Chapter II: Part 2

Half-an-hour after he had entirely repainted the hair, and without losing anything of its brightness. He painted it again and again; every time it came out brighter and fresher, and the painting never seemed to lose anything in quality. That this portrait cost him infinite labour and was eventually destroyed matters nothing; my point is merely that he could paint yellow over yellow without getting the colour muddy. One day, seeing that I was in difficulties with a black, he took a brush from my hand, and it seemed to have hardly touched the canvas when the ugly heaviness of my tiresome black began to disappear. There came into it grey and shimmering lights, the shadows filled up with air, and silk seemed to float and rustle. There was no method-there was no trick; he merely painted. My palette was the same to him as his own; he did not prepare his palette; his colour did not exist on his palette before he put it on the canvas; but working under the immediate dictation of his eye, he snatched the tints instinctively, without premeditation. Ah! that marvellous hand, those thick fingers holding the brush so firmly-somewhat heavily; how malleable, how obedient, that most rebellious material, oil-colour, was to his touch. He did with it what he liked. I believe he could rub a picture over with Prussian blue without experiencing any inconvenience; half-an-hour after the colour would be fine and beautiful.

And never did this mysterious power which produces what artists know as "quality" exist in greater abundance in any fingers than it did in the slow, thick fingers of Edouard Manet: never since the world began; not in Velasquez, not in Hals, not in Rubens, not in Titian. As an artist Manet could not compare with the least among these illustrious painters; but as a manipulator of oil-colour he never was and never will be excelled. Manet was born a painter as absolutely as any man that ever lived, so absolutely that a very high and lucid intelligence never for a moment came between him and the desire to put anything into his picture except good painting. I remember his saying to me, "I also tried to write, but I did not succeed; I never could do anything but paint." And what a splendid thing for an artist to be able to say. The real meaning of his words did not reach me till years after; perhaps I even thought at the time that he was disappointed that he could not write. I know now what was passing in his mind: _Je ne me suis pas trompé de métier_. How many of us can say as much? Go round a picture gallery, and of how many pictures, ancient or modern, can you stand before and say, _Voila un homme qui ne s'est pas trompé de métier?_

Perhaps above all men of our generation Manet made the least mistake in his choice of a trade. Let those who doubt go and look at the beautiful picture of Boulogne Pier, now on view in Mr. Van Wesselingh's gallery, 26 Old Bond Street. The wooden pier goes right across the canvas; all the wood piers are drawn, there is no attempt to hide or attenuate their regularity. Why should Manet attenuate when he could fill the interspaces with the soft lapping of such exquisite blue sea-water. Above the piers there is the ugly yellow-painted rail. But why alter the colour when he could keep it in such exquisite value? On the canvas it is beautiful. In the middle of the pier there is a mast and a sail which does duty for an awning; perhaps it is only a marine decoration. A few loungers are on the pier--men and women in grey clothes. Why introduce reds and blues when he was sure of being able to set the little figures in their places, to draw them so firmly, and relieve the grey monotony with such beauty of execution? It would be vain to invent when so exquisite an execution is always at hand to relieve and to transform. Mr. Whistler would have chosen to look at the pier from a more fanciful point of view. Degas would have taken an odd corner; he would have cut the composition strangely, and commented on the humanity of the pier. But Manet just painted it without circumlocutions of any kind. The subject was void of pictorial relief. There was not even a blue space in the sky, nor yet a dark cloud. He took it as it was--a white sky, full of an inner radiance, two sailing-boats floating in mist of heat, one in shadow, the other in light. Vandervelde would seem trivial and precious beside painting so firm, so manly, so free from trick, so beautifully logical, and so unerring.

Manet did not often paint sea-pieces. He is best known and is most admired as a portrait-painter, but from time to time he ventured to trust his painting to every kind of subject-I know even a cattle-piece by Manet--and his Christ watched over by angels in the tomb is one of his finest works. His Christ is merely a rather fat model sitting with his back against a wall, and two women with wings on either side of him. There is no attempt to suggest a Divine death or to express the Kingdom of Heaven on the angels' faces. But the legs of the man are as fine a piece of painting as has ever been accomplished.

In an exhibition of portraits now open in Paris, entitled _Cent Chefs-d'Oeuvre_, Manet has been paid the highest honour; he himself would not demand a greater honour--his "Bon Bock" has been hung next to a celebrated portrait by Hals....

Without seeing it, I know that the Hals is nobler, grander; I know, supposing the Hals to be a good one, that its flight is that of an eagle as compared with the flight of a hawk. The comparison is exaggerated; but, then, so are all comparisons. I also know that Hals does not tell us more about his old woman than Manet tells us about the man who sits so gravely by his glass of foaming ale, so clearly absorbed by it, so oblivious to all other joys but those that it brings him. Hals never placed any one more clearly in his favourite hour of the day, the well-desired hour, looked forward to perhaps since the beginning of the afternoon. In this marvellous portrait we read the age, the rank, the habits, the limitations, physical and mental, of the broad-faced man who sits so stolidly, his fat hand clasping his glass of foaming ale. Nothing has been omitted. We look at the picture, and the man and his environment become part of our perception of life. That stout, middle-aged man of fifty, who works all day in some small business, and goes every evening to his café to drink beer, will abide with us for ever. His appearance, and his mode of life, which his appearance so admirably expresses, can never become completely dissociated from our understanding of life. For Manet's "Bon Bock" is one of the eternal types, a permanent national conception, as inherent in French life as Polichinelle, Pierrot, Monsieur Prud'homme, or the Baron Hulot. I have not seen the portrait for fifteen or eighteen years, and yet I see it as well as if it were hung on the wall opposite the table on which I am writing this page. I can see that round, flat face, a little swollen with beer, the small eyes, the spare beard and moustaches. His feet are not in the picture, but I know how much he pays for his boots, and how they fit him. Nor did Hals ever paint better; I mean that nowhere in Hals will you find finer handling, or a more direct luminous or simple expression of what the eye saw. It has all the qualities I have enumerated, and yet it falls short of Hals. It has not the breadth and scope of the great Dutchman. There is a sense of effort, _on sent le souffle_, and in Hals one never does. It is more bound together, it does not flow with the mighty and luminous ease of the _chefs d'oeuvre_ at Haarlem.

But is this Manet's final achievement, the last word he has to say? I think not. It was painted early in the sixties, probably about the same period as the Luxembourg picture, when the effects of his Spanish travel were wearing off, and Paris was beginning to command his art. Manet used to say, "When Degas was painting Semiramis I was painting modern Paris." It would have been more true to have said modern Spain. For it was in Spain that Manet found his inspiration. He had not been to Holland when he painted his Spanish pictures. Velasquez clearly inspired them; but there never was in his work any of the noble delicacies of the Spaniard; it was always nearer to the plainer and more--forgive the phrase--yokel-like eloquence of Hals. The art of Hals he seemed to have divined; it seems to have come instinctively to him.

Manet went to Spain after a few months spent in Couture's studio. Like all the great artists of our time, he was self-educated--Whistler, Degas, Courbet, Corot, and Manet wasted little time in other men's studios. Soon after his return from Spain, by some piece of good luck, Manet was awarded _une mention honorable_ at the Salon for his portrait of a toreador. Why this honour was conferred upon him it is difficult to guess. It must have been the result of some special influence exerted at a special moment, for ever after--down to the year of his death--his pictures were considered as an excrescence on the annual exhibitions at the _Salon_. Every year--down to the year of his death--the jury, M. Bouguereau et Cie., lamented that they were powerless to reject these ridiculous pictures. Manet had been placed _hors concours_, and they could do nothing. They could do nothing except stand before his pictures and laugh. Oh, I remember it all very well. We were taught at the Beaux-Arts to consider Manet an absurd person or else an _épateur_, who, not being able to paint like M. Gérôme, determined to astonish. I remember perfectly well the derision with which those _chefs d'oeuvre_, "Yachting at Argenteuil" and "Le Linge", were received. They were in his last style--that bright, clear painting in which violet shadows were beginning to take the place of the conventional brown shadows, and the brush-work, too, was looser and more broken up; in a word, these pictures were the germ from which has sprung a dozen different schools, all the impressionism and other isms of modern French art. Before these works, in which the real Manet appeared for the first time, no one had a good word to say. To kill them more effectually, certain merits were even conceded to the "Bon Bock" and the Luxembourg picture.

The "Bon Bock", as we have seen, at once challenges comparison with Hals. But in "Le Linge" no challenge is sent forth to any one; it is Manet, all Manet, and nothing but Manet. In this picture he expresses his love of the gaiety and pleasure of Parisian life. And this bright-faced, simple-minded woman, who stands in a garden crowded with the tallest sunflowers, the great flower-crowns drooping above her, her blue cotton dress rolled up to the elbows, her hands plunged in a small wash-tub in which she is washing some small linen, habit-shirts, pocket-handkerchiefs, collars, expresses the joy of homely life in the French suburb. Her home is one of good wine, excellent omelettes, soft beds; and the sheets, if they are a little coarse, are spotless, and retain an odour of lavender-sweetened cupboards. Her little child, about four years old, is with his mother in the garden; he has strayed into the foreground of the picture, just in front of the wash-tub, and he holds a great sunflower in his tiny hand. Beside this picture of such bright and happy aspect, the most perfect example of that _genre_ known as _la peinture claire_, invented by Manet, and so infamously and absurdly practised by subsequent imitators--beside this picture so limpid, so fresh, so unaffected in its handling, a Courbet would seem heavy and dull, a sort of mock old master; a Corot would seem ephemeral and cursive; a Whistler would seem thin; beside this picture of such elegant and noble vision a Stevens would certainly seem odiously common. Why does not Liverpool or Manchester buy one of these masterpieces? If the blueness of the blouse frightens the administrators of these galleries, I will ask them--and perhaps this would be the more practical project--to consider the purchase of Manet's first and last historical picture, the death of the unfortunate Maximilian in Mexico. Under a high wall, over which some Mexicans are looking, Maximilian and two friends stand in front of the rifles. The men have just fired, and death clouds the unfortunate face. On the right a man stands cocking his rifle. Look at the movement of the hand, how well it draws back the hammer. The face is nearly in profile--how intent it is on the mechanism. And is not the drawing of the legs, the boots, the gaiters, the arms lifting the heavy rifle with slow deliberation, more massive, firm, and concise than any modern drawing? How ample and how exempt from all trick, and how well it says just what the painter wanted to say! This picture, too, used to hang in his studio. But the greater attractiveness of "Le Linge" prevented me from discerning its more solemn beauty. But last May I came across it unexpectedly, and after looking at it for some time the thought that came was--no one painted better, no one will ever paint better.

The Luxembourg picture, although one of the most showy and the completest amongst Manet's masterpieces, is not, in my opinion, either the most charming or the most interesting; and yet it would be difficult to say that this of the many life-sized nudes that France has produced during the century is not the one we could least easily spare. Ingres' Source compares not with things of this century, but with the marbles of the fourth century B.C. Cabanel's Venus is a beautiful design, but its destruction would create no appreciable gap in the history of nineteenth century art. The destruction of "Olympe" would.

The picture is remarkable not only for the excellence of the execution, but for a symbolic intention nowhere else to be found in Manet's works. The angels on either side of his dead Christ necessitated merely the addition of two pairs of wings--a convention which troubled him no more than the convention of taking off his hat on entering a church. But in "Olympe" we find Manet departing from the individual to the universal. The red-headed woman who used to dine at the _Ratmort_ does not lie on a modern bed but on the couch of all time; and she raises herself from amongst her cushions, setting forth her somewhat meagre nudity as arrogantly and with the same calm certitude of her sovereignty as the eternal Venus for whose prey is the flesh of all men born. The introduction of a bouquet bound up in large white paper does not prejudice the symbolic intention, and the picture would do well for an illustration to some poem to be found in _"Les fleurs du Mal"_. It may be worth while to note here that Baudelaire printed in his volume a quatrain inspired by one of Manet's Spanish pictures.

But after this slight adventure into symbolism, Manet's eyes were closed to all but the visible world. The visible world of Paris he saw henceforth--truly, frankly, and fearlessly, and more beautifully than any of his contemporaries. Never before was a great man's mind so strictly limited to the range of what his eyes saw. Nature wished it so, and, having discovered nature's wish, Manet joined his desire with Nature's. I remember his saying as he showed me some illustrations he had done for Mallarme's translation of Edgar Poe's poem, "You'll admit that it doesn't give you much idea 'of a kingdom by the sea.'" The drawing represented the usual sea-side watering place--the beach with a nursemaid at full length; children building sand castles, and some small sails in the offing.

So Manet was content to live by the sight, and by the sight alone; he was a painter, and had neither time nor taste for such ideals as Poe's magical Annabel Lee. Marvellous indeed must have been the eyes that could have persuaded such relinquishment. How marvellous they were we understand easily when we look at "Olympe". Eyes that saw truly, that saw beautifully and yet somewhat grossly. There is much vigour in the seeing, there is the exquisite handling of Hals, and there is the placing, the setting forth of figures on the canvas, which was as instinctively his as it was Titian's. Hals and Velasquez possessed all those qualities, and something more. They would not have been satisfied with that angular, presumptuous, and obvious drawing, harsh in its exterior limits and hollow within--the head a sort of convulsive abridgment, the hand void, and the fingers too, if we seek their articulations. An omission must not be mistaken for a simplification, and for all his omissions Manet strives to make amend by the tone. It would be difficult to imagine a more beautiful syntheses than that pale yellow, a beautiful golden sensation, and the black woman, the attendant of this light of love, who comes to the couch with a large bouquet fresh from the boulevard, is certainly a piece of painting that Rubens and Titian would stop to admire.

But when all has been said, I prefer Manet in the quieter and I think the more original mood in the portrait of his sister-in-law, Madame Morisot. The portrait is in M. Duret's collection; it hangs in a not too well lighted passage, and if I did not spend six or ten minutes in admiration before this picture, I should feel that some familiar pleasure had drifted out of my yearly visit to Paris. Never did a white dress play so important or indeed so charming a part in a picture. The dress is the picture--this common white dress, with black spots, _une robe a poix, une petite confection de soixante cinq francs_, as the French would say; and very far it is from all remembrance of the diaphanous, fairy-like skirts of our eighteenth century English school, but I swear to you no less charming. It is a very simple and yet a very beautiful reality. A lady, in white dress with black spots, sitting on a red sofa, a dark chocolate red, in the subdued light of her own quiet, prosaic French _appartment, le deuxième au dessus l'entre-sol_. The drawing is less angular, less constipated than that of "Olympe". How well the woman's body is in the dress! there is the bosom, the waist, the hips, the knees, and the white stockinged foot in the low shoe, coming from out the dress. The drawing about the hips and bosom undulates and floats, vague and yet precise, in a manner that recalls Harlem, and it is not until we turn to the face that we come upon ominous spaces unaccounted for, forms unexplained. The head is so charming that it seems a pity to press our examination further. But to understand Manet's deficiency is to understand the abyss that separates modern from ancient art, and the portrait of Madame Morisot explains them as well as another, for the deficiency I wish to point out exists in Manet's best portraits as well as in his worst. The face in this picture is like the face in every picture by Manet. Three or four points are seized, and the spaces between are left unaccounted for. Whistler has not the strength of Velasquez; Manet is not as complete as Hals.

THE FAILURE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

In the seventeenth century were Poussin and Claude; in the eighteenth Watteau, Boucher, Chardin, and many lesser lights--Fragonard, Pater, and Lancret. But notwithstanding the austere grandeur of Poussin and the beautiful, if somewhat too reasonable poetry of Claude, the infinite perfection of Watteau, the charm of that small French Velasquez Chardin, and the fascinations and essentially French genius of all this group (Poussin and Claude were entirely Roman), I think we must place France's artistic period in the nineteenth century.

Nineteenth century art began in France in the last years of the eighteenth century. It began well, for it began with its greatest painters--Ingres, Corot, and Delacroix. Ingres was born in 1780, Gericault in 1791, Corot in 1796, Delacroix in 1798, Diaz in 1809, Dupré in 1812, Rousseau in 1812, Jacques in 1813, Meissonier in 1815, Millet in 1815, Troyon in 1816, Daubigny in 1817, Courbet in 1819, Fromentin in 1820, Monticelli in 1824, Puvis de Chavannes in 1824, Cabanel in 1825, Hervier in 1827, Vollon in 1833, Manet in 1833, Degas in 1834. With a little indulgence the list might be considerably enlarged.

The circumstances in which this artistic manifestation took place were identical with the circumstances which brought about every one of the great artistic epochs. It came upon France as a consequence of huge national aspiration, when nationhood was desired and disaster had joined men together in struggle, and sent them forth on reckless adventure. It has been said that art is decay, the pearl in the oyster; but such belief seems at variance with any reading of history. The Greek sculptors came after Salamis and Marathon; the Italian renaissance came when Italy was distracted with revolution and was divided into opposing states. Great empires have not produced great men. Art came upon Holland after heroic wars in which the Dutchmen vehemently asserted their nationhood, defending their country against the Spaniard, even to the point of letting in the sea upon the invaders. Art came upon England when England was most adventurous, after the victories of Marlborough. Art came upon France after the great revolution, after the victories of Marengo and Austerlitz, after the burning of Moscow. A unique moment of nationhood gave birth to a long list of great artists, just as similar national enthusiasm gave birth to groups of great artists in England, in Holland, in Florence, in Venice, in Athens.

Having determined the century of France's artistic period we will ask where we shall place it amongst the artist period of the past. Comparison with Greece, Italy, or Venice is manifestly impossible; the names of Rembrandt, Hals, Ruysdael, Peter de Hoogh, Terburg, and Cuyp give us pause. We remember the names of Ingres, Delacroix, Corot, Millet, and Degas. Even the divine name of Ingres cannot save the balance from sinking on the side of Holland. Then we think of Reynolds, Gainsborough, Romney, Wilson, and Morland, and wonder how they compare with the Frenchmen. The best brains were on the French side, they had more pictorial talent, and yet the school when taken as a whole is not so convincing as the English. Why, with better brains, and certainly more passion and desire of achievement, does the French school fall behind the English? Why, notwithstanding its extraordinary genius, does it come last in merit as it comes last in time amongst the world's artistic epochs? Has the nineteenth century brought any new intention into art which did not exist before in England, Holland, or Italy? Yes, the nineteenth century has brought a new intention into art, and I think that it is this very new intention that has caused the failure of the nineteenth century. To explain myself, I will have to go back to first principles.

In the beginning the beauty of man was the artist's single theme. Science had not then relegated man to his exact place in creation: he reigned triumphant, Nature appearing, if at all, only as a kind of aureole. The Egyptian, the Greek, and the Roman artists saw nothing, and cared for nothing, except man; the representation of his beauty, his power, and his grandeur was their whole desire, whether they carved or painted their intention, and I may say the result was the same. The painting of Apelles could not have differed from the sculpture of Phidias; painting was not then separated from her elder sister. In the early ages there was but one art; even in Michael Angelo's time the difference between painting and sculpture was so slight as to be hardly worth considering. Is it possible to regard the "Last Judgment" as anything else but a coloured bas-relief, more complete and less perfect than the Greeks? Michael Angelo's artistic outlook was the same as Phidias'. One chose the "Last Judgment" and the other "Olympus", but both subjects were looked at from the same point of view. In each instance the question asked was--what opportunity do they afford for the display of marvellous human form? And when Michael Angelo carved the "Moses" and painted the "St. Jerome" he was as deaf and blind as any Greek to all other consideration save the opulence and the magic of drapery, the vehemence and the splendour of muscle. Nearly two thousand years had gone by and the artistic outlook had not changed at all; three hundred years have passed since Michael Angelo, and inthose three hundred years what revolution has not been effected? How different our estheticism, our aims, our objects, our desires, our aspiration, and how different our art!

After Michael Angelo painting and sculpture became separate arts: sculpture declined, and colour filled the whole artistic horizon. But this change was the only change; the necessities of the new medium had to be considered; but the Italian and Venetian painters continued to view life and art from the same side. Michael Angelo chose his subjects merely because of the opportunities they offered for the delineation of form, Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese chose theirs merely for the opportunities they offered for the display of colour. A new medium of expression had been discovered, that was all. The themes of their pictures were taken from the Bible, if you will, but the scenes they represented with so much pomp of colour were seen by them through the mystery of legend, and the vision was again sublimated by naive belief and primitive aspiration.

The stories of the Old and New Testaments were not anecdotes; faith and ignorance had raised them above the anecdote, and they had become epics, whether by intensity of religious belief--as in the case of the monk of Fiesole--or by being given sublime artistic form--for paganism was not yet dead in the world to witness Leonardo, Raphael, and Andrea del Sarto. To these painters Biblical subjects were a mere pretext for representing man in all his attributes; and when the same subjects were treated by the Venetians, they were transformed in a pomp of colour, and by an absence of all _true_ colour and by contempt for history and chronology became epical and fantastical. It is only necessary to examine any one of the works of the great Venetians to see that they bestowed hardly a thought on the subject of their pictures. When Titian painted the "Entombment of Christ", what did he see? A contrast--a white body, livid and dead, carried by full-blooded, red-haired Italians, who wept, and whose sorrow only served to make them more beautiful. That is how he understood a subject. The desire to be truthful was not very great, nor was the desire to be new much more marked; to be beautiful was the first and last letter of a creed of which we know very little to-day.

Art died in Italy, and the subject had not yet appeared; and at the end of the sixteenth century the first painters of the great Dutch school were born, and before 1650 a new school, entirely original, having nothing in common with anything that had gone before, had formulated its aestheticism and produced masterpieces. In these masterpieces we find no suspicion of anything that might be called a subject; the absence of subject is even more conspicuous in the Dutchmen than in the Italians. In the Italian painters the subject passed unperceived in a pomp of colour or a Pagan apotheosis of humanity; in the Dutchmen it is dispensed with altogether. No longer do we read of miracles or martyrdoms, but of the most ordinary incidents of everyday life. Turning over the first catalogue to hand of Dutch pictures, I read: "View of a Plain, with shepherd, cows, and sheep in the foreground"; "The White Horse in the Riding School"; "A Lady Playing the Virginal"; "Peasants Drinking Outside a Tavern"; "Peasants Drinking in a Tavern"; "Peasants Gambling Outside a Tavern"; "Brick-making in a Landscape"; "The Wind-mill"; "The Water-mill"; "Peasants Bringing Home the Hay". And so on, and so on. If we meet with a military skirmish, we are not told where the skirmish took place, nor what troops took part in the skirmish. "A Skirmish in a Rocky Pass" is all the information that is vouchsafed to us. Italian art is invention from end to end, in Dutch art no slightest trace of invention is to be found; one art is purely imaginative, the other is plainly realistic; and yet, at an essential point, the two arts coincide; in neither does the subject prevail; and if Dutch art is more truthful than Italian art, it is because they were unimaginative, stay-at-home folk, whose feet did not burn for foreign travel, and whose only resource was, therefore, to reproduce the life around them, and into that no element of curiosity could come. For their whole country was known to them; even when they left their native town they still continued to paint what they had seen since they were little children.

And, like Italian, Dutch art died before the subject had appeared. It was not until the end of the eighteenth century that the subject really began to make itself felt, and, like the potato blight or phylloxera, it soon became clear that it had come to stay. I think Greuze was the first to conceive a picture after the fashion of a scene in a play--I mean those domestic dramas which he invented, and in which the interest of the subject so clearly predominates--"The Prodigal Son", for instance. In this picture we have the domestic drama exactly as a stage manager would set it forth. The indignant father, rising from table, prepares to anathematise the repentant son, who stands on the threshold, the weeping mother begs forgiveness for her son, the elder girl advances shyly, the younger children play with their toys, and the serving-girl drops the plate of meat which she is bringing in. And ever since the subject has taken first place in the art of France, England, and Germany, and in like measure as the subject made itself felt, so did art decline.

For the last hundred years painters seem to have lived in libraries rather than in studios. All literatures and all the sciences have been pressed into the service of painting, and an Academy catalogue is in itself a liberal education. In it you can read choice extracts from the Bible, from Shakespeare, from Goethe, from Dante. You can dip into Greek and Latin literature, history--ancient and modern--you can learn something of all mythologies-Pagan, Christian, and Hindoo; if your taste lies in the direction of Icelandic legends, you will not be disappointed in your sixpennyworth. For the last hundred years the painter seems to have neglected nothing except to learn how to paint.

For more than a hundred years painting has been in service. She has acted as a sort of handmaiden to literature, her mission being to make clear to the casual and the unlettered what the lettered had already understood and enjoyed in a more subtle and more erudite form. But to pass from the abstract to the concrete, and, so far as regards subject, to make my meaning quite clear to every one, I cannot do better than to ask my readers to recall Mr. Luke Fildes' picture of "The Doctor". No better example could be selected of a picture in which the subject is the supreme interest. True that Mr. Fildes has not taken his subject from novel or poem; in this picture he may have been said to have been his own librettist, and perhaps for that very reason the subject is the one preponderating interest in the picture. He who doubts if this be so has only to ask himself if any critic thought of pointing to any special passage of colour in this picture, of calling attention to the quality of the modelling or the ability of the drawing. No; what attracted attention was the story. Would the child live or die? Did that dear, good doctor entertain any hopes of the poor little thing's recovery? And the poor parents, how grieved they seemed! Perhaps it is their only child. The picture is typical of contemporary art, which is nearly all conceived in the same spirit, and can therefore have no enduring value. And if by chance the English artist does occasionally escape from the vice of subject for subject's sake, he almost invariably slips into what I may called the derivative vices--exactness of costume, truth of effect and local colour. To explain myself on this point, I will ask the reader to recall any one of Mr. Alma Tadema's pictures; it matters not a jot which is chosen. That one, for instance, where, in a circular recess of white marble, Sappho reads to a Greek poet, or is it the young man who is reading to Sappho and her maidens? The interest of the picture is purely archaeological. According to the very latest researches, the ornament which Greek women wore in their hair was of such a shape, and Mr. Tadema has reproduced the shape in his picture. Further researches are made, and it is discovered that that ornament was not worn until a hundred years later. The picture is therefore deprived of some of its interest, and the researches of the next ten years may make it appear as old-fashioned as the Greek pictures of the last two generations appear in our eyes to-day. Until then it is as interesting as a page of Smith's _Classical Dictionary_. We look at it and we say, "How curious! And that was how the Greeks washed and dressed themselves!"

When Mr. Holman Hunt conceived the idea of a picture of Christ earning His livelihood by the sweat of His brow, it seemed to him to be quite necessary to go to Jerusalem. There he copied a carpenter's shop from nature, and he filled it with Arab tools and implements, feeling sure that, the manners and customs having changed but little in the East, it was to be surmised that such tools and implements must be nearly identical with those used eighteen centuries ago. To dress the Virgin in sumptuous flowing robes, as Raphael did, was clearly incorrect; the Virgin was a poor woman, and could not have worn more than a single garment, and the garment she wore probably resembled the dress of the Arab women of the present day, and so on and so on. Through the window we see the very landscape that Christ looked upon. From the point of view of the art critic of the _Daily Telegraph_ nothing could be better; the various sites and prospects are explained and commented upon, and the heart of middle-class England beats in sympathetic response. But the real picture-lover sees nothing save two geometrically drawn figures placed in the canvas like diagrams in a book of Euclid. And the picture being barren of artistic interest, his attention is caught by the Virgin's costume, and the catalogue informs him that Mr. Hunt's model was an Arab woman in Jerusalem, whose dress in all probability resembled the dress the Virgin wore two thousand years ago. The carpenter's shop he is assured is most probably an exact counterpart of the carpenter's shop in which Christ worked. How very curious! how very curious!

Curiosity in art has always been a corruptive influence, and the art of our century is literally putrid with curiosity. Perhaps the desire of home was never so fixed and so real in any race as some would have us believe. At all times there have been men whose feet itched for travel; even in Holland, the country above all others which gave currency to the belief in the stay-at-home instinct, there were always adventurous spirits who yearned for strange skies and lands. It was this desire of travel that destroyed the art of Holland in the seventeenth century. I can hardly imagine an article that would be more instructive and valuable than one dealing precisely with those Dutchmen who went to Italy in quest of romance, poetry, and general artistic culture, for travel has often had an injurious effect on art. I do not say foreign travel, I say any travel. The length of the journey counts for nothing, once the painter's inspiration springs from the novelty of the colour, or the character of the landscape, or the interest that a strange costume suggests. There are painters who have never been further than Maidenhead, and who bring back what I should call _notes de voyage_; there are others who have travelled round the world and have produced general aspects bearing neither stamp nor certificate of mileage--in other words, pictures. There are, therefore, two men who must not be confused one with the other, the traveller that paints and the painter that travels.

Every day we hear of a painter who has been to Norway, or to Brittany, or to Wales, or to Algeria, and has come back with sixty-five sketches, which are now on view, let us say, at Messrs. Dowdeswell's Galleries, in New Bond Street, the home of all such exhibitions. The painter has been impressed by the savagery of fiords, by the prettiness of blouses and sabots, by the blue mountain in the distance and the purple mountain in the foreground, by the narrow shade of the street, and the solemnity of a _burnous_ or the grace of a _haik_ floating in the wind. The painter brings back these sights and scenes as a child brings back shells from the shore--they seemed very strange and curious, and, therefore, like the child, he brought back, not the things themselves, but the next best things, the most faithful sketches he could make of them. To understand how impossible it is to paint _pictures_ in a foreign country, we have only to imagine a young English painter setting up his easel in, let us say, Algeria. There he finds himself confrontedwith a new world; everything is different: the costumes are strange, the rhythm of the lines is different, the effects are harsh and unknown to him; at home the earth is dark and the sky is light, in Algeria the everlasting blue must be darker than the white earth, and the key of colour widely different from anything he has seen before. Selection is impossible, he cannot distinguish between the important and the unimportant; everything strikes him with equal vividness. To change anything of this country, so clear, so precise, so characteristic, is to soften; to alleviate what is too rude, is to weaken; to generalise, is to disfigure. So the artist is obliged to take Algiers in the lump; in spite of himself he will find himself forced into a scrupulous exactitude, nothing must be passed over, and so his pictures are at best only the truth, photographic truth and the naturalness of a fac-simile.

The sixty-five drawings which the painter will bring back and will exhibit in Messrs. Dowdeswell's will be documentary evidence of the existence of Algeria--of all that makes a country itself, of exactly the things by which those who have been there know it, of the things which will make it known to those who have not been there, the exact type of the inhabitants, their costume, their attitudes, their ways, and manner of living. Once the painter accepts truth for aim and end, it becomes impossible to set a limit upon his investigations. We shall learn how this people dress, ride, and hunt; we shall learn what arms they use--the painter will describe them as well as a pencil may describe--the harness of the horses he must know and understand; through dealing with so much novelty it becomes obligatory for the travelling painter to become explanatory and categorical. And as the attraction of the unknown corresponds in most people to the immoral instinct of curiosity, the painter will find himself forced to attempt to do with paint and canvas what he could do much better in a written account. His public will demand pictures composed after the manner of an inventory, and the taste for ethnography will end by being confused with the sentiment of beauty.

Amongst this collection of _documents_ which causes the Gallery to resound with foolish and vapid chatter there are two small pictures. Every one has passed by them, but now an artist is examining them, and they are evidently the only two things in the exhibition that interest him. One is entitled "Sunset on the Nile", an impression of the melancholy of evening; the other is entitled "Pilgrims", a band of travellers passing up a sandy tract, an impression of hot desert solitudes.

And now I will conclude with an anecdote taken from one to whom I owe much. Two painters were painting on the banks of the Seine. Suddenly a shepherd passed driving before him a long flock of sheep, silhouetting with supple movement upon the water whitening under a grey sky at the end of April. The shepherd had his scrip on his back, he wore the great felt hat and the gaiters of the herdsman, two black dogs, picturesque in form, trotted at his heels, for the flock was going in excellent order. "Do you know," cried one painter to the other, "that nothing is more interesting to paint than a shepherd on the banks of _a river_?" He did not say the Seine--he said a river.

ARTISTIC EDUCATION IN FRANCE AND ENGLAND.

Is the introduction of the subject into art the one and only cause for the defeat of the brilliant genius which the Revolution and the victories of Napoleoncalled into existence? Are there not other modern and special signs which distinguish the nineteenth century French schools from all the schools that preceded it? I think there are.

Throwing ourselves back in our chairs, let us think of this French school in its _ensemble_. What extraordinary variety! What an absence of fixed principle! curiosity, fever, impatience, hurry, anxiety, desire touching on hysteria. An enormous expenditure of force, but spent in so many different and contrary directions, that the sum-total of the result seems a little less than we had expected. Throwing ourselves back in our chairs, and closing our eyes a second time, let us think of our eighteenth century English school. Is it not like passing from the glare and vicarious holloaing of the street into a quiet, grave assembly of well-bred men, who are not afraid to let each other speak, and know how to make themselves heard without shouting; men who choose their words so well that they afford to speak without emphasis, and in whose speech you find neither neologisms, nor inversions, nor grammatical extravagances, nor calculated brutalities, nor affected ignorance, nor any faintest trace of pedantry? What these men have to say is more or less interesting, but they address us in the same language, and however arbitrarily we may place them, though we hang a pig-stye by Morland next to a duchess by Gainsborough, we are surprised by a pleasant air of family likeness in the execution. We feel, however differently these men see and think, that they are content to express themselves in the same language. Their work may be compared to various pieces of music played on an instrument which was common property; they were satisfied with the instrument, and preferred to compose new music for it than to experiment with the instrument itself.

It may be argued that in the lapse of a hundred years the numerous differences of method which characterise modern painting will disappear, and that it will seem as uniform to the eyes of the twenty-first century as the painting of the eighteenth century seems in our eyes to-day. I do not think this will be so. And in proof of this opinion I will refer again to the differences of opinion regarding the first principles of painting and drawing which divided Ingres and Géricault. Differences regarding first principles never existed between the leaders of any other artistic movement. Not between Michael Angelo and Raphael, not between Veronese, Tintoretto, Titian, and Rubens; not between Hals or any other Dutchman, except Rembrandt, born between 1600 and 1640; or between Van Dyck and Reynolds and Gainsborough. Nor must the difference between the methods of Giotto and Titian cause any one to misunderstand my meaning. The change that two centuries brought into art was a gradual change, corresponding exactly to the ideas which the painter wished to express; each method was sufficient to explain the ideas current at the time it was invented for that purpose; it served that purpose and no more.

Facilities for foreign travel, international exhibitions, and cosmopolitanism have helped to keep artists of all countries in a ferment of uncertainty regarding even the first principles of their art. But this is not all; education has proved a vigorous and rapid solvent, and has completed the disintegration of art. A young man goes to the Beaux Arts; he is taught how to measure the model with his pencil, and how to determine the movement of the model with his plumb-line. He is taught how to draw by the masses rather than by the character, and the advantages of this teaching permit him, if he is an intelligent fellow, to produce at the end of two years' hard labour a measured, angular, constipated drawing, a sort of inferior photograph. He is then set to painting, and the instruction he receives amounts to this--that he must not rub the paint about with his brush as he rubbed the chalk with his paper stump. After a long methodical study of the model, an attempt is made to prepare a corresponding tone; no medium must be used; and when the, large square brush is filled full of sticky, clogging pigment it is drawn half an inch down and then half an inch across the canvas, and the painter must calculate how much he can finish at a sitting, for this system does not admit of retouchings. It is practised in all the French studios, where it is known as _la peinture au premier coup_.

A clever young man, a man of talent, labours at art in the manner I have described from eight to ten hours a day, and at the end of six or seven years his education is completed. During the long while of his pupilage he has heard, "first learn your trade, and then do what you like". The time has arrived for him to do what he likes. He already suspects that the mere imitation of MM. Bouguereau and Lefebvre will bring him neither fame nor money; he soon finds that is so, and it becomes clear to him he must do something different. Enticing vistas of possibilities open out before him, but he is like a man whose limbs have been kept too long in splints--they are frozen; and he at length understands the old and terrible truth: as the twig is bent so will it grow. The skin he would slough will not be sloughed; he tries all the methods--robust executions, lymphatic executions, sentimental and insipid executions, painstaking executions, cursive and impertinent executions. Through all these the Beaux Arts student, if he is intelligent enough to perceive the falseness and worthlessness of his primary education, slowly works his way. He is like a vessel without ballast; he is like a blindfolded man who has missed his pavement; he is blown from wave to wave; he is confused with contradictory cries. Last year he was robust, this year he is lymphatic; he affects learning which he does not possess, and then he assumes airs of ignorance, equally unreal--a mild, sophisticated ignorance, which he calls _naïveté_. And these various execution she is never more than superficially acquainted with; he does not practise any one long enough to extract what good there may be in it.

To set before the reader the full story of the French decadence, I should have to relate the story of the great schism of some few years ago, when the pedants remained at the _Salon_ under the headship of Mr. Bouguereau, and the experimentalists followed Meissonier to the Champs de Mars.[Footnote: See "Impressions and Opinions."]The authoritative name of Meissonier, the genius of Puvis de Chavannes, and the interest of the exhibition of Stevens' early work, sufficed for some years to disguise the progress and the tendency of the declension of French art; and it was not until last year (1892) that it was impossible to doubt any longer that the great French renaissance of the beginning of the century had worn itself out, that the last leaves were falling, and that probably a long period of winter rest was preparing. French art has resolved itself into pedants and experimentalists! The _Salon_ is now like to a library of Latin verses composed by the Eton and Harrow masters and their pupils; the Champs de Mars like a costume ball at Elyseé Montmartre.

In England it is customary for art to enter by a side door, and the enormous subvention to the Kensington Schools would never have been voted by Parliament if the bill had not been gilt with the usual utility gilding. It was represented that the schools were intended for something much more serious than the mere painting of pictures, which only rich people could buy: the schools were primarily intended as schools of design, wherein the sons and daughters of the people would be taught how to design wall-papers, patterns for lace, curtains, damask table-cloths, etc. The intention, like many another, was excellent; but the fact remains that, except for examination purposes, the work done by Kensington students is useless. A design for a piece of wall-paper, for which a Kensington student is awarded a medal, is almost sure to prove abortive when put to a practical test. The isolated pattern looks pretty enough on the two feet of white paper on which it is drawn; but when the pattern is manifolded, it is usually found that the designer has not taken into account the effect of the repetition. That is the pitfall into which the Kensington student usually falls; he cannot make practical application of his knowledge, and at Minton's factory all the designs drawn by Kensington students have to be redrawn by those who understand the practical working out of the processes of reproduction and the quality of the material employed. So complete is the failure of the Kensington student, that to plead a Kensington education is considered to be an almost fatal objection against any one applying for work in any of our industrial centres.

Five-and-twenty years ago the schools of art at South Kensington were the most comical in the world; they were the most complete parody on the Continental school of art possible to imagine. They are no doubt the same to-day as they were five-and-twenty years ago--any way, the educational result is the same. The schools as I remember them were faultless in everything except the instruction dispensed there. There were noble staircases, the floors were covered with cocoa-nut matting, the rooms admirably heated with hot-water pipes, there were plaster casts and officials. In the first room the students practised drawing from the flat. Engraved outlines of elaborate ornamentation were given them, and these they drew with lead pencil, measuring the spaces carefully with compasses. In about six months or a year the student had learned to use his compass correctly, and to produce a fine hard black-lead outline; the harder and finer the outline, the more the drawing looked like a problem in a book of Euclid, the better the examiner was pleased, and the more willing was he to send the student to the room upstairs, where drawing was practised from the antique.