Chapter III (4)

One other drawback to Art taking its place alongside its sisters--Poetry and Music--is the annual exhibitions. Nothing more thoroughly barbarous and childish could be devised than this concentrating the mental activity of the nation in regard to the Art of the year upon one month. Fancy our being obliged to read all our novels, and all our poetry, and hear all our music in a segment of our year. Then there is the mixing up of all sorts of pictures--sacred and profane, gay and sombre, etc.--all huddled together, and the eye flitting from one to the other.[61] Hence the temptation to paint down to the gaudiest pictures, instead of up or into the pure intensity of nature. Why should there not be some large public hall to which artists may send their pictures at any time when they are perfected; but better still, let purchasers frequent the studios, as they did of old, full of love and knowledge. Why will we insist in pressing our Art and our taste, as we did long ago our religion and our God, upon our neighbors! Why not trust to time, and to cultivating our own tastes earnestly, thoroughly, humbly, and for ourselves, filling our houses with the best of everything, and making all welcome to see them, and believing that the grandchildren of those who come to see our Turners and Wilkies and Hogarths will be wiser and more refined than we? It is most lamentable to witness the loss of money, of energy, and in a measure of skill, and, above all, of time, on those engravings, which no one but a lodging-keeper frames, and those Parian statuettes and Etruscan pitchers and tazzas of all sorts, which no one thinks half so much of, or gets half so much real pleasure and good from, as from one of John Leech's woodcuts. One true way to encourage Art is to buy and enjoy _Punch_. There is more fun, more good drawing, more good sense, more beauty in John Leech's _Punch_ pictures, than in all the Art-Union illustrations, engravings, statuettes, etc. etc., put together. Could that mighty Potentate have been got up, think you, by a committee of gentlemen, and those drawings educed by proffered prizes? No; they came out, and have flourished according to a law as natural and as effective as the law of seed-time and harvest; and Art, as a power to do good, will never reach its full perfection till it is allowed to walk at liberty, and follow the course of all other productions, that of supply and demand, individual demand, and voluntary supply. It is not easy to tell how far back these well-meaning, zealous, deluded men who have managed these "encouragements," have put the progress of the nation in its power of knowing and feeling true Art.

[61] In our excellent National Gallery (Edinburgh), a copy of
Titian's Ariadne in Naxos is hung immediately above Wilkie's
sacred sketch of John Knox administering the Sacrament in
Calder House!

One other heresy I must vent, and that is to protest against the doctrine that scientific knowledge is of much direct avail to the artist; it may enlarge his mind as a man, and sharpen and strengthen his nature, but the knowledge of anatomy is, I believe, more a snare than anything else to an artist as such. Art is the _tertium quid_ resulting from observation and imagination, with skill and love and downrightness as their executors; anything that interferes with the action of any of these, is killing to the soul of Art. Now, painting has to do simply and absolutely with the surfaces, with the appearances of things; it knows and cares nothing for what is beneath and beyond, though if it does its own part aright it indicates them. Phidias and the early Greeks, there is no reason to believe, ever dissected even a monkey, much less a man, and yet where is there such skin, and muscle, and substance, and breath of life? When Art became scientific, as among the Romans, and lost its heart in filling its head, see what became of it: anatomy offensively thrust in your face, and often bad anatomy; men skinned and galvanized, not men alive and in action. In the same way in landscape, do you think Turner would have painted the strata in an old quarry, or done Ben Cruachan more to the quick, had he known all about geology, gneiss, and graywacke, and the Silurian system? Turner might have been what is called a better-informed man, but we question if he would have been so good, not to say a better representer of the wonderful works of God, which were painted on his retina, and in his inner chamber--the true _Camera lucida_, the chamber of imagery leading from the other,--and felt to his finger-tips. No; science and poetry are to a nicety diametrically opposed, and he must be a Shakspeare and a Newton, a Turner and a Faraday all in one, who can consort much with both without injury to each. It is not what a man has learned from others, not even what he thinks, but what he sees and feels, which makes him a painter.

The moral from all this is, love Art, and if you choose, practise Art. Purchase Art for itself alone, and in the main for yourself alone. If you so do, you will encourage Art to more purpose than if you spent thousands a year in Art-Unions, and in presenting the public with what pleased you; just as a man does most good by being good. Goldsmith puts it in his inimitable way--"I was ever of opinion that the honest man, who married and brought up a large family, did more service than he who continued single, and only talked of population."

I have said those things strongly, abruptly, and perhaps rudely; but my heart is in the matter. Art is part of my daily food, like the laughter of children, and the common air, the earth, the sky; it is an affection, not a passion to come and go like the gusty wind, nor a principle cold and dead; it penetrates my entire life, it is one of the surest and deepest pleasures, one of the refuges from "the nature of things," as Bacon would say, into that enchanted region, that "ampler aether," that "diviner air," where we get a glimpse not only of a Paradise that is past, but of a Paradise that is to come.

There is one man amongst us who has done more to breathe the breath of life into the literature and the philosophy of Art, who has "encouraged" it ten thousand times more effectually than all our industrious Coles and anxious Art-Unions, and that is the author of _Modern Painters_. I do not know that there is anything in our literature, or in any literature, to compare with the effect of this one man's writings. He has by his sheer force of mind, and fervor of nature, the depth and exactness of his knowledge, and his amazing beauty and power of language, raised the subject of Art from being subordinate and technical, to the same level with Poetry and Philosophy. He has lived to see an entire change in the public mind and eye, and, what is better, in the public heart, on all that pertains to the literature and philosophy of representative genius. He combines its body and its soul. Many before him wrote about its body, and some well; a few, as Charles Lamb and our own "Titmarsh," touched its soul: it was left to John Ruskin to do both.[62]

[62] This great writer was first acknowledged as such by our big
quarterlies, in the _North British Review_, fourteen years
ago, as follows:--

"This is a very extraordinary and a very delightful book,
full of truth and goodness, of power and beauty. If genius
may be considered (and it is as serviceable a definition as
is current) that power by which one man produces for the use
or the pleasure of his fellow-men, something at once new and
true, then have we here its unmistakable and inestimable
handiwork. Let our readers take our word for it, and read
these volumes thoroughly, giving themselves up to the
guidance of this most original thinker, and most attractive
writer, and they will find not only that they are richer in
true knowledge, and quickened in pure and heavenly
affections, but they will open their eyes upon a now
world--walk under an ampler heaven, and breathe a diviner
air. There are few things more delightful or more rare, than
to feel such a kindling up of the whole faculties as is
produced by such a work as this; it adds a 'precious seeing
to the eye,'--makes the ear more quick of apprehension, and,
opening our whole inner-man to a new discipline, it fills us
with gratitude as well as admiration towards him to whom we
owe so much enjoyment. And what is more, and better than all
this, everywhere throughout this work, we trace evidences of
a deep reverence and godly fear--a perpetual, though subdued
acknowledgment of the Almighty, as the sum and substance,
the beginning and the ending of all truth, of all power, of
all goodness, and of all beauty.

"This book (_Modern Painters_) contains more true
philosophy, more information of a strictly scientific kind,
more original thought and exact observation of nature, more
enlightened and serious enthusiasm, and more eloquent
writing, than it would be easy to match, not merely in works
of its own class, but in those of any class whatever. It
gives us a new, and we think, the only true theory of beauty
and sublimity; it asserts and proves the existence of a new
element in landscape-painting, placing its prince upon his
rightful throne; it unfolds and illustrates, with singular
force, variety, and beauty, the laws of art; it explains and
enforces the true nature and specific function of the
imagination, with the precision and fulness of one having
authority,--and all this delivered in language which, for
purity and strength and native richness, would not have
dishonored the early manhood of Jeremy Taylor, of Edmund
Burke, or of the author's own favorite Richard Hooker."--J.B.

BEAUTY, ABSOLUTE AND RELATIVE.

We are not now going to try our 'prentice hand upon a new theory of Beauty, after so many masters have failed; but we cannot help thinking that the dispute would be at an end if it were but allowed at once, that there are two kinds of beauty, that there is a material and necessary element of beauty, and another which is contingent and relative--a natural and a spiritual delightfulness to and through the eye; and that sometimes we see both together, as in the face and eyes of a beautiful and beloved woman; and moreover, that there is no more reason for denying either the sense or the emotion of beauty, because everybody does not agree about the kind or measure of either of these qualities in all objects, than there is for affirming that there is no such thing as veracity or natural affection, because the Spartans commended lying, and the Cretians practised it, or the New Zealanders the eating of one's grandmother. Why should the eye, the noblest, the amplest, the most informing of all our senses, be deprived of its own special delight? The light is sweet, and it is a pleasant thing for the eye to behold the sun; and why, when the ear has sound for informing, and music for delight--when there is smell and odor, taste and flavor, and even the touch has its sense of pleasant smoothness and softness--why should there not be in the eye a pleasure born and dying with the sights it sees? it is like the infinite loving-kindness of Him who made the trees of the garden pleasant to the eye as well as good for food. We say nothing here of Relative or Associative Beauty,--this has never been doubted either in its essence or its value. It is as much larger in its range, as much nobler in its meaning and uses, as the heavens are higher than the earth, or as the soul transcends the body. This, too, gives back to material beauty more than it received: it was after man was made, that God saw, and, behold, everything was very good.

Our readers may perhaps think we make too much of imagination as an essential element--as _the_ essential element--in Art. With our views of its function and its pervading influence in all the ideal arts, we can give it no other place. A man can no more be a poet or painter in the spiritual and only true sense without imagination, than an animal can be a bird without wings; and as, other things being equal, that bird can be longest on the wing and has the greatest range of flight which has the strongest pinions, so that painter is likely to have the farthest and keenest vision of all that is within the scope of his art, and the surest and most ample faculty of making known to others what he himself has seen, whose imagination is at once the most strong and quick. At the same time, if it be true that the body without the spirit is dead, so it is equally true that the spirit without the body is vain, ineffectual, fruitless. Imagination alone can no more make a painter or a poet than wings can constitute a bird. Each must have a body. Unfortunately, in painting we have more than enough of body without spirit. Correct drawing, wonderful imitative powers, cleverness, adaptiveness, great facility and dexterity of hand, much largeness of _quotation_, and many material and mechanical qualities, all go to form an amusing, and, it may be, useful spectacle, but not a true picture. We have also, but not so often, the reverse of all this,--the vision without the faculty, the soul without the body, great thoughts without the power to embody them in intelligible forms. He, and he alone, is a great painter, and an heir of time, who combines both. He must have observation,--humble, loving, unerring, unwearied; this is the material out of which a painter, like a poet, feeds his genius, and "makes grow his wings." There must be perception and conception, both vigorous, quick and _true_; you must have these two primary qualities, the one first, the other last, in every great painter. Give him good sense and a good memory, it will be all the better for him and for us. As for principles of drawing and perspective, they are not essential. A man who paints according to a principle is sure to paint ill; he may apply his principles after his work is done, if he has a philosophic as well as an ideal turn.

THE END.

CAMBRIDGE: PRINTED BY H. O. HOUGHTON.

Transcriber's Note: Greek transliterations are indicated by
{curly braces}. Duplicated essay names have been removed. Minor
typographical errors have been corrected, but spelling and
hyphenation inconsistencies have been retained.