HIS ART
With all his definiteness of opinion and sincere belief in the accuracy of his own judgment, Millais was too keenly alive to the varieties of nature, too earnest in his observation of the life about him, to fall into the mechanical habit of repeating himself. He was robust, modern and practical, a man whose instinct was active rather than contemplative; and he might even be said to be wanting in imagination, if by imagination is understood the capacity to evolve things curious and unusual out of the inner consciousness.
But if he lacked imagination in this sense, he more than made up for the deficiency by the exquisite acuteness of his insight into natural facts, and by the depth of his judgment about the essentials of art. He made no mistakes through ignorance or want of proper preparation; and he never failed because he grudged the preliminary thought needed to carry to success a great undertaking. Indeed, the one thing that he always preached was application, constant industry devoted to the task of finding out how work should be done. Carelessness he condemned; but he had no love for that type of performance which shows the trouble that the producer has taken over it. He contended, justly, that it was the duty of the artist to so master the executive details of his profession that his work should impress the spectator by its ready certainty rather than its conscientious toil.
The need to strive for the quality of freshness in technical expression was, however, very far from being the only thing he insisted upon. He had, as well, a strong belief in the importance of a definitely independent attitude with regard to choice of pictorial motive, and selection of suitable material. But beyond this he advocated special precautions against any narrowing of the artist's practice by too close adherence to one kind of picture. He once put this conviction into words of considerable significance. "Individuality is not all that should be looked to; a varied manner must be cultivated as well. I believe that however admirably he may paint in a certain method, or however perfectly he may render a certain class of subject, the artist should not be content to adhere to a speciality of manner or method. A fine style is good, but it is not everything—it is not absolutely necessary."
Certainly Sir John carried out these principles in his own production. He had many sides to his character as an artist, and used his powers of observation with splendid freedom. His popularity was gained not by the reiteration of any one set of ideas, but by showing himself equally capable in many forms of painting. In his figure pictures he was by turns dramatic, romantic, sternly realistic, and at times sentimental in a robust way; in his portraits he was incisive, direct, and accurate; in his landscapes precise, exact, and searchingly correct in his rendering of what was before him; and in his water-colours and drawings in black and white delightfully facile and ingenious. He had no speciality, and no set conviction that there was one particular thing he could do better than anything else; so that he never restrained his love of variety or bound himself by limitations based simply upon expediency.
In any classification of his works, the first place must necessarily be given to his figure paintings and portraits. Indeed, they make up the bulk of his achievement, and represent the fullest growth of his capacity. The history of his life is principally written in them. The charm of his personality distinguishes them all—a charm as evident in the simpler and more limited subjects as in those which made great demands upon his powers of invention and contrivance. There was never any suggestion that he did not honestly feel the motive with which he was dealing, or that he was not perfectly convinced that what he had chosen was worthy of record. If he failed, it was because he had misapprehended the suitability of his material, not because he had been trying to do something outside the range of his belief.
Curiously, perhaps, his honesty and directness were at the same time the source of what was best in his pictures, and the cause of their chief weaknesses. Had he not been so frank and wholesome-minded he could never have arrived at that exquisite appreciation of the daintiness of childhood to which he gave expression in a great many of his most successful canvases, and could never have gained, as he did, the hearts of all classes of art lovers. Only a worshipper of children, with the most absolute sympathy with their ways and habits, could have painted pictures as persuasive as Cherry Ripe, A Waif, Caller Herrin', The Princess Elizabeth, and that long series of pretty studies of which Perfect Bliss, Dropped from the Nest, Forbidden Fruit, and Little Mrs. Gamp may be quoted as types. Only a man with the happiest sense of delicate shades of character could have commanded the extraordinary popularity that came to him as a result of his production of pictures such as these.
Yet it was to these very qualities that was due his occasional want of success in dealing with stronger themes. His dramatic pictures descended at times into an artlessness that was only redeemed from feebleness by its obvious sincerity. They failed because he concerned himself so much with matters of fact that he missed the greater possibilities of the subjects he had selected, and because in his desire to be real and convincing he forgot that there was a need to appeal to the imagination of people who would not be satisfied with plain statements.
THE VALE OF REST.
On the other hand it is possible to select from among his subject pictures several that prove him to have had brilliant moments when he could reach the greater heights of pictorial invention. There are quite half a dozen of his canvases which by their wonderful vitality, their deep significance, and force of expression make good a claim to the possession of the finest kind of mastery. The Vale of Rest, The North-West Passage, The Order of Release, The Ruling Passion, The Boyhood of Raleigh, and perhaps Effie Deans show that he could grasp with all possible firmness and state with unflinching decision, motives that called for great mental exertion. Their qualities are those that come from a minute insight not only into details of character, but also into the principles which govern the dramatic side of pictorial art. No false note spoils the harmony of these compositions, no touch of uncertainty or divided opinion; they are confident and assured, and their meaning is not to be questioned. They express the thoughts of a man who, with all his straightforwardness and simplicity, could now and then look beneath the surface and work out problems far more profound than it was his every-day habit to investigate.
His romance, especially, had this merit of being well thought out. It was never complicated by excess of details, and was strict in its adherence to the main facts of the story, without irrelevant matter introduced to complete picturesquely an imperfect conception. The Knight Errant is a very good example of his method of dealing with an incident evolved from his own fancy; and Victory, O Lord! is equally characteristic as an instance of the power with which he could seize upon the salient points of a subject suggested to him by written history. Many of his finer paintings were illustrative records of the impressions made upon him by things he had read, and expressions of the instinct that brought him throughout his life such success as a draughtsman in black and white; but they were only occasionally direct illustrations of particular passages from books. More often what he gave was his view of what might have happened, rather than a plain reproduction in paint of what was already fixed in words.
He preferred to base himself more upon the spirit than the letter of a story, to find a new reading for himself, and to treat it with a considerable degree of independence. In The Princes in the Tower he followed none of the accepted versions, and in Effie Deans he made a subject out of the slightest possible suggestion in the text of the romance; yet both pictures show that peculiar air of conviction which results from a perfect understanding of what is essential for the proper application of dramatic material. In these, as in almost all his renderings of incident, appears his habit of attacking not the climax of the story, but rather one of its earlier stages, an intermediate moment when the action is still in progress and the final result is suggested rather than clearly foreshadowed. This habit was always strong upon him. It gave their particular interest to such early works as The Huguenot, The Black Brunswicker, The Proscribed Royalist, and The Escape of a Heretic, just as much as it did to later pictures like The Girlhood of St. Theresa, or Speak! Speak!; and by introducing a touch of speculation into the record of his thoughts he enhanced the fascination which was never wanting in his sturdy inventions.
Indeed, there was in every branch of his figure-painting some sufficient reason for his popularity, some distinct attractiveness of mental quality to add convincingly to the impression created by his superlative command over technicalities. He could be tender, dainty, and refined in his studies of children; serious and solemn in his symbolical compositions; pathetic, vigorous, and passionate by turns in his subject-pictures; and through all ran a vein of sentiment that was always wholesome, clean, and intelligible. He never affected to be influenced by feelings that were not honestly natural to him, nor did he pretend to represent anything that he did not believe in sincerely and without question. What he painted was invariably what he felt at the moment; and, whether it was a masterpiece or a comparative failure it expressed simply the appeal that the subject had made to him; and his response to this appeal was always unconventional and definite.
He trusted in the same way to a personal impression of his sitter when he set himself to paint a portrait. What he wanted was to show that he understood the individuality of the man or woman before him, and that his understanding had helped him to make clear to others the special idiosyncrasies that separated that man or woman from the ordinary crowd. Portraiture to him was a matter of observation, of receptiveness to suggestion, and acceptance of what was visible, rather than an artistic process which enabled him to give free scope to his inventive instincts.
Perhaps he was less analytical and discriminating in his pictures of women. They seemed to appeal to him less than men did as subjects for psychological study. What he preferred to dwell upon were the physical charms of femininity, beauty of face and form, elegance of carriage, and that rounded fulness of development that argues perfect healthiness of body and mind. The stateliness of the card-players in Hearts are Trumps, the air of high breeding and conscious power which distinguishes the portrait of the Duchess of Westminster, and the more matronly splendour of Mrs. Bischoffsheim, mark the chief variations in his manner of painting womankind; occasionally only did he diverge into more detailed character, as in Miss Eveleen Tennant, Mrs. Jopling, and Mrs. Perugini; but as a rule he was content to treat the freshness and brilliant vitality of his feminine sitters, and to leave untouched their possibilities of passion or strong emotion. His men were full of vigorous aspirations, restrained for the moment, yet near the surface and ready at any time to break into activity; but his women were serene and unmoved, prepared, perhaps, for conquest, but wrapped in a reserve that would not allow them to make the first advances.
That his preference for repose in representation did not lead the artist into a dry convention, or into any disregard of the essential points of difference between people, is very evident if a comparison is made of his chief portraits. Beneath their reserve appears a wonderful variety of manner, and a superb power of interpretation. They are studied, exact, and intensely real. No perfunctory labour is seen in them, and their value is diminished by no slurring over of the little things which help to define the more intimate characteristics of the modern man.
The unquestionable popularity that Millais gained by his excursions into landscape was equally due to the fact that he was a student of nature, not an imaginative interpreter of what she presented. He dealt with facts and left fancies almost entirely alone. In the series of canvases that began with Chill October, and ended with Halcyon Weather, there was infinite industry, marvellous accuracy, perfect veracity of record, but little effort to be anything but absolutely exact in his statement of what he saw. His amazing patience and his surprising quickness of vision, enabled him to grasp with easy confidence the plain truths of nature, and his command of brushwork ensured a rare perfection in his pictorial expression of the matter that he had selected for representation. Nothing was implied or left in sketchy incompleteness, because his patience had failed him before he had realised the complicated fulness of his subject. He spared himself no toil to arrive at what seemed to him to be the perfection of nature, and he was as minutely attentive, as surely certain of himself, as he ever was in his figure work.
As a necessary consequence, however, of this manner of working, he never could be ranked among the inspired painters of the open air, nor could he ever be said to have dealt exhaustively with the problems presented by natural phenomena. He remained untouched by the subtleties of atmospheric effect, by the varieties of momentary illumination, or by the fleeting glories of aerial colour, which provide the student of nature's devices with the chief incentive to artistic effort. He was always too much concerned with the things at his feet, with matter that he could dissect and investigate, to give much thought to the broad and comprehensive scheme of which these things formed part. Whatever he arrived at in the way of a record of a natural effect was reached not so much by thorough understanding of the effect as a whole, as by an amazingly acute interpretation of the influence exercised by it upon the details upon which his eyes were fixed.
An excellent instance of this is afforded in The Blind Girl, where he has given little enough attention to the grandeur of the passing storm-clouds, and has concentrated the whole of his energies upon the rendering, with supreme fidelity, of dripping weeds and a drenched hillside lighted by the rays of the setting sun. As a record of microscopic insight, the picture is superlatively successful; it could hardly be more closely reasoned out; but, as a representation of Nature in one of her most impressive moods, it is ineffectual and unconvincing. So, too, his most popular landscape, Chill October, falls short of greatness, because it is too plainly studied bit by bit, and part by part, and built up precisely by the careful putting in place of material collected for the pictorial purpose. It holds together, not because it has one great dominating intention, but because its construction is so ingenious, and its mechanism so workmanlike, that no single detail can be criticised as out of relation to the rest. It can hardly be called learned in design, nor can it be said to have any conspicuous dignity of style; yet the knowledge of form, the intimate observation of the growth of riverside vegetation, and the appreciation of autumnal colouring, which were turned to account by the artist in his treatment of the subject, make the canvas prominent among the greatest nature studies of modern times.
No consideration of his influence and no review of his performance would be complete without an appreciative reference to his services to black and white. As a painter he has a secure place among the chief modern masters of the world; but what he did for pictorial art was paralleled, if not surpassed, by his assertion of the dignity and importance of illustration as a form of occupation for even the greatest of art workers.
It has been well said that if Millais had never devoted himself to the painting of oil pictures, but had given his life entirely to the work of book illustration, his position would still have been indisputable, and his magnificent ability would have been amply demonstrated. There is, indeed, a great deal of truth in this contention. Although the world would have been the poorer for the loss of his masterly essays in brushwork, and of his wonderful exercises in the arrangement of strong colour, it would have possessed extremely significant evidence of the reality of his artistic judgment, and of the adaptability of his inventive powers. In his black and white work he showed frequently a side of his capacity that appeared in his painting only on great occasions, a sense of dramatic exigencies, a feeling for illustrative meanings, far beyond what was suggested by the general run of his pictures. As an interpreter of the fancies of other men he was exceptionally intelligent, with a memorable grasp of the salient points of the story and a remarkable facility in summarising essentials. He was afraid of nothing in the way of a subject, and spared no labour to make his drawings completely expressive.
His love of black and white was indeed a genuine one. Illustration was not to him, as it so often is with other men, a mere expedient, resorted to because an unappreciative public refused to recognise the merit and importance of his paintings, and abandoned gladly as soon as he found he could make a sufficient income without it. On the contrary, he welcomed the opportunities with which this branch of art practice provided him, and regarded them as of the highest value. For more than twenty years he was a prolific illustrator, constantly busy with drawings that were reproduced in all kinds of books and magazines; and even in his later life occasional examples appeared to prove that his hand had not lost its cunning and that his interest in this type of work was undiminished.
How deeply he felt about this particular subject is, perhaps, best proved by his constant advocacy, within and without the Academy, of the claims of illustrative draughtsmen to official recognition. Before the Royal Commission on the Academy he strenuously urged that workers in black and white should be declared eligible for election to membership of that institution as draughtsmen purely, instead of being required to disguise themselves as picture painters before they could hope for admission; and his pleading then expressed a conviction which remained strong in him till his death. He spoke with real authority on a matter that, both by inclination and association, he was fully qualified to discuss. His experience of illustrative drawing, and his acquaintance with the history of its development, were both peculiarly intimate; and he knew exactly what were the possibilities of influence possessed by the craft.
About his technical methods there is comparatively little to be said. He was not a worker who concerned himself very deeply over devices of execution, or cared to codify his system of painting in accordance with scientific principles. He drew well, and handled his materials with the sureness and confidence that came from complete knowledge of what he wanted to do. His chief desire, as has been already stated, was to retain in pictures that had really cost him deep thought and prolonged labour an aspect of spontaneity and freshness; to be direct in statement and simple in expression. He had a well-founded belief that the finest art was that in which the meaning of the artist was to be realised with the least amount of seeking and with as little inquiry as possible about his intentions. Consequently, he strove all his life to master the intricacies of his craft, so that no hesitation on his part might make his meaning vague or indefinite.
Speed he always had. Even in the apparently laborious period of his Pre-Raphaelite performance he could, and did, paint with amazing facility—the head of Ferdinand in Ferdinand lured by Ariel, was, for instance, completed in five hours—and as years went on his certainty became even more indisputable. Cherry Ripe was painted in a week, The Last Rose of Summer in not more than four days, and for many of his portraits half a dozen sittings sufficed to give him all that was necessary for the achievement of a masterpiece. His quickness of apprehension and accuracy of vision helped him to a prompt decision as to choice of material; and when his direction was once fixed, his inexhaustible energy carried him easily through the work of production. Nature had well equipped him for his profession, and wisely he followed the lines she had laid down.