together is the one of Cézanne: "I remain the primitive of the way I
have discovered"; and that of Whitman, which comes if I am not
mistaken from Democratic Vistas, though it may be from elsewhere in
Whitman's prose, running chiefly: "I only wish to indicate the way for
the innumerable poets that are to come after me," etc., and "I warn
you this is not a book, this is a man." These two geniuses are both of
one piece as to their esthetic intention, despite the great gulf that
lies between their concepts of, and their attitudes toward life. For
the one, life was a something to stay close to always, for the other,
it was something to be afraid of to an almost abnormal degree; Whitman
and his door never closed, Cézanne and his door seldom or never
opened, indeed, were heavily padlocked against the intrusion of the
imaginary outsider. These are the geniuses who have done most for
these two arts of the present time, it is Whitman and Cézanne who have
clarified the sleeping eye and withheld it from being totally blinded,
from the onslaughts of jaded tradition.
There were in Cézanne the requisite gifts for selection, and for
discarding all useless encumbrances, there was in him the great desire
for purification, or of seeing the superb fact in terms of itself,
majestically; and if not always serenely, serenity was nevertheless
his passionate longing. He saw what there was for him in those old and
accepted masters who meant most to him, and he saw also what there was
for him in that newest of old masters, which was also in its way the
assumed discovery of our time, he saw the relativity of Greco's
beautiful art to the art of his own making. He saw that here was a
possible and applicable architectonic suited to the objects of his
newly conceived principles, he felt in Greco the magnetic tendency of
one thing toward another in nature, that trees and hills and valleys
and people were not something sitting still for his special
delectation, but that they were constantly aspiring to fruition,
either physical, mental, or let us say, spiritual, even when the word
is applied to the so-termed inanimate objects. He felt the
"palpitancy," the breathing of all things, the urge outward of all
life toward the light which helps it create and recreate itself. He
felt this "movement" in and about things, and this it is that gives
his pictures that sensitive life quality which lifts them beyond the
aspect of picture-making or even mere representation. They are not
cold studies of inanimate things, they are pulsing realizations of
living substances striving toward each other, lending each other their
individual activities until his canvases become, as one might name
them, ensembles of animation, orchestrated life. We shall, I think,
find this is what Greco did for Cézanne, and it is Cézanne who was
among the first of moderns, if not the first, to appreciate that
particular aspirational quality in the splendid pictures of Greco.
They "move" toward their design, they were lifted by the quality of
their organization into spaces in which they were free to carry on the
fine illusion of life.
Whitman has certainly aspired equally, but being more things in one
than Cézanne, his task has been in some ways greater, more difficult,
and may we say for humanistic reasons, loftier. Whitman's
inclusiveness was at one and the same time his virtue and his defect.
For mystical reasons, it was imperative for him to include all things
in himself, and so he set about enumerating all those elements which
were in him, and of which he was so devoted and affectionate a part.
That he could leave nothing out was, it may be said, his strongest
esthetical defect, for it is by esthetical judgment that we choose and
bring together those elements as we conceive it. It is the mark of
good taste to reject that which is unessential, and the "tact of
omission," well exemplified in Cézanne, has been found excellently
axiomatic. So that it is the tendency in Whitman to catalogue in
detail the entire obvious universe that makes many of his pages a
strain on the mind as well as on the senses, and the eye especially.
The absolute enforcement of this gift of omission in painting makes it
easier for the artist, in that his mind is perforce engrossed with the
idea of simplification, directness, and an easy relationship of the
elements selected for presentation to each other.
It is the quality of "living-ness" in Cézanne that sends his art to
the heights of universality, which is another way of naming the
classical vision, or the masterly conception, and brings him together
with Whitman as much of the same piece. You get all this in all the
great masters of painting and literature, Goethe, Shakespeare, Rubens,
and the Greeks. It is the reaching out and the very mastering of life
which makes all art great, and all artists into geniuses. It is the
specializing on ideas which shuts the stream of its flow. I have felt
the same gift for life in a still-life or a landscape of Cézanne's
that I have felt in any of Whitman's best pieces. The element in
common with these two exceptional creators is liberation. They have
done more, these modern pioneers, for the liberation of the artist,
and for the "freeing" of painting and poetry than any other men of
modern time. Through them, painting and poetry have become literally
free, and through them it is that the young painters and poets have
sought new fields for self deliverance. Discipleship does not hold out
long with the truly understanding. Those who really know what
originality is are not long the slave of the power of imitation: it is
the gifted assimilator that suffers most under the spell of mastery.
Legitimate influence is a quality which all earnest creators learn to
handle at once. Both poetry and painting are, or so it seems to me,
revealing well the gift of understanding, and as a result we have a
better variety of painting and of poetry than at the first outbreak of
this so called modern esthetic epidemic.
The real younger creators are learning the difference between surface
and depth, between exterior semblances, and the underlying substances.
Both Whitman and Cézanne stand together in the name of one common
purpose, freedom from characteristics not one's own. They have taught
the creators of this time to know what classicism really is, that it
is the outline of all things that endure. They have both shown that it
is not idiosyncrasy alone which creates originality, that idiosyncrasy
is but the husk of personal penetration, that it is in no way the
constituent essential for genius. For genius is nothing but the name
for higher perception, the greater degree of understanding. Cézanne's
fine landscapes and still-lifes, and Whitman's majestic line with its
gripping imagery are one and the same thing, for it reaches the same
height in the mind. They walk together out of a vivid past, these two
geniuses, opening the corridors to a possibly vivid future for the
artists of now, and to come. They are the gateway for our modern
esthetic development, the prophets of the new time. They are most of
all, the primitives of the way they have begun, they have voiced most
of all the imperative need of essential personalism, of direct
expression out of direct experience, with an eye to nothing but
quality and proportion as conceived by them. Their dogmas were both
simple in the extreme, and of immense worth to us in their respective
spheres. We may think of them as the giants of the beginning of the
twentieth century, with the same burning desire to enlarge the general
scope of vision, and the finer capacity for individual experience.
ALBERT P. RYDER
Albert P. Ryder possessed in a high degree that strict passivity of
mental vision which calls into being the elusive yet fixed element the
mystic Blake so ardently refers to and makes a principle of, that
element outside the mind's jurisdiction. His work is of the essence of
poetry; it is alien to the realm of esthetics pure, for it has very
special spiritual histories to relate. His landscapes are somewhat
akin to those of Michel and of Courbet. They suggest Michel's wide
wastes of prodigal sky and duneland with their winding roads that have
no end, his ever-shadowy stretches of cloud upon ever-shadowy
stretches of land that go their austere way to the edges of some
vacant sea. They suggest, too, those less remote but perhaps even more
aloof spaces of solitude which were ever Courbet's theme in his deeper
hours, that haunting sense of subtle habitation, that acute invasion
of either wind or soft fleck of light or bright presence in a breadth
of shadow, as if a breath of living essences always somehow pervaded
those mystic woodland or still lowland scenes. But highly populate as
these pictures of Courbet's are with the spirit of ever-passing feet
that hover and hold converse in the remote wood, the remoter plain,
they never quite surrender to that ghostliness which possesses the
pictures of our Ryder. At all times in his work one has the feeling of
there having lately passed, if ever so fleetly, some bodily shape
seeking a solitude of its own. I recall no other landscapes impressed
with a more terrific austerity save Greco's incredible "Toledo," to my
thinking a finality in landscape creation.
There is quietude, solace, if you will, in Michel, in Courbet, but
there is never a rest for the eye or the mind or the spirit in those
most awesome of pictures which Ryder has presented to us, few as they
are; for the Ryder legend is akin to the legend of Giorgione. There is
always splendor in them but it is the splendor of the dream given over
to a genius more powerful than the vision which has conjured them
forth. It is distinctly a land of Luthany in which they have their
being; he has inscribed for us that utter homelessness of the spirit
in the far tracts that exist in the realm of the imagination; there is
suffering in his pictures, that fainting of the spirit, that
breathlessness which overtakes the soul in search of the consummation
of beauty.
Ryder is akin to Coleridge, too, for there is a direct visional
analogy between "The Flying Dutchman" and the excessively pictorial
stanzas of "The Ancient Mariner." Ryder has typified himself in this
excellent portrayal of sea disaster, this profound spectacle of the
soul's despair in conflict with wind and wave. Could any picture
contain more of that remoteness of the world of our real heart as
well as our real eye, the artist's eye which visits that world in no
official sense but only as a guest or a courtly spectator? No artist,
I ought to say, was ever more master of his ideas and less master of
the medium of painting than Ryder; there is in some of his finest
canvases a most pitiable display of ignorance which will undoubtedly
shorten their life by many years.
I still retain the vivid impression that afflicted me when I saw my
first Ryder, a marine of rarest grandeur and sublimity, incredibly
small in size, incredibly large in its emotion--just a sky and a
single vessel in sail across a conquering sea. Ryder is, I think, the
special messenger of the sea's beauty, the confidant of its majesties,
its hauteurs, its supremacies; for he was born within range of the sea
and all its legends have hovered with him continually. Since that time
I have seen a number of other pictures either in the artist's
possession or elsewhere: "Death on the Racetrack," "Pegasus," canvases
from The Tempest and Macbeth in that strange little world of chaos
that was his home, his hermitage, so distraught with débris of the
world for which he could seem to find no other place; I have spent
some of the rare and lovelier moments of my experience with this
gentlest and sweetest of other-world citizens; I have felt with
ever-living delight the excessive loveliness of his glance and of his
smile and heard that music of some far-away world which was his
laughter; I have known that wisdom which is once and for all wisdom
for the artist, that confidence and trust that for the real artist
there is but one agency for the expression of self in terms of beauty,
the eye of the imagination, that mystical third somewhere in the mind
which transposes all that is legitimate to expression. To Ryder the
imagination was the man; he was a poet painter, living ever outside
the realm of theory.
He was fond of Corot, and at moments I have thought of him as the heir
and successor to some of Corot's haunting graces; but there was all
the difference between them that there is between lyric pure and
tragic pure. Ryder has for once transcribed all outer semblances by
means of a personality unrelated to anything other than itself, an
imagination belonging strictly to our soil and specifically to our
Eastern geography. In his autographic quality he is certainly our
finest genius, the most creative, the most racial. For our genius, at
its best, is the genius of the evasive; we are born lovers of the
secret element, the mystery in things.
How many of our American painters have given real attention to Ryder?
I find him so much the legend among professional artists, this master
of arabesque, this first and foremost of our designers, this real
creator of pattern, this first of all creators of tragic landscape,
whose pictures are sacred to those that revere distinction and power
in art. He had in him that finer kind of reverence for the element of
beauty which finds all things somehow lovely. He understood best of
all the meaning of the grandiose, of everything that is powerful; none
of his associates in point of time rose to just that sublimated
experience; not Fuller, not Martin, not Blakelock, though each of
these was touched to a special expression. They are more derivative
than Ryder, more the children of Barbizon.
Ryder gave us first and last an incomparable sense of pattern and
austerity of mood. He saw with an all too pitiless and pitiful eye the
element of helplessness in things, the complete succumbing of things
in nature to those elements greater than they that wield a fatal
power. Ryder was the last of the romantics, the last of that great
school of impressive artistry, as he was the first of our real
painters and the greatest in vision. He was a still companion of Blake
in that realm of the beyond, the first citizen of the land of Luthany.
He knew the fine distinction between drama and tragedy, the tragedy
which nature prevails upon the sensitive to accept. He was the painter
poet of the immanent in things.
WINSLOW HOMER
In Winslow Homer we have yankeeism of the first order, turned to a
creditable artistic account. With a fierce feeling for truth, a mania,
almost, for actualities, there must have been somewhere in his make-up
a gentleness, a tenderness and refinement which explain his fine
appreciation of the genius of the place he had in mind to represent.
There is not an atom of legend in Homer, it is always and always
narrative of the obvious world. There is at once the essential
dramatic import ruling the scene. With him it is nothing but dramatic
relationship, the actionary tendency of the facts themselves, in
nature. You are held by him constantly to the bold and naked theme,
and you are left to wander in the imagination only among the
essentials of simple and common realism.
Narrative then, first and last with Homer, and the only creative
aspect of his pictures is concealed in the technique. The only touch
of invention in them is the desire to improve the language they speak.
Dramatic always, I do not call them theatric excepting in the case of
one picture that I know, called "Morro Castle" I think, now in the
Metropolitan Museum, reminding me much of the commonplace, "Chateau de
Chillon" of Courbet's, neither of these pictures being of any value
in the careers of their authors. But once you sat on the rocks of
Maine, and watched the climbing of the surf up the morning sky after a
heavy storm at sea, you realize the force of Homer's gift for the
realities. His pictures are yankee in their indications, as a work of
art could be, flinty and unyielding, resolute as is the yankee nature
itself, or rather to say, the original yankee, which was pioneer then
in a so rough yet resourceful country. It is the quality of Thoreau,
but without the genius of Thoreau for the poetry of things.
Homer's pictures give you nothing but the bare fact told in the better
class terms of illustration, for he was illustrator, first of all.
While the others were trying to make a little American Barbizon of
their own, there were Homer, Ryder, Fuller, Martin, working alone for
such vastly opposite ideas, and yet, of these men, four of them were
expressing such highly imaginative ideas, and Homer was the
unflinching realist among them. I do not know where Homer started, but
I believe it was the sea at Prout's Neck that taught him most. I think
that William Morris Hunt and Washington Allston must have seemed like
infant Michelangelos then, for there is still about them a sturdiness
which we see little of in the American art of that time, or even now
for that matter. They had a certain massive substance, proving the
force of mind and personality which was theirs, and while these men
were proving the abundance and warmth of themselves, Homer was the
frozen one among them. Nature was nature to him, and that alone he
realized, and yet it was not precisely slavish imitation that impelled
him.
There was in him a very creditable sense of selection,--as will be
seen especially in the water colours, so original with him, so gifted
in their power of treatment--one of the few great masters of the
medium the world has known. He knew the meaning of wash as few since
have known it, he knew that it has scale and limitation of its own,
and for all that, infinite suggestibility. Not Turner or Whistler have
excelled him, and I do not know of anyone who has equalled him in
understanding of this medium outside of Dodge Macknight and John
Marin. It is in these so expressive paintings on paper that you feel
the real esthetic longing as well as a certain contribution in Homer,
the desire to realize himself and to release himself from too slavish
imitation of nature and the too rigid consideration of truth. He was
finer in technique than perhaps any that I have mentioned, though the
two modern men have seconded him very closely, and in point of vision
have, I am certain, surpassed him. Homer arrived because of his power
to express what he wished to say, though his reach was far less lofty
than theirs. He was essentially on the ground, and wanted to paint the
very grip of his own feet on the rocks. He wanted the inevitability
put down in recognizable form. He had not feeling for the hint or the
suggestion until he came to the water-color, which is of course most
essentially that sort of medium. He knew its scope and its limitations
and never stepped out of its boundaries, and he achieved a fine
mastery in it. His imitators will never arrive at his severity because
they are not flint yankee. They have not the hard head and snappy
tongue. It was yankee crabbedness that gave Homer his grip on the idea
he had in mind. Florida lent a softer tone to what Maine rocks could
not give him. He is American from skin to skeleton, and a leader among
yankee as well as American geniuses. He probably hated as much as
Thoreau, and in his steely way admired as much. It was fire from the
flintlock in them both, though nature had a far softer and loftier
persuasion with the Concord philosopher and naturalist.
Homer remains a figure in our American culture through his feeling for
reality. He has learned through slavery to detail to put down the
essential fact, however abundantly or however sparsely. He has a
little of Courbet's sense of the real, and none whatever of his sense
of the imaginative. It was enough for him to classicize the realistic
incident. He impels me to praise through his yankee insistence upon
integrity. Story is story with Homer and he leaves legend to itself.
It is the narrative of the Whittier type, homely, genuine, and
typical. He never stepped outside of his yankee determination. Homer
has sent the art of water colour painting to a very high place in
world consideration. He cannot be ignored as a master in this field.
His paintings must be taken as they are, solid renderings of fact,
dramatically considered. He offers nothing else. Once you have seen
these realistic sea pictures, you may want to remember and you may
want to forget, but they call for consideration. They are true in
their living appreciation of reality.
He knew the sea like the old salts that were his neighbors, and from
accounts he was as full of the tang of the sea as they. He was a foe
to compromise and a despiser of imposition. The best and most
impersonal of him is in his work, for he never ventured to express
philosophies, ethics, or morals in terms of picture-painting. That is
to his credit at least. He was concerned with illustration first and
last, as he was illustrator and nothing else. He taught the proceeding
school of illustrators much in the significance of verity, and in the
ways and means of expressing verity in terms of pigment. What the
stiff pen and ink drawings and the cold engravings of his time taught
him, he conferred upon the later men in terms of freedom of technique.
And at the same time he rose a place, as painter and artist of no mean
order, by a certain distinction inherent in him. He had little feeling
for synthesis outside of the water-colours, and here it was necessary
by virtue of the limitations of the medium.
Winslow Homer will not stimulate for all time only because his mind
was too local. There is nothing of universal appeal in him. His
realism will never reach the height even of the sea-pieces of Courbet,
and I shall include Ryder as well. Courbet was a fine artist, and so
was Ryder, and both had the advantage of exceptional imagination.
Homer and Ryder are natives of the same coast and typify excellently
the two poles in the New England temper, both in art and in life.
Homer as realist, had the one idea in mind only, to illustrate realism
as best he could in the most distinguished terms at the disposal of
his personality. He succeeded admirably.
Homer typifies a certain sturdiness in the American temper at least,
and sends the lighter men away with his roughness, as doubtless he
sent the curious away from his cliffs with the acidity of truth he
poured upon them. He had lived so much in the close association of the
roughest elements in existence, rocks and the madly swinging sea that
glides over and above them defiantly, that he had without doubt taken
on the character of them. The portrait of Homer gives him as one would
expect him to look, and he looks like his pictures. His visage bore a
ferocity that had to be met with a rocky certainty. It is evident
there was no fooling him. He was filled with yankee tenacity and
yankee courage. Homer is what you would expect to find if you were
told to hunt up the natives of "Prout's Neck" or "Perkins Cove," or
any of the inlets of the Maine coast. These sea people live so much
with the roughness of the sea, that if they are at all inclined to
acidity, and the old fashioned yankee was sure to be, they take on the
hard edges of a man's temper in accordance with the jaggedness of the
shores on which they live. The man around the rocks looks so very like
the profiles one sees in the rocks themselves. They have absorbed the
energy of the dramatic elements they cope with, and you may be sure
that life around the sea in New England is no easy existence; and they
give out the same salty equivalent in human association.
If you have lived by the sea, you have learned the significance of the
bravery of sea people, and you learn to understand and excuse the
sharpness of them which is given them from battle with the elemental
facts they are confronted with at all times. That is the character of
Homer, that is the quality of his painting. That is what makes him
original in the American sense, and so recognizable in the New England
sense. He is one of New England's strongest spokesmen, and takes his
place by the side of Ryder, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Fuller, Whittier, and
such representative temperaments, and it is this quality that
distinguishes him from men like Inness, Wyant, and the less typical
painters. It is obvious, too, that he never painted any other coast,
excepting of course Florida, in the water colours.