II
The question is rather What is the practice of the artist than What ought to be the practice of the artist. When, in some future epoch of thought, these questions about fine art shall be more generally understood by the writers and thinkers than they now are, it may become possible for some Ruskin of the future to preach an acceptable creed as to the proper mission of the artist; but it has not been possible for the Ruskins of the past or of the present to do so, simply because they have failed to understand the conditions under which the artist does his work. There is very little use in exhorting a man to better things until you are able to sympathize with what he is already engaged upon. Now, it requires but a limited observation of artists to ascertain that they are little occupied in narration, in description, in preaching, in devotion, or in jesting; but a very long continued and minute observance of their ways will leave the beholder in the same mind about these, and more and more convinced that artists are chiefly occupied in producing works of art and nothing else. And what are the works of art which they are trying to produce? In the matter of painting, which is our present subject, it is unfortunate that the word impression has been used in a special sense as describing the way of work of a certain special body of painters, because it more accurately described the way in which most painters work than any other single word will suggest it. The object of the landscape-painter is commonly to paint something upon his canvas which will convey to the spectator an impression which he, the landscape-painter, has already received from external nature. That impression may have come upon him during the watches of the night, as he thought about what he had seen by day; or it may have come upon him instantaneously as he faced a piece of hill-side with trees, or a single old tree. Suppose it even to be a sunset sky, with miles of ocean illuminated by the colored fire above; it is with no hope of adequately representing that sea and sky that he sits down to paint, but he proposes to paint an impression which that sea and sky have made upon his sensitive mind, and which he thinks will be interesting when painted. That, then, is the landscape-painter's subject. Not the whole truth, nor even any essential part of the truth, about a hay-stack or a mountain-range, but an interesting artistic impression made upon the artist's mind by the hay-stack or the mountain-range. Here, as in literature, there are nobler subjects and less noble subjects; but here much less than in literature is the nobility of the work of art affected by the nobility of the subject. In two pictures by Homer Martin, one represents the stretch of an Adirondack lake, with mountain and forest and a great wealth of varied cloud-form in the sky above; while the other represents only the ridge of a hill seen from a point so low that the ridge cuts the sky and nothing else is seen against the sky but the tops of a few trees which grow on the farther slope. It is impossible to say which of the two pictures is the nobler. The bigger and fuller picture may, indeed, be a greater work of art than the smaller one could ever be, and yet that is so very small a fact! What the artist has done is, first, to make a design out of the material afforded him by a broad landscape and the varied sky, and in the other instance to make a design out of a monotonous grassy slope, a few tree-tops, left unaccounted for except by the beholder's intelligence, and a very uniform gray firmament beyond. Who shall say which is the nobler design of the two?
Mr. George Moore has published an essay well worthy of consideration, in which he undertakes to show that the "failure of the nineteenth century" in painting is that it has assumed the necessity of taking a subject in the literary sense, in the moral sense, in the sense of those frequenters of picture-galleries who prefer the picture which is to them the most like a novel, or a pathetic poem in words. The assumption is, and it is certainly a safe one, that those persons who are attracted to these pictures in order that they may study archæology or feel a religious thrill, or be made curious and inclined to look up the facts in either story, or, finally, to feel the domestic pathos of the scene at the sick child's bedside—those students of art are on the wrong track, and will never discover what, in most cases, the painter is after when he paints a picture. Italian art and Dutch art had died before "the subject" had appeared, and it was not until the end of the eighteenth century that this evil thing "really began to make itself felt, and like the potato blight, it soon became clear that it had come to stay." And the conclusion is that if the painter would now produce pictures worthy of himself he must reject the temptation to attract spectators by tickling their feelings or showing off his learning, and must paint pictures with painter's subjects only.