to conquer
prejudice, and do away with the iniquities of personal feeling, and
the insufficiencies of limited knowledge, we should all agree in this
estimate, and be able to place each painter in his right rank,
measuring them by a true scale of nobleness. We feel that the men in
the higher classes of the scale would be, in the full sense of the
word, Great--men whom one would give much to see the faces of but for
an instant; and that those in the lower classes of the scale (though
none were admitted but who had true merit of some kind) would be very
small men, not greatly exciting either reverence or curiosity. And
with this fixed instinct in our minds, we permit our teachers daily to
exhort their pupils to the cultivation of "great art"--neither they
nor we having any very clear notion as to what the greatness consists
in: but sometimes inclining to think it must depend on the space of
the canvas, and that art on a scale of 6 feet by 10 is something
spiritually separated from that on a scale of 3 feet by 5;--sometimes
holding it to consist in painting the nude body, rather than the body
decently clothed;--sometimes being convinced that it is connected with
the study of past history, and that the art is only great which
represents what the painter never saw, and about which he knows
nothing;-and sometimes being firmly persuaded that it consists in
generally finding fault with, and endeavoring to mend, whatsoever the
Divine Wisdom has made. All which various errors, having yet some
motes and atoms of truth in the make of each of them, deserve some
attentive analysis, for they come under that general law,--that "the
corruption of the best is the worst." There are not _worse_ errors
going than these four; and yet the truth they contain, and the
instinct which urges many to preach them, are at the root of all
healthy growth in art. We ruin one young painter after another by
telling him to follow great art, without knowing, ourselves, what
greatness is; and yet the feeling that it verily _is_ something, and
that there are depths and breadths, shallows and narrows, in the
matter, is all that we have to look to, if we would ever make our art
serviceable to ourselves or others. To follow art for the sake of
being a great man, and therefore to cast about continually for some
means of achieving position or attracting admiration, is the surest
way of ending in total extinction. And yet it is only by honest
reverence for art itself, and by great self-respect in the practice of
it, that it can be rescued from dilettantism, raised to approved
honorableness, and brought to the proper work it has to accomplish in
the service of man.
Sec. 4. Let us therefore look into the facts of the thing, not with any
metaphysical, or otherwise vain and troublesome effort at acuteness,
but in a plain way; for the facts themselves are plain enough, and
may be plainly stated, only the difficulty is that out of these
facts, right and left, the different forms of misapprehension branch
into grievous complexity, and branch so far and wide, that if once
we try to follow them, they will lead us quite from our mark into
other separate, though not less interesting discussions. The best
way will be, therefore, I think, to sketch out at once in this
chapter, the different characters which really constitute
"greatness" of style, and to indicate the principal directions of
the outbranching misapprehensions of them; then, in the succeeding
chapters, to take up in succession those which need more talk about
them, and follow out at leisure whatever inquiries they may suggest.
Sec. 5. I. CHOICE OF NOBLE SUBJECT.--Greatness of style consists, then:
first, in the habitual choice of subjects of thought which involve wide
interests and profound passions, as opposed to those which involve
narrow interests and slight passions. The style is greater or less in
exact proportion to the nobleness of the interests and passions
involved in the subject. The habitual choice of sacred subjects, such
as the Nativity, Transfiguration, Crucifixion (if the choice be
sincere), implies that the painter has a natural disposition to dwell
on the highest thoughts of which humanity is capable; it constitutes
him so far forth a painter of the highest order, as, for instance,
Leonardo, in his painting of the Last Supper: he who delights in
representing the acts or meditations of great men, as, for instance,
Raphael painting the School of Athens, is, so far forth, a painter of
the second order: he who represents the passions and events of ordinary
life, of the third. And in this ordinary life, he who represents deep
thoughts and sorrows, as, for instance, Hunt, in his Claudio and
Isabella, and such other works, is of the highest rank in his sphere;
and he who represents the slight malignities and passions of the
drawingroom, as, for instance, Leslie, of the second rank: he who
represents the sports of boys or simplicities of clowns, as Webster or
Teniers, of the third rank; and he who represents brutalities and vices
(for delight in them, and not for rebuke of them), of no rank at all,
or rather of a negative rank, holding a certain order in the abyss.
Sec. 6. The reader will, I hope, understand how much importance is to be
attached to the sentence in the first parenthesis, "if the choice be
sincere;" for choice of subject is, of course, only available as a
criterion of the rank of the painter, when it is made from the heart.
Indeed, in the lower orders of painting, the choice is always made
from such heart as the painter has; for his selection of the brawls of
peasants or sports of children can, of course, proceed only from the
fact that he has more sympathy with such brawls or pastimes than with
nobler subjects. But the choice of the higher kind of subjects is
often insincere; and may, therefore, afford no real criterion of the
painter's rank. The greater number of men who have lately painted
religious or heroic subjects have done so in mere ambition, because
they had been taught that it was a good thing to be a "high art"
painter; and the fact is that, in nine cases out of ten, the so-called
historical or "high-art" painter is a person infinitely inferior to
the painter of flowers or still life. He is, in modern times, nearly
always a man who has great vanity without pictorial capacity, and
differs from the landscape or fruit painter merely in misunderstanding
and over-estimating his own powers. He mistakes his vanity for
inspiration, his ambition for greatness of soul, and takes pleasure in
what he calls "the ideal," merely because he has neither humility nor
capacity enough to comprehend the real.
Sec. 7. But also observe, it is not enough even that the choice be
sincere. It must also be wise. It happens very often that a man of weak
intellect, sincerely desiring to do what is good and useful, will
devote himself to high art subjects because he thinks them the only
ones on which time and toil can be usefully spent, or, sometimes,
because they are really the only ones he has pleasure in contemplating.
But not having intellect enough to enter into the minds of truly great
men, or to imagine great events as they really happened, he cannot
become a great painter; he degrades the subjects he intended to honor,
and his work is more utterly thrown away, and his rank as an artist in
reality lower, than if he had devoted himself to the imitation of the
simplest objects of natural history. The works of Overbeck are a most
notable instance of this form of error.
Sec. 8. It must also be remembered, that in nearly all the great periods
of art the choice of subject has not been left to the painter. His
employer,--abbot, baron, or monarch,--determined for him whether he
should earn his bread by making cloisters bright with choirs of
saints, painting coats of arms on leaves of romances, or decorating
presence-chambers with complimentary mythology; and his own personal
feelings are ascertainable only by watching, in the themes assigned to
him, what are the points in which he seems to take most pleasure.
Thus, in the prolonged ranges of varied subjects with which Benozzo
Gozzoli decorated the cloisters of Pisa, it is easy to see that love
of simple domestic incident, sweet landscape, and glittering ornament,
prevails slightly over the solemn elements of religious feeling,
which, nevertheless, the spirit of the age instilled into him in such
measure as to form a very lovely and noble mind, though still one of
the second order. In the work of Orcagna, an intense solemnity and
energy in the sublimest groups of his figures, fading away as he
touches inferior subjects, indicates that his home was among the
archangels, and his rank among the first of the sons of men: while
Correggio, in the sidelong grace, artificial smiles, and purple
languors of his saints, indicates the inferior instinct which would
have guided his choice in quite other directions, had it not been for
the fashion of the age, and the need of the day.
Sec. 9. It will follow, of course, from the above considerations, that
the choice which characterises the school of high art is seen as
much in the treatment of a subject as in its selection, and that the
expression of the thoughts of the persons represented will always
be the first thing considered by the painter who worthily enters
that highest school. For the artist who sincerely chooses the
noblest subject will also choose chiefly to represent what makes
that subject noble, namely, the various heroism or other noble
emotions of the persons represented. If, instead of this, the artist
seeks only to make his picture agreeable by the composition of its
masses and colors, or by any other merely pictorial merit, as fine
drawing of limbs, it is evident, not only that any other subject
would have answered his purpose as well, but that he is unfit to
approach the subject he has chosen, because he cannot enter into its
deepest meaning, and therefore cannot in reality have chosen it for
that meaning. Nevertheless, while the expression is always to be the
first thing considered, all other merits must be added to the utmost
of the painter's power: for until he can both color and draw
beautifully he has no business to consider himself a painter at all,
far less to attempt the noblest subjects of painting; and, when he
has once possessed himself of these powers, he will naturally and
fitly employ them to deepen and perfect the impression made by the
sentiment of his subject.
The perfect unison of expression, as the painter's main purpose,
with the full and natural exertion of his pictorial power in the
details of the work, is found only in the old Pre-Raphaelite
periods, and in the modern Pre-Raphaelite school. In the works of
Giotto, Angelico, Orcagna, John Bellini, and one or two more, these
two conditions of high art are entirely fulfilled, so far as the
knowledge of those days enabled them to be fulfilled; and in the
modern Pre-Raphaelite school they are fulfilled nearly to the
uttermost. Hunt's Light of the World is, I believe, the most perfect
instance of expressional purpose with technical power, which the
world has yet produced.
Sec. 10. Now in the Post Raphaelite period of ancient art, and in the
spurious high art of modern times, two broad forms of error divide
the schools; the one consisting in (A) the superseding of expression
by technical excellence, and the other in (B) the superseding of
technical excellence by expression.
(A). Superseding expression by technical excellence.--This takes place
most frankly, and therefore most innocently, in the work of the
Venetians. They very nearly ignore expression altogether, directing
their aim exclusively to the rendering of external truths of color and
form. Paul Veronese will make the Magdalene wash the feet of Christ
with a countenance as absolutely unmoved as that of any ordinary
servant bringing a ewer to her master, and will introduce the supper
at Emmaus as a background to the portraits of two children playing
with a dog. Of the wrongness or rightness of such a proceeding we
shall reason in another place; at present we have to note it merely as
displacing the Venetian work from the highest or expressional rank of
art. But the error is generally made in a more subtle and dangerous
way. The artist deceives himself into the idea that he is doing all he
can to elevate his subject by treating it under rules of art,
introducing into it accurate science, and collecting for it the
beauties of (so-called) ideal form; whereas he may, in reality, be all
the while sacrificing his subject to his own vanity or pleasure, and
losing truth, nobleness, and impressiveness for the sake of delightful
lines or creditable pedantries.
Sec. 11. (B). Superseding technical excellence by expression.--This is
usually done under the influence of another kind of vanity. The
artist desires that men should think he has an elevated soul,
affects to despise the ordinary excellence of art, contemplates with
separated egotism the course of his own imaginations or sensations,
and refuses to look at the real facts round about him, in order that
he may adore at leisure the shadow of himself. He lives in an
element of what he calls tender emotions and lofty aspirations;
which are, in fact, nothing more than very ordinary weaknesses or
instincts, contemplated through a mist of pride. A large range of
modern German art comes under this head.
A more interesting and respectable form of this error is fallen into by
some truly earnest men, who, finding their powers not adequate to the
attainment of great artistical excellence, but adequate to rendering,
up to a certain point, the expression of the human countenance, devote
themselves to that object alone, abandoning effort in other directions,
and executing the accessaries of their pictures feebly or carelessly.
With these are associated another group of philosophical painters, who
suppose the artistical merits of other parts _adverse_ to the
expression, as drawing the spectator's attention away from it, and who
paint in grey color, and imperfect light and shade, by way of enforcing
the purity of their conceptions. Both these classes of conscientious
but narrow-minded artists labor under the same grievous mistake of
imagining that wilful fallacy can ever be either pardonable or helpful.
They forget that color, if used at all, must be either true or false,
and that what _they_ call chastity, dignity, and reserve, is, to the
eye of any person accustomed to nature, pure, bold, and impertinent
falsehood. It does not, in the eyes of any soundly minded man, exalt
the expression of a female face that the cheeks should be painted of
the color of clay, nor does it in the least enhance his reverence for a
saint to find the scenery around him deprived, by his presence, of
sunshine. It is an important consolation, however, to reflect that no
artist ever fell into any of these last three errors (under head B.)
who had really the capacity of becoming a great painter. No man ever
despised color who could produce it; and the error of these
sentimentalists and philosophers is not so much in the choice of their
manner of painting, as in supposing themselves capable of painting at
all. Some of them might have made efficient sculptors, but the greater
number had their mission in some other sphere than that of art, and
would have found, in works of practical charity, better employment for
their gentleness and sentimentalism, than in denying to human beauty
its color, and to natural scenery its light; in depriving heaven of its
blue, and earth of its bloom, valor of its glow, and modesty of its
blush.
Sec. 12. II. LOVE OF BEAUTY.--The second characteristic of the great
school of art is, that it introduces in the conception of its
subject as much beauty as is possible, consistently with truth.[6]
For instance, in any subject consisting of a number of figures, it
will make as many of those figures beautiful as the faithful
representation of humanity will admit. It will not deny the facts of
ugliness or decrepitude, or relative inferiority and superiority of
feature as necessarily manifested in a crowd, but it will, so far as
it is in its power, seek for and dwell upon the fairest forms, and
in all things insist on the beauty that is in them, not on the
ugliness. In this respect, schools of art become higher in exact
proportion to the degree in which they apprehend and love the
beautiful. Thus, Angelico, intensely loving all spiritual beauty,
will be of the highest rank; and Paul Veronese and Correggio,
intensely loving physical and corporeal beauty, of the second rank;
and Albert Durer, Rubens, and in general the Northern artists,
apparently insensible to beauty, and caring only for truth, whether
shapely or not, of the third rank; and Teniers and Salvator,
Caravaggio, and other such worshippers of the depraved, of no rank,
or, as we said before, of a certain order in the abyss.
Sec. 13. The corruption of the schools of high art, so far as this
particular quality is concerned, consists in the sacrifice of truth
to beauty. Great art dwells on all that is beautiful; but false art
omits or changes all that is ugly. Great art accepts Nature as she
is, but directs the eyes and thoughts to what is most perfect in
her; false art saves itself the trouble of direction by removing or
altering whatever it thinks objectionable. The evil results of which
proceeding are twofold.
[Sidenote: Sec. 14. Evil first,--that we lose the true _force_ of beauty.]
First. That beauty deprived of its proper foils and adjuncts ceases
to be enjoyed as beauty, just as light deprived of all shadow ceases
to be enjoyed as light. A white canvas cannot produce an effect of
sunshine; the painter must darken it in some places before he can
make it look luminous in others; nor can an uninterrupted succession
of beauty produce the true effect of beauty; it must be foiled by
inferiority before its own power can be developed. Nature has for
the most part mingled her inferior and nobler elements as she
mingles sunshine with shade, giving due use and influence to both,
and the painter who chooses to remove the shadow, perishes in the
burning desert he has created. The truly high and beautiful art of
Angelico is continually refreshed and strengthened by his frank
portraiture of the most ordinary features of his brother monks, and
of the recorded peculiarities of ungainly sanctity; but the modern
German and Raphaelesque schools lose all honor and nobleness in
barber-like admiration of handsome faces, and have, in fact, no real
faith except in straight noses and curled hair. Paul Veronese
opposes the dwarf to the soldier, and the negress to the queen;
Shakspere places Caliban beside Miranda, and Autolycus beside
Perdita; but the vulgar idealist withdraws his beauty to the safety
of the saloon, and his innocence to the seclusion of the cloister;
he pretends that he does this in delicacy of choice and purity of
sentiment, while in truth he has neither courage to front the
monster, nor wit enough to furnish the knave.
[Sidenote: Sec. 15. Evil second,--we lose the true _quantity_ of beauty.]
It is only by the habit of representing faithfully all things, that
we can truly learn what is beautiful and what is not. The ugliest
objects contain some element of beauty; and in all, it is an element
peculiar to themselves, which cannot be separated from their
ugliness, but must either be enjoyed together with it, or not at
all. The more a painter accepts nature as he finds it, the more
unexpected beauty he discovers in what he at first despised; but
once let him arrogate the right of rejection, and he will gradually
contract his circle of enjoyment, until what he supposed to be
nobleness of selection ends in narrowness of perception. Dwelling
perpetually upon one class of ideas, his art becomes at once
monstrous and morbid; until at last he cannot faithfully represent
even what he chooses to retain; his discrimination contracts into
darkness, and his fastidiousness fades into fatuity.
High art, therefore, consists neither in altering, nor in improving
nature; but in seeking throughout nature for "whatsoever things are
lovely, and whatsoever things are pure;" in loving these, in
displaying to the utmost of the painter's power such loveliness as
is in them, and directing the thoughts of others to them by winning
art, or gentle emphasis. Of the degree in which this can be done,
and in which it may be permitted to gather together, without
falsifying, the finest forms or thoughts, so as to create a sort of
perfect vision, we shall have to speak hereafter: at present, it is
enough to remember that art (_caeteris paribus_) is great in exact
proportion to the love of beauty shown by the painter, provided that
love of beauty forfeit no atom of truth.
Sec. 16. III. SINCERITY.--The next[7] characteristic of great art is that
it includes the largest possible quantity of Truth in the most perfect
possible harmony. If it were possible for art to give all the truths of
nature, it ought to do it. But this is not possible. Choice must always
be made of some facts which _can_ be represented, from among others
which must be passed by in silence, or even, in some respects,
misrepresented. The inferior artist chooses unimportant and scattered
truths; the great artist chooses the most necessary first, and
afterwards the most consistent with these, so as to obtain the greatest
possible and most harmonious _sum_. For instance, Rembrandt always
chooses to represent the exact force with which the light on the most
illumined part of an object is opposed to its obscurer portions. In
order to obtain this, in most cases, not very important truth, he
sacrifices the light and color of five sixths of his picture; and the
expression of every character of objects which depends on tenderness of
shape or tint. But he obtains his single truth, and what picturesque
and forcible expression is dependent upon it, with magnificent skill
and subtlety. Veronese, on the contrary, chooses to represent the great
relations of visible things to each other, to the heaven above, and to
the earth beneath them. He holds it more important to show how a figure
stands relieved from delicate air, or marble wall; how as a red, or
purple, or white figure, it separates itself, in clear discernibility,
from things not red, nor purple, nor white; how infinite daylight
shines round it; how innumerable veils of faint shadow invest it; how
its blackness and darkness are, in the excess of their nature, just as
limited and local as its intensity of light: all this, I say, he feels
to be more important than showing merely the exact _measure_ of the
spark of sunshine that gleams on a dagger-hilt, or glows on a jewel.
All this, moreover, he feels to be harmonious,--capable of being joined
in one great system of spacious truth. And with inevitable
watchfulness, inestimable subtlety, he unites all this in tenderest
balance, noting in each hair's-breadth of color, not merely what its
rightness or wrongness is in itself, but what its relation is to every
other on his canvas; restraining, for truth's sake, his exhaustless
energy, reining back, for truth's sake, his fiery strength; veiling,
before truth, the vanity of brightness; penetrating, for truth, the
discouragement of gloom; ruling his restless invention with a rod of
iron; pardoning no error, no thoughtlessness, no forgetfulness; and
subduing all his powers, impulses, and imaginations, to the arbitrament
of a merciless justice, and the obedience of an incorruptible verity.
[Sidenote: Sec. 17. Corollary 1st: great art is generally distinct.]
I give this instance with respect to color and shade; but, in the whole
field of art, the difference between the great and inferior artists is
of the same kind, and may be determined at once by the question, which
of them conveys the largest sum of truth? It follows from this
principle, that in general all _great_ drawing is _distinct_ drawing;
for truths which are rendered indistinctly might, for the most part, as
well not be rendered at all. There are, indeed, certain facts of
mystery, and facts of indistinctness, in all objects, which must have
their proper place in the general harmony, and the reader will
presently find me, when we come to that part of our investigation,
telling him that all good drawing must in some sort be _in_distinct. We
may, however, understand this apparent contradiction, by reflecting
that the highest knowledge always involves a more advanced perception
of the fields of the unknown; and, therefore, it may most truly be
said, that to know anything well involves a profound sensation of
ignorance, while yet it is equally true that good and noble knowledge
is distinguished from vain and useless knowledge chiefly by its
clearness and distinctness, and by the vigorous consciousness of what
is known and what is not.
So in art. The best drawing involves a wonderful perception and
expression of indistinctness; and yet all noble drawing is separated
from the ignoble by its distinctness, by its fine expression and
firm assertion of _Something_; whereas the bad drawing, without
either firmness or fineness, expresses and asserts _Nothing_. The
first thing, therefore, to be looked for as a sign of noble art, is
a clear consciousness of what is drawn and what is not; the bold
statement, and frank confession--"_This_ I know," "_that_ I know
not;" and, generally speaking, all haste, slurring, obscurity,
indecision, are signs of low art, and all calmness, distinctness,
luminousness, and positiveness, of high art.
[Sidenote: Sec. 18. Corollary 2d: Great art is generally large in masses
and in scale.]
It follows, secondly, from this principle, that as the great painter
is always attending to the sum and harmony of his truths rather than
to one or the other of any group, a quality of Grasp is visible in his
work, like the power of a great reasoner over his subject, or a great
poet over his conception, manifesting itself very often in missing out
certain details or less truths (which, though good in themselves, he
finds are in the way of others), and in a sweeping manner of getting
the beginnings and ends of things shown at once, and the squares and
depths rather than the surfaces: hence, on the whole, a habit of
looking at large masses rather than small ones; and even a physical
largeness of handling, and love of working, if possible, on a large
scale; and various other qualities, more or less imperfectly expressed
by such technical terms as breadth, massing, unity, boldness, &c., all
of which are, indeed, great qualities when they mean breadth of truth,
weight of truth, unity of truth, and courageous assertion of truth;
but which have all their correlative errors and mockeries, almost
universally mistaken for them,--the breadth which has no contents, the
weight which has no value, the unity which plots deception, and the
boldness which faces out fallacy.
Sec. 19. And it is to be noted especially respecting largeness of
scale, that though for the most part it is characteristic of the
more powerful masters, they having both more invention wherewith to
fill space (as Ghirlandajo wished that he might paint all the walls
of Florence), and, often, an impetuosity of mind which makes them
like free play for hand and arm (besides that they usually desire to
paint everything in the foreground of their picture of the natural
size), yet, as this largeness of scale involves the placing of the
picture at a considerable distance from the eye, and this distance
involves the loss of many delicate details, and especially of the
subtle lines of expression in features, it follows that the masters
of refined detail and human expression are apt to prefer a small
scale to work upon; so that the chief masterpieces of expression
which the world possesses are small pictures by Angelico, in which
the figures are rarely more than six or seven inches high; in the
best works of Raphael and Leonardo the figures are almost always
less than life, and the best works of Turner do not exceed the size
of 18 inches by 12.
[Sidenote: Sec. 20. Corollary 3d: Great art is always delicate.]
As its greatness depends on the sum of truth, and this sum of truth
can always be increased by delicacy of handling, it follows that all
great art must have this delicacy to the utmost possible degree.
This rule is infallible and inflexible. All coarse work is the sign
of low art. Only, it is to be remembered, that coarseness must be
estimated by the distance from the eye; it being necessary to
consult this distance, when great, by laying on touches which appear
coarse when seen near; but which, so far from being coarse, are, in
reality, more delicate in a master's work than the finest close
handling, for they involve a calculation of result, and are laid on
with a subtlety of sense precisely correspondent to that with which
a good archer draws his bow; the spectator seeing in the action
nothing but the strain of the strong arm, while there is, in
reality, in the finger and eye, an ineffably delicate estimate of
distance, and touch on the arrow plume. And, indeed, this delicacy
is generally quite perceptible to those who know what the truth is,
for strokes by Tintoret or Paul Veronese, which were done in an
instant, and look to an ignorant spectator merely like a violent
dash of loaded color, (and are, as such, imitated by blundering
artists,) are, in fact, modulated by the brush and finger to that
degree of delicacy that no single grain of the color could be taken
from the touch without injury; and little golden particles of it,
not the size of a gnat's head, have important share and function in
the balances of light in a picture perhaps fifty feet long. Nearly
_every_ other rule applicable to art has some exception but this.
This has absolutely none. All great art is delicate art, and all
coarse art is bad art. Nay, even to a certain extent, all _bold_ art
is bad art; for boldness is not the proper word to apply to the
courage and swiftness of a great master, based on knowledge, and
coupled with fear and love. There is as much difference between the
boldness of the true and the false masters, as there is between the
courage of a pure woman and the shamelessness of a lost one.
Sec. 21. IV. INVENTION.--The last characteristic of great art is that
it must be inventive, that is, be produced by the imagination. In
this respect, it must precisely fulfil the definition already given
of poetry; and not only present grounds for noble emotion, but
furnish these grounds by _imaginative power_. Hence there is at once
a great bar fixed between the two schools of Lower and Higher Art.
The lower merely copies what is set before it, whether in portrait,
landscape, or still-life; the higher either entirely imagines its
subject, or arranges the materials presented to it, so as to
manifest the imaginative power in all the three phases which have
been already explained in the second volume.
And this was the truth which was confusedly present in Reynolds's
mind when he spoke, as above quoted, of the difference between
Historical and Poetical Painting. _Every relation of the plain facts
which the painter saw_ is proper _historical_ painting.[8] If those
facts are unimportant (as that he saw a gambler quarrel with another
gambler, or a sot enjoying himself with another sot), then the
history is trivial; if the facts are important (as that he saw such
and such a great man look thus, or act thus, at such a time), then
the history is noble: in each case perfect truth of narrative being
supposed, otherwise the whole thing is worthless, being neither
history nor poetry, but plain falsehood. And farther, as greater or
less elegance and precision are manifested in the relation or
painting of the incidents, the merit of the work varies; so that,
what with difference of subject, and what with difference of
treatment, historical painting falls or rises in changeful eminence,
from Dutch trivialities to a Velasquez portrait, just as historical
talking or writing varies in eminence, from an old woman's
story-telling up to Herodotus. Besides which, certain operations of
the imagination come into play inevitably, here and there, so as to
touch the history with some light of poetry, that is, with some
light shot forth of the narrator's mind, or brought out by the way
he has put the accidents together; and wherever the imagination has
thus had anything to do with the matter at all (and it must be
somewhat cold work where it has not), then, the confines of the
lower and higher schools touching each other, the work is colored by
both; but there is no reason why, therefore, we should in the least
confuse the historical and poetical characters, any more than that
we should confuse blue with crimson, because they may overlap each
other, and produce purple.
Sec. 22. Now, historical or simply narrative art is very precious in its
proper place and way, but it is never _great_ art until the poetical
or imaginative power touches it; and in proportion to the stronger
manifestation of this power, it becomes greater and greater, while the
highest art is purely imaginative, all its materials being wrought
into their form by invention; and it differs, therefore, from the
simple historical painting, exactly as Wordsworth's stanza, above
quoted, differs from Saussure's plain narrative of the parallel fact;
and the imaginative painter differs from the historical painter in the
manner that Wordsworth differs from Saussure.
Sec. 23. Farther, imaginative art always _includes_ historical art; so
that, strictly speaking, according to the analogy above used, we meet
with the pure blue, and with the crimson ruling the blue and changing
it into kingly purple, but not with the pure crimson: for all
imagination must deal with the knowledge it has before accumulated; it
never produces anything but by combination or contemplation. Creation,
in the full sense, is impossible to it. And the mode in which the
historical faculties are included by it is often quite simple, and
easily seen. Thus, in Hunt's great poetical picture of the Light of the
World, the whole thought and arrangement of the picture being
imaginative, the several details of it are wrought out with simple
portraiture; the ivy, the jewels, the creeping plants, and the
moonlight being calmly studied or remembered from the things
themselves. But of all these special ways in which the invention works
with plain facts, we shall have to treat farther afterwards.
Sec. 24. And now, finally, since this poetical power includes the
historical, if we glance back to the other qualities required in great
art, and put all together, we find that the sum of them is simply the
sum of all the powers of man. For as (1) the choice of the high subject
involves all conditions of right moral choice, and as (2) the love of
beauty involves all conditions of right admiration, and as (3) the
grasp of truth involves all strength of sense, evenness of judgment,
and honesty of purpose, and as (4) the poetical power involves all
swiftness of invention, and accuracy of historical memory, the sum of
all these powers is the sum of the human soul. Hence we see why the
word "Great" is used of this art. It is literally great. It compasses
and calls forth the entire human spirit, whereas any other kind of art,
being more or less small or narrow, compasses and calls forth only
_part_ of the human spirit. Hence the idea of its magnitude is a
literal and just one, the art being simply less or greater in
proportion to the number of faculties it exercises and addresses.[9]
And this is the ultimate meaning of the definition I gave of it long
ago, as containing the "greatest number of the greatest ideas."
Sec. 25. Such, then, being the characters required in order to
constitute high art, if the reader will think over them a little,
and over the various ways in which they may be falsely assumed, he
will easily perceive how spacious and dangerous a field of
discussion they open to the ambitious critic, and of error to the
ambitious artist; he will see how difficult it must be, either to
distinguish what is truly great art from the mockeries of it, or to
rank the real artists in any thing like a progressive system of
greater and less. For it will have been observed that the various
qualities which form greatness are partly inconsistent with each
other (as some virtues are, docility and firmness for instance), and
partly independent of each other; and the fact is, that artists
differ not more by mere capacity, than by the component _elements_
of their capacity, each possessing in very different proportions the
several attributes of greatness; so that, classed by one kind of
merit, as, for instance, purity of expression, Angelico will stand
highest; classed by another, sincerity of manner, Veronese will
stand highest; classed by another, love of beauty, Leonardo will
stand highest; and so on; hence arise continual disputes and
misunderstandings among those who think that high art must always be
one and the same, and that great artists ought to unite all great
attributes in an equal degree.
Sec. 26. In one of the exquisitely finished tales of Marmontel, a
company of critics are received at dinner by the hero of the story,
an old gentleman, somewhat vain of his _acquired_ taste, and his
niece, by whose incorrigible _natural_ taste, he is seriously
disturbed and tormented. During the entertainment, "On parcourut
tous les genres de litterature, et pour donner plus d'essor a
l'erudition et a la critique, on mit sur le tapis cette question
toute neuve, scavoir, lequel meritoit le preference de Corneille ou
de Racine. L'on disoit meme la-dessus les plus belles choses du
monde, lorsque la petite niece, qui n'avoit pas dit un mot, s'avisa
de demander naivement lequel des deux fruits, de l'orange ou de la
peche, avoit le gout les plus exquis et meritoit le plus d'eloges.
Son oncle rougit de sa simplicite, et les convives baisserent tous
les yeux sans daigner repondre a cette betise. Ma niece, dit Fintac,
a votre age, il faut scavoir ecouter, et se taire."
I cannot close this chapter with shorter or better advice to the
reader, than merely, whenever he hears discussions about the
relative merits of great masters, to remember the young lady's
question. It is, indeed, true that there _is_ a relative merit, that
a peach is nobler than a hawthorn berry, and still more a hawthorn
berry than a bead of the nightshade; but in each rank of fruits, as
in each rank of masters, one is endowed with one virtue, and another
with another; their glory is their dissimilarity, and they who
propose to themselves in the training of an artist that he should
unite the coloring of Tintoret, the finish of Albert Durer, and the
tenderness of Correggio, are no wiser than a horticulturist would
be, who made it the object of his labor to produce a fruit which
should unite in itself the lusciousness of the grape, the crispness
of the nut, and the fragrance of the pine.
Sec. 27. And from these considerations one most important practical
corollary is to be deduced, with the good help of Mademoiselle's
Agathe's simile, namely, that the greatness or smallness of a man is,
in the most conclusive sense, determined for him at his birth, as
strictly as it is determined for a fruit whether it is to be a currant
or an apricot. Education, favorable circumstances, resolution, and
industry can do much; in a certain sense they do _everything_; that is
to say, they determine whether the poor apricot shall fall in the form
of a green bead, blighted by an east wind, shall be trodden under foot,
or whether it shall expand into tender pride, and sweet brightness of
golden velvet. But apricot out of currant,--great man out of
small,--did never yet art or effort make; and, in a general way, men
have their excellence nearly fixed for them when they are born; a
little cramped and frost-bitten on one side, a little sun-burnt and
fortune-spotted on the other, they reach, between good and evil
chances, such size and taste as generally belong to the men of their
calibre, and the small in their serviceable bunches, the great in their
golden isolation, have, these no cause for regret, nor those for
disdain.
Sec. 28. Therefore it is, that every system of teaching is false which
holds forth "great art" as in any wise to be taught to students, or
even to be aimed at by them. Great art is precisely that which never
was, nor will be taught, it is preeminently and finally the
expression of the spirits of great men; so that the only wholesome
teaching is that which simply endeavors to fix those characters of
nobleness in the pupil's mind, of which it seems easily susceptible;
and without holding out to him, as a possible or even probable
result, that he should ever paint like Titian, or carve like Michael
Angelo, enforces upon him the manifest possibility, and assured
duty, of endeavoring to draw in a manner at least honest and
intelligible; and cultivates in him those general charities of
heart, sincerities of thought, and graces of habit which are likely
to lead him, throughout life, to prefer openness to affectation,
realities to shadows, and beauty to corruption.
[5] Del "no," per li danar, vi "si" far ita.
[6] As here, for the first time, I am obliged to use the terms
Truth and Beauty in a kind of opposition, I must therefore
stop for a moment to state clearly the relation of these two
qualities of art; and to protest against the vulgar and
foolish habit of confusing truth and beauty with each other.
People with shallow powers of thought, desiring to flatter
themselves with the sensation of having attained profundity,
are continually doing the most serious mischief by introducing
confusion into plain matters, and then valuing themselves on
being confounded. Nothing is more common than to hear people
who desire to be thought philosophical, declare that "beauty
is truth," and "truth is beauty." I would most earnestly beg
every sensible person who hears such an assertion made, to nip
the germinating philosopher in his ambiguous bud; and beg him,
if he really believes his own assertion, never thenceforward
to use two words for the same thing. The fact is, truth and
beauty are entirely distinct, though often related, things.
One is a property of statements, the other of objects. The
statement that "two and two make four" is true, but it is
neither beautiful nor ugly, for it is invisible; a rose is
lovely, but it is neither true nor false, for it is silent.
That which shows nothing cannot be fair, and that which
asserts nothing cannot be false. Even the ordinary use of the
words false and true as applied to artificial and real things,
is inaccurate. An artificial rose is not a "false" rose, it is
not a rose at all. The falseness is in the person who states,
or induces the belief, that it is a rose.
Now, therefore, in things concerning art, the words true and
false are only to be rightly used while the picture is
considered as a statement of facts. The painter asserts that
this which he has painted is the form of a dog, a man, or a
tree. If it be _not_ the form of a dog, a man, or a tree, the
painter's statement is false; and therefore we justly speak of
a false line, or false color; not that any line or color can
in themselves be false, but they become so when they convey a
statement that they resemble something which they do _not_
resemble. But the beauty of the lines or colors is wholly
independent of any such statement. They may be beautiful
lines, though quite inaccurate, and ugly lines though quite
faithful. A picture may be frightfully ugly, which represents
with fidelity some base circumstance of daily life; and a
painted window may be exquisitely beautiful, which represents
men with eagles' faces, and dogs with blue heads and crimson
tails (though, by the way, this is not in the strict sense
_false_ art, as we shall see hereafter, inasmuch as it means
no assertion that men ever _had_ eagles' faces). If this were
not so, it would be impossible to sacrifice truth to beauty;
for to attain the one would always be to attain the other.
But, unfortunately, this sacrifice is exceedingly possible,
and it is chiefly this which characterizes the false schools
of high art, so far as high art consists in the pursuit of
beauty. For although truth and beauty are independent of each
other, it does not follow that we are at liberty to pursue
whichever we please. They are indeed separable, but it is
wrong to separate them; they are to be sought together in the
order of their worthiness; that is to say, truth first, and
beauty afterwards. High art differs from low art in possessing
an excess of beauty in addition to its truth, not in
possessing an excess of beauty inconsistent with truth.
[7] I name them in order of _in_creasing not decreasing
importance.
[8] Compare my Edinburgh Lectures, lecture iv. p. 218, et seq.
(2nd edition)
[9] Compare Stones of Venice, vol. iii. chap. iv. Sec. 7, and Sec. 21.