ALL ABOUT ART.
Art's a service.
AURORA LEIGH.
"God sent art, and the devil sent critics," said Müller, dismally
paraphrasing a popular proverb. "My picture is rejected!"
"Rejected!" I echoed, surprised to find him sitting on the floor, like a
tailor, in front of an acre of canvas. "By whom?"
"By the Hanging Committee."
"Hang the Hanging Committee!"
"A pious prayer, my friend. Would that it could be carried into
execution!"
"What cause do they assign?"
"Cause! Do you suppose they trouble themselves to find one? Not a bit of
it. They simply scrawl a great R in chalk on the back of it, and send
you a printed notice to carry it home again. What is it to them, if a
poor devil has been painting his very heart and hopes out, day after
day, for a whole year, upon that piece of canvas? Nothing, and less than
nothing--confound them!"
I drew a chair before the picture, and set myself to a patient study of
the details. He had chosen a difficult subject--the death of Louis XI.
The scene represented a spacious chamber in the Castle of
Plessisles-Tours. To the left, in a great oak chair beside the bed from
which he had just risen, sat the dying king, with a rich, furred mantle
loosely thrown around him. At his feet, his face buried in his hands,
kneeled the Dauphin. Behind his chair, holding up the crucifix to enjoin
silence, stood the king's confessor. A physician, a couple of
councillors in scarlet robes, and a captain of archers, stood somewhat
back, whispering together and watching the countenance of the dying man;
while through the outer door was seen a crowd of courtiers and pages,
waiting to congratulate King Charles VIII. It was an ambitious subject,
and Müller had conceived it in a grand spirit. The heads were
expressive; and the textures of the velvets, tapestries, oak carvings,
and so forth, had been executed with more than ordinary finish and
fidelity. For all this, however, there was more of promise than of
achievement in the work. The lights were scattered; the attitudes were
stiff; there was too evident an attempt at effect. One could see that it
was the work of a young painter, who had yet much to learn, and
something of the Academy to forget.
"Well," said Müller, still sitting ruefully on the floor, "what do you
think of it? Am I rightly served? Shall I send for a big pail of
whitewash, and blot it all out?"
"Not for the world!"
"What shall I do, then?"
"Do better."
"But, if I have done my best already?"
"Still do better; and when you have done that, do better again. So
genius toils higher and ever higher, and like the climber of the
glacier, plants his foot where only his hand clung the moment before."
"Humph! but what of my picture?"
"Well," I said, hesitatingly, "I am no critic--"
"Thank Heaven!" muttered Müller, parenthetically.
"But there is something noble in the disposition of the figures. I
should say, however, that you had set to work upon too large a scale."
"A question of focus," said the painter, hastily. "A mere question of
focus."
"How can that be, when you have finished some parts laboriously, and in
others seem scarcely to have troubled yourself to cover the canvas?"
"I don't know. I'm impatient, you see, and--and I think I got tired of
it towards the last."
"Would that have been the case if you had allowed yourself but half the
space?"
"I'll take to enamel," exclaimed Müller, with a grin of hyperbolical
despair. "I'll immortalize myself in miniature. I'll paint henceforward
with the aid of a microscope, and never again look at nature unless
through the wrong end of a telescope!"
"Pshaw!--be in earnest, man, and talk sensibly! Do you conceive that for
every failure you are to change your style? Give yourself, heart and
soul, to the school in which you have begun, and make up your mind
to succeed."
"Do you believe, then, that a man may succeed by force of will alone?"
said Müller, musingly.
"Yes, because force of will proceeds from force of character, and the
two together, warp and woof, make the stuff out of which Nature clothes
her heroes."
"Oh, but I am not talking of heroes," said Müller.
"By heroes, I do not mean only soldiers. Captain Pen is as good a hero
as Captain Sword, any day; and Captain Brush, to my thinking, is as fine
a fellow as either."
"Ay; but do they come, as you would seem to imply, of the same stock?"
said Müller. "Force of will and force of character are famous clays in
which to mould a Wellington or a Columbus; but is not something more--at
all events, something different--necessary to the modelling of a
Raffaelle?"
"I don't fancy so. Power is the first requisite of genius. Give power in
equal quantity to your Columbus and your Raffaelle, and circumstance
shall decide which will achieve the New World, and which the
Transfiguration."
"Circumstance!" cried the painter, impatiently. "Good heavens! do you
make no account of the spontaneous tendencies of genius? Is Nature a
mere vulgar cook, turning out men, like soups, from one common stock,
with only a dash of flavoring here and there to give them variety?
No--Nature is a subtle chemist, and her workshop, depend on it, is
stored with delicate elixirs, volatile spirits, and precious fires of
genius. Certain of these are kneaded with the clay of the poet, others
with the clay of the painter, the astronomer, the mathematician, the
legislator, the soldier. Raffaelle had in him some of 'the stuff that
dreams are made of.' Never tell me that that same stuff, differently
treated, would equally well have furnished forth an Archimedes or a
Napoleon!"
"Men are what their age calls upon them to be," I replied, after a
moment's consideration. "Be that demand what it may, the supply is ever
equal to it. Centre of the most pompous and fascinating of religions,
Rome demanded Madonnas and Transfigurations, and straightway Raffaelle
answered to the call. The Old World, overstocked with men, gold, and
aristocracies, asked wider fields of enterprise, and Columbus added
America to the map. What is this but circumstance? Had Italy needed
colonies, would not her men of genius have turned sailors and
discoverers? Had Madrid been the residence of the Popes, might not
Columbus have painted altar-pieces or designed churches?"
Müller, still sitting on the floor, shook his head despondingly.
"I don't think it," he replied; "and I don't wish to think it. It is too
material a view of genius to satisfy my imagination. I love to believe
that gifts are special. I love to believe that the poet is born a poet,
and the artist an artist."
"Hold! I believe that the poet is born a poet, and the artist an artist;
but I also believe the poetry of the one and the art of the other to be
only diverse manifestations of a power that is universal in its
application. The artist whose lot in life it is to be a builder is none
the less an artist. The poet, though engineer or soldier, is none the
less a poet. There is the poetry of language, and there is also the
poetry of action. So also there is the art which expresses itself by
means of marble or canvas, and the art which designs a capitol, tapers a
spire, or plants a pleasure-ground. Nay, is not this very interfusion of
gifts, this universality of uses, in itself the bond of beauty which
girdles the world like a cestus? If poetry were only rhyme, and art only
painting, to what an outer darkness of matter-of-fact should we be
condemning nine-tenths of the creation!"
Müller yawned, as if he would have swallowed me and my argument
together.
"You are getting transcendental," said he. "I dare say your theories are
all very fine and all very true; but I confess that I don't understand
them. I never could find out all this poetry of bricks and mortar,
railroads and cotton-factories, that people talk about so fluently
now-a-days. We Germans take the dreamy side of life, and are seldom at
home in the practical, be it ever so highly colored and highly flavored.
In our parlance, an artist is an artist, and neither a bagman nor an
engine-driver."
His professional pride was touched, and he said this with somewhat less
than his usual _bonhomie_--almost with a shade of irritability.
"Come," said I, smiling, "we will not discuss a topic which we can never
see from the same point of view. Doing art is better than talking art;
and your business now is to find a fresh subject and prepare another
canvas. Meanwhile cheer up, and forget all about Louis XI. and the
Hanging Committee. What say you to dining with me at the Trois Frères?
It will do you good."
"Good!" cried he, springing to his feet and shaking his fist at the
picture. "More good, by Jupiter, than all the paint and megilp that ever
was wasted! Not all the fine arts of Europe are worth a _poulet à la
Marengo_ and a bottle of old _Romanée_!"
So saying, he turned his picture to the wall, seized his cap, locked his
door, scrawled outside with a piece of chalk,--"_Summoned to the
Tuileries on state affairs_," and followed me, whistling, down the six
flights of gloomy, ricketty, Quartier-Latin lodging-house stairs up
which he lived and had his being.
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