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ART AND CRITICISM.

N a very entertaining pamphlet, a well-known painter, Mr. Whistler, propounded not long ago his day-dream of a golden age. All would be well, he told us, with art and artists, if only the men of letters could be induced to leave them alone. From such a consummation we are at present singularly far removed. There never was a time when so much was written about art and artists as is written now. In the shape of ephemeral comments on the exhibitions of the day, or of historical studies on the schools and masters of the past, or of discursive essays and exhortations having the fine arts for their text and point of departure-in one of these shapes or another, English literature has of late years been full of the subject.

That literature should thus employ itself is very natural. As the works of fine art, meaning by the word the higher manual arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture, are of all human achievements the most tangible and abiding, so they are among the most interesting and most attractive; and to define the nature of their interests and attraction, to furnish such guidance and information as may help a reader to profit by this great branch of man's activity, and to receive from the works of these arts the best they are capable of giving, is as legitimate a literary task as any other. It is a task, at the same time, which calls for special aptitudes and special study, and has methods and difficulties of its own. Let us consider for a moment what those methods and difficulties are. Since literature is not in truth likely to leave art alone, what, let us ask, in dealing with the works of art, are the aims which literature should keep in view, and the errors which it should avoid?

And, first, of contemporary criticism, or literature as concerned with the works of living artists. This may at first sight seem a much simpler matter than historical criticism, in which literature concerns itself with the works and schools of the past; and simpler, indeed, it is in one particular. Contemporary criticism does not make the same call as historical criticism on the industry of the critic in examining monuments and ascertaining facts; it does not, in a word, require him to know as much. But in other particulars it is far harder to write justly and to the point about the work of your own, than about that of former generations. In historical criticism it is easy to be dispassionate-you are not prepossessed by personal sympathies, by the conflicts of theories and rivalries of groups; it is easy to

see things as they are-your judgment is not confused by the currents of momentary favor and neglect, or by the influence of the fashions amid which you have grown up; it is easy to keep a just sense of proportion-time has already brought the objects of your study into something like their true relations toward each other and their age. Whereas in contemporary criticism, to be dispassionate, to keep a just sense of proportion, and to see things as they are, apart from fashion and prepossession, are matters of very considerable difficulty indeed.

Unluckily this difficult task is one to which many have been accustomed to address themselves without pausing to consider whether they were qualified, either by aptitudes or study, to perform it. "Art-criticism" has on the whole been conducted so much at random, that a shade of ridicule and discredit has attached itself to the very word. Both before and since the days of Thackeray's genial creation, F. B., the "artcritic," has been an accepted type of the person who pronounces with a light heart on matters which he has been at no pains to understand. We all know in what kind of consideration the business is usually held by artists themselves. Not to make too much of the views of Mr. Whistler, who is a humorist and pushes things far, we may read how Mr. Poynter, in his volume of lectures lately published, denounces "the ordinary newspaper ignoramus"; saying that “as a rule English art-critics start on their career by criticising the exhibitions, and trust to time and chance for learning something about art," and quoting with satisfaction an indignant protest once made by the French painter, Ingres, to a similar purport. Nor can it be said that the disesteem in which newspaper criticism is thus held by artists is without warrant, though certainly it had more warrant twenty years ago than now. It has come to pass from a variety of causes, and not least from the stimulating power exercised by a master of letters, Mr. Ruskin, that a greater amount of intelligent interest is now directed to the works of art in England than was ever directed before; and this interest naturally reflects itself in current criticism. Vagaries, indeed, occur; as when our old friend the "Pall Mall Gazette," a journal which within the last five years had been most honorably distinguished for its competent treatment of matters of this kind, the other day amused its readers by suddenly changing its tone, and denouncing some fancied faults in the works of Mr. Burne-Jones

in language of the greatest extravagance. We must remember, however, that the ideals of that painter, being ideals of delicacy rather than of strength, are displeasing to the morbidly robust; and for the paroxysms of aggrieved robustness due allowance must be made. Besides, the outbreak in question was not a fair example of the newspaper criticism of the day.

Criticism of a more temperate and clearsighted kind is not wanting; and for such criticism, with reference to the works of living artists, there is abundance to do. In comparison with the literary fine arts of poetry and romance, in comparison even with music, the manual fine arts play as yet but a small part in our English civilization. Painting is the best understood of those arts, and in painting a great, and, as we said, a constantly increasing number of persons are interested. But of the multitudes who interest themselves in painting, and flock to the yearly exhibitions, the interest of a great many neither goes, nor professes to go, beyond the curiosity and amusement of the hour. It is not the pictures in the exhibitions that they care for, but the life, the greetings, and the gossip. And even of those who really care for the pictures, and are anxious to understand and enjoy them, few feel that they can perfectly understand and enjoy them unaided. It is common, though not so common as it was, to find in persons other wise full of cultivation a real insensibility, acknowledged or unacknowledged, to the effects and pleasures of this art. Picture-blindness in a greater or less degree-the condition of those who have not the faculty or the habit of seeing and feeling for themselves what there is to see and feel in the combination of lines and colors before them-is certainly the condition of the majority. The only cure for picture-blindness lies in habitual and rightly directed looking, and it is the business of criticism to teach people how to look. Comparatively few people are able of themselves to receive and discriminate the visual impressions offered by the works of art, with the accuracy and sensitiveness necessary to their right enjoyment; but most can apprehend the force of words. Criticism employs words to assist and reënforce visual impressions; and the mission of criticism, as applied to the works of art, is fulfilled when it has defined and analyzed the qualities of the object before it in the way best calculated to help a reader to see them for himself.

This may seem but a humble office to claim for the critic of art, who is apt to give himself airs, and to address his observations less to the public than to the artist, whom he tells of his faults, admonishing and putting him right with much frankness and confidence. But criticism

VOL. VII.-21

of this kind, even where it is just, is generally thrown away. Artists are not, in fact, much influenced by any criticism except by that of their brother artists; they know that they possess powers and dexterities which the critic does not possess; and each of them in his way is generally conscious of devoting those powers and dexterities to the production of the best which it is in him to produce. The artist, by the very nature of his vocation, is more likely than other men to be continually doing his best. His vocation is simply to produce a representation or report of something which he has noticed and preferred in life and nature, or imagined concerning the things transcending life and nature; and as his representation or report has no ulterior object except to delight and impress, so there is everything to induce him to make it as delightful and impressive as he knows how. Nay, it may be said, his work has an ulterior object—to sell; and of course it is true that an artist may, for money's sake, be false to the ideal within him, or that petty cares may drag him down, or that he may have mistaken his vocation, and his best be after all not worth having. But even so, the criticism of those who can not do as much as he does, will have little direct influence in changing his way of work. Criticism may, indeed, indirectly affect the practice of artists, by drawing favor away from work that is trivial or mistaken, to work that is serious and in the right direction; by opening the eyes of readers to faults to which habit had made them indulgent, or excellences. which they could not have found out for themselves; in a word, by helping to form the public taste, and to create, so to speak, a market for the best kinds of things. But it is essentially to the public, and not to artists, that the critic has to address himself—to those who know less than he does, and not to those who know more.

The question next arises, What kind and amount of knowledge entitles a person to criticise the works of art at all? Two extreme views are held on this question. According to the one, it is absurd for any person not a practical painter to give an authoritative opinion about a picture at all; according to the other, painting is an art which addresses not specialists only, but every one, and about which, therefore, every one has a right to form and to express an opinion.

If the first of these views were true, and only painters had a right to speak about painting, then the public would have to do without guidance of any kind in the matter, since members of the same profession are in good feeling debarred from expressing dispraise of one another. Moreover, though on the technical points on which alone a painter himself wants advice, the criticism of another painter is the only criticism worth

having, yet the kind of criticism wanted for the public is a kind which painters are very seldom qualified to give. For the public, what is wanted is a criticism that shall be able to sympathize with the most various ideals, and to define, interpret, and do justice to the most opposite kinds of excellence; whereas an artist, if he has a true vocation for his art, is generally so constituted as to see life and nature under special aspects, and in a manner personal to himself. Those aspects he can not choose but report; according to that manner, he can not choose but work; and it is the most difficult thing in the world for him fully to sympathize with the aims of a brother artist who sees life and nature in a different light. Once or twice, indeed, in a generation, there appears a painter accomplished in his art, yet without personal instincts or predilections strong enough to narrow his sympathies; and these are the ideal critics. Sir Charles Eastlake, in England, and M. Fromentin, in France, may be mentioned as distinguished cases in point; but as these men were working artists, so they necessarily abstained from contemporary, and limited themselves to historical, criticism.

The second view, according to which the natural man is competent, without study or experience, to judge and to express his judgment of works of art, is one that hardly needs discussion. The judgments so formed and expressed are, in fact, worth no more than the utterances of inexperience are worth on any subject whatever. Let them be heard with courtesy, but by no means with deference. The faculty of the eye for accurately and sensitively discriminating the qualities of the combination of lines and colors before it, both in themselves and in relation to the natural objects which they are intended to recall, is, as we have said, a comparatively rare faculty, and one which comes to most people only by cultivation. If any one proposes to instruct others concerning pictures or works of art in general, the first thing of which he has to make sure is that he be not himself, like the majority, half or three parts picture-blind. The chances are that he is so, unless he has made the pleasures of fine art a large and serious portion of the pleasures of his life, and unless he has spent much time and trouble in the pursuit and discrimination of those pleasures. In the practical matter of buying a work of art or a curiosity, no one would offer advice who was not conscious of having trained his eye to the perception of those niceties -those minute material differences of form, color, substance, and surface—which distinguish a genuine thing from a false, an original from a copy, and which to the untrained eye are imperceptible. The beauty and excellence of a work of art depends on visible conditions almost as subtile,

though not the same, as those which determine its authenticity or its spuriousness; and to appreciate them with certainty, and at once, demands powers of observation almost as thoroughly trained. Why, then, should we listen to the judgment as to what is beautiful or excellent in art, of persons who have never trained their powers of observation or appreciation at all, and to whose judgment we should never listen for a moment as to what was genuine or false? We have the right to ask from any one who wishes to be heard on these things that he should do more than go through the exhibitions each year, having perhaps frequented the studios of a few friends in the interval, and write down whatever crosses his mind during the progress. We have the right to ask, at least, that the study of the works of art shall have been a real part of his life, that he shall have taken trouble to educate his eye, and that he shall have steadied and prepared his judgment for the appreciation of contemporary work in the familiarity of that of other days and other schools.

Starting with this for the least amount of qualification which will be required of him, the critic has next to be on his guard against his own literary ambition. If he is to be useful in his proper capacity, he must remember that his writing is but auxiliary to the works of that art which he criticises. The artist is the creator and inventor, the critic is but the commentator and exponent; and an indifferent poem, picture, or statue is a higher achievement than the criticism which points out why it is indifferent. Fine art, whether manual or literary, reports directly concerning life and nature; criticism only interprets and characterizes the report, and makes it more intelligible and better known. If any one has great and new things to say concerning life and nature, let him say them in the appropriate artistic or didactic form; let him be a writer of poetry or romance, an essayist, or a moralist. But if he only has things to say concerning art, let him be careful to keep to the point. In discussing, in any given case, the artistic result into which the materials of life and nature have already been worked up by another, let the critic keep his attention fixed on the actual qualities of the work before him, and on the precise message which the artist has intended to convey. The temptation is very great to wander, and to make excursions of his own into life and nature in directions not relevant to the case.

It is impossible to lay down a law for genius; and the greatness of Mr. Ruskin's achievement in literature depends, it may be said with truth, on nothing so much as on the very range and frequency of his excursions, on the rousing and illuminating utterances concerning life and na

ture to which the consideration of the works of art continually draws him on. But the greatness of a writer's general achievement is not the measure of his contributions to sound criticism; and even of Mr. Ruskin it is surely true that his interpretations of the works of art would, as such, have been more just and final had he been able to keep them more severely to the point; while for writers not of genius the observance of this law is essential. To observe it is a matter of no small self-denial; since the considerations suggested by a work of art, but not relevant to its true appreciation, are often the considerations most effective to write and pleasant to read about. This is not true of the works of literary art, which deal with life in its sequence and duration, with the stir and movement of thought, passion, and event; things which criticism can always discuss in an interesting way. But it is true of the works of painting and sculpture, which deal not with the stir and movement of life, but with its stationary aspects, imprisoning visibly for ever some crisis of event or passion, or perpetuating some felicitous moment of repose. In the works of these arts the point of the performance, the value of the message conveyed, lies precisely in considerations which are not the best to write about.

The ideas or story represented must not tempt the critic away, as they are very apt to do, from the mode of their representation. By the mode of representation I mean the aspect of the work as it meets the eye; its general character and conception, the types and expressions of the personages, their arrangement and composition, the beauty and justice of the design and color, the conduct of light and shade, the charm or want of charm of the parts and of the whole, their relations to natural fact, their harmony among each other, their degrees of finish or neglect, of force or refinement, the particular fashion of the presentation and quality of the execution. It is in these visible and palpable terms that painting delivers its report of life and nature, and upon their quality in each case that the power and significance of the report depend. But these are things which it is far from easy to write about without being vaguely technical on the one hand, or luxuriantly descriptive on the other, and in either case uninteresting.

If, instead of sticking carefully to the point, and running thereby the risk of failing to interest, a critic determines to interest at all costs, he may very easily do so by writing, not about the picture itself, but about thoughts more or less closely connected with it. But then he will have forfeited his reason to exist; he will not have performed his proper function of interpreting the works of art to those who can not sufficiently judge of them for themselves; and, in the long

run, his criticisms may be injurious to art itself. Finding that the public are led to care only about the story or the ideas presented in a picture, artists may attend only to these, and neglect the quality of the presentment. It is not long since this neglect of the essence of the artist's business was the prevailing characteristic of English art. Let us take a case in point, the case of a picture which is typical of many, and which had in its day so famous a success that to disparage it now can hurt nobody—I mean Mr. Frith's "Railway-Station." The principle upon which a picture like this is painted is the principle of putting together as many episodes and anecdotes as the scene will hold, of a kind which everybody can recognize, and about which, when recognized, it is easy to write and entertaining to read. But criticism, in thus entertaining the reader with a narration of the episodes in the scene, draws him altogether away from the main point-namely, the presence or absence of pictorial power and refinement in their visible presentment. And if about the qualities of pictorial power and refinement neither critics nor the public trouble themselves, why then should the artist?

The class of subject which Mr. Frith dealt with in this and some other famous pictures is one perfectly legitimate for art to treat. There are schools of criticism, indeed, which maintain that the only legitimate enterprise of art is to represent the modern world as it really is. We shall certainly not join the cry of those who, in France or elsewhere, uphold this doctrine, and declare that no other art is genuine or worth attempting than that which devotes itself to la vérité vraie and la vie vivante—that is, to the literal rendering of facts without compromise or embellishment, and to the representation of life in its daily agitation and commonness. To say this is, on the one hand, to deny the rights of the imagination, and on the other to forget that painting, with its limitation to a single point of time, has, after all, but a feeble hold on the bustle of life and its realities. But without joining the fanatics of realism and modernism, we can at least welcome their experiments when they are made with a due regard to the conditions of the art. A most interesting series of such experiments, depending entirely on qualities proper to the painter's art, and offering little temptation to the excursions of literary criticism, has been shown this season in London. I allude to the exhibition of M. de Nittis, an accomplished Italian master who has lived both in Paris and in our own country, and has caught and turned to pictorial account the physiognomy of modern cities with a justice and an insight that hardly any other painter of similar subjects has equaled.

One picture was taken at the level of the Thames beneath one of the great railway-bridges, and showed the very color and flow of the muddy tide overshadowed by the black mass of the bridge; bringing out with admirable effect the grimy grandeur of the great black girders overhead, their hard outlines softened with straggling waifs of black smoke, while across a space of open, copper-colored sky on either hand drifted trails of more black smoke and white steam from passing engines. In another picture we looked from the parapet of the Thames Embankment in a fog; and the value and power of the work depended entirely upon the subtile sense of space and mystery expressed in the color of the dense atmosphere, with its shifting gleams of lilac or coppery light, and in the perfect physiognomical truth of the three laborers who were represented, with precisely the right measure of force, definition, and value in the atmosphere, as they leaned smoking on the parapet, and a gleam from the sky caught the wreaths which issued from their pipes. A third exhibited the very life of the city crowd as it may be seen on any wet day looking across from the Mansion House toward the Bank of England. But in all this medley of rich passengers and poor, policemen and shoeblacks, crossing-sweepers, cabs, vans, and omnibuses with their freights and drivers, in all this familiar turmoil of human life and character the artist has not thought it worth while to introduce a single episode the narration of which could render entertaining a literary description of the picture. An artist in literature, dealing with the same scene and the same human materials, might naturally have found in it suggestions for a hundred stories; he would have thought of the fortunes and destinies of the actors before and after their momentary appearance in the crowd, and his imagination would have woven for them in the past and future dramas without number. But the painter is not concerned with their past or future, but only with their momentary appearance and visible relations. Each type is an admirable and unforced study of English character, physiognomy, attitude, and, if the critic wishes to convey a sense of the excellence of the work, it is these points he must drive home in words as he best can-these, and the surprising justness of observation and rendering by which the retreating figures are dimmed and softened in the atmosphere, and the architecture and gas-lamps receive their exact value against the sky, and the colored wares on the wagons and umbrellas of the omnibus-drivers serve as points of color amid the grayness and the wet.

Granting, then, that the first thing to be required of critics of art is the faculty of sight and

judgment, whereby he is saved from praising or blaming at random, and the second, the habit of literary self-denial, whereby he is on his guard against writing that which shall be readable but irrelevant, what is now the third thing which we shall require of him? The third thing is that he shall be, so far as possible, impartial. This does not mean that his writing shall never be controversial, since false tendencies and unfounded pretensions may need to be discouraged, and since for new and unfashionable kinds of excellence it is impossible, without controversy, to gain recognition. But it does mean that he shall be quick to appreciate not one kind only, but all kinds of real excellence.

It is unreasonable to quarrel about matters which have no practical consequences; but controversy is so much the habit of our lives, and we are so eager to impose our predilections by argument and theory, and still more our aversions, that we often refuse to recognize more than one kind of artistic excellence at a time. The theory to which I have already alluded, the theory of the fanatical realists and modernists, who will have it that all art is obsolete and false which is not modern and realistic, is a signal case in point. This theory has been defended with great force and ingenuity, and with reference to the works of literature as well as to those of the manual arts, over and over again in France, and chiefly by those whose views on the new functions of art are bound up with their views on the new order of society. But all such exclusive theories are obviously shallow. Ever since the proscriptions of the Catholic ages were broken down by the revolutionary Dutch school of the seventeenth century, the aims of modern art have become diverse and many-sided, and diverse and many-sided they will continue to the end. Some minds will be most impressed by the actual life round about them, and their reports will be nothing but reports of life and nature as they literally are. Others will be most impressed with the thoughts and imaginations of the past, and their reports will be reports, based only on what is choicest in life and nature, of things imagined as existing in a brighter world. The tendency of modern life is to assume aspects less and less capable of yielding occasion for the more potent and enchanting effects of art. The great departments of portrait and landscape will always remain; but the collective life of our communities can yield at best, if they are to be quite literally represented, some such results as we have described in the works of M. de Nittis. Interesting as these results are-full of truth, animation, atmosphere, admirably just and accomplished as records of the passing hour-yet capable of giving the best pleasures of art they

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