II
The great genius Hokusai, who has obtained for popular art in Japan a success comparable to that of the best classic masterpieces of that country and to the drawings and etchings of Rembrandt, a master of an altogether kindred nature, wrote a little treatise on the difference of aim noticeable in European and Japanese art. From the few Dutch pictures which he had been able to examine, he concluded that European art attempted to deceive the eye, whereas Japanese art laboured to express life, to suggest movement, and to harmonise colour. What is meant is easily grasped when we set before the mind's eye a picture, by Teniers and a page of Hokusai's "Mangwa." On the other hand, if one chose a sketch by Rembrandt to represent Dutch art, the difference could no longer be apparent. If the aim of European art had ever in serious examples been to deceive the eye, our painting would rank with legerdemain and Maskelyne's famous box trick; for it is to be doubted if it could ever so well have attained its end as even a second-rate conjurer can. I have cited a passage in which Reynolds confronts the work of great artists with the illusions of the camera obscura (see p. 237). The adept musical performer who reproduces the noises of a farmyard is the true parallel to the lesser Dutch artists; he deceives the ear far better than they deceive the eye. For every picture has a surface which, unless very carefully lighted, must immediately destroy the illusion, even if it were otherwise perfect. Nevertheless, Dürer in the foregoing passage seems to accept Hokusai's verdict that the aim of his painting is to deceive the eye; forgetful of all that he has elsewhere written about the necessity of beauty, the necessity of composition, the superiority of rough sketches over finished works.
When a painter has conceived in his heart a vision of beauty, whether he suggests it with a few strokes of the pen or elaborates it as thoroughly as Jan Van Eyck did, he wishes it to be taken as a report of something seen. This is as different from wishing to deceive the eye as for some one to say "and then a dog barked," instead of imitating the barking of a dog. A circumstantial description in words and a picture by Van Eyck or Veronese are equally intended to pass as reports of something visually conceived or actually seen. Pictures would have to be made peep-shows of before they could veritably deceive; and Jan Van Beers, a modern Dutchman, actually turned some of his paintings into peep-shows. Dürer in the following passage is speaking of the separate details or objects which go to make up a picture, not of the picture as a whole; he never tried to make peep-shows; his signature or an inscription is often used to give the very surface that must destroy the peep-show illusion a definite decorative value. The rest of his remarks have become commonplaces; nor has he written at such length as to give them their true limitations and intersubordination. They will be easily understood by those who remember that art is concerned with producing the illusion of a true report of something seen, not that of an actual vision. Such a report may be slight and brief; it may be stammered by emotion; it may have been confused or tortured to any degree by the mental condition of him who delivers it: if it produces the conviction of his sincerity, it achieves the only illusion with which art is concerned, and its value will depend on its beauty and the beauty of the means employed to deliver it.