II.
“We have not talked much about politics, eh? And a good thing, too. One only got really well into the atmosphere of political life at Washington; and then, after all, one heard more about literary copyright than anything else. I find I have made a note of a letter I read somewhere recently from an American painter, in support of taxing importations of fine art, more particularly pictures. It seems to me this is a grave mistake. I had no idea that protection, as it is called, existed so generally in America.”
“You have here,” I said, “the extreme of protective duties, as we in England have the other extreme of an unreciprocal free trade.”
“I can understand a reasonable protective tariff for a commercial industry; but art should surely go free. For a country that as yet possesses no great school of painting nor sculpture of her own, to obstruct, nay, almost prohibit, the entry of foreign work, must be to handicap her own rising genius. The examples of the famous masters of Greece and Rome, of France, and Holland, and England, are necessary for the American student, and free traffic in the works of great modern artists would have an elevating tendency on public taste.”
“As a rule American artists are favorable to the free importation of foreign pictures. They favor it from your own stand-point, the educational point of view,” I said.
“Moreover, I can quite imagine American artists who are permitted all the privileges of the art schools and galleries of Europe, and who sell their pictures in the Old World without let or hindrance, being annoyed at the inhospitality of their own country in this respect,” he replied; “Boughton, Bierstadt, Whistler, and other well-known American painters, for example.”
“And so they are, no doubt.”
“As a matter of fact public opinion in the United States, if it could be tested, would, I imagine, be on the side of admitting pictures, bric-à-brac, and books without duty; though the progress of what is called the modern free-trade movement is likely rather to retard than advance the interests of a free importation of fine-art productions.”
“In what way?” he asked. “The leading idea of a great reduction of tariffs is in the direction of abolition for protective purposes, a tariff for revenue only. In that case luxuries only would be heavily taxed, and the so-called free-traders, who support this view, would probably count in pictures and bric-à-brac with luxuries.”
“I should call them necessities,” Irving replied; “for the mind and the imagination require feeding just as much as the body. Besides, how are the Americans going to judge of the work of their own painters without comparison, and current daily comparison too, with foreign artists? The stage is as much of a luxury as paintings. Why let the English actor and his artistic baggage and belongings come in? It is a pleasant thing to remember that, under all circumstances, whatever the troubles between the two countries, America has always welcomed English players, and that has given her some of the best theatrical families she has,—the Booths, Jeffersons, Wallacks, and others. If the same enlightened policy in regard to painting, pottery, and bric-à-brac had been carried out in the matter of the stage, we should have seen just as fine an art appreciation applied to pictures as to plays and players. I am sure of it. If the musician and his works, if the opera, had been handicapped as art in other directions is, would America hold her high place in respect of choral societies, orchestral bands? And would she enjoy, as she does, the grand operas that are now produced in all her great cities? No. While, as you know, I claim no other credit for my method of presenting Shakespeare and the legitimate drama upon the stage than a performance of managerial duty, I am quite sure that, had European stage-art and artists been hampered for twenty years by restrictive taxes and other fiscal obstructions, the Lyceum Company and work would not have been welcomed as they have been, wherever we have pitched our tent. The same freedom for paintings would have made Watts, Millais, Tadema, Leighton, Pettie, Leader, Cole, Long, not to mention the works of earlier masters, as familiar here as at home, and would have crowded American homes with examples, original and copies, of the best schools of Europe. Would not that have helped American painters? Of course it would.”