It seems to me that the largeness and peace of nature appeal most forcibly to the artist. Such pictures as the "Conway Estuary near Gogarth Abbey," "Llandudno Bay—a Nocturne," "A Sunny Field near Llanberis," are so musical with the respite and peace that the artist's soul found there. But whatever note she touches nature seldom finds him unresponsive. "Conway Castle and Quay" lazily dozing in the noon-tide heat, the cliffs like sleeping dragons guarding the lonely shore of the "Barmouth Estuary," the sullen gloom of "Moelwyn," the glamour and enchantment as of fairyland in the "Silvery Light on Conway Shore," the rush and resounding din of "The Swallow Falls,"—all these experiences has the artist lived through and stamped for us on the canvas.
There is one reward nature gives to those who love her with Mr. Fowler's self-abandonment, which the illustrations of this volume prove that the artist has gathered abundantly. He never seems to repeat himself. His work has something of nature's infinity, her prodigality and inexhaustible resources. We not only pass from scene to scene, but we share the myriad adventures of the days and hear the tramp of the seasons resounding through his pictures.
Mr. Fowler once adorned the walls of his studio with this motto: "The world has been enough invented: let us discover it." He meant that he had had the temerity to look at the world for himself, and that he wanted us also to see something of the glorious things he could discover—not invent. On another occasion he said: "I always laugh when I hear people say that my ideal is the camera. They never see the reality clearly enough in all its beauty to wish to reproduce it in its entirety. I would willingly be a camera if I could get some of the wonders I see in the fact." "Go out one of these glorious mornings," he added, "and look at the scene just as it lies on the retina, and ask what is wrong with this beautiful thing that one should have to haul in 'memories of other days' and other people's pictures."
Mr. Fowler's landscapes show that he is not one of those who fly to dreams to satisfy the craving for beauty that exists in every human breast. The reality, he feels, is infinitely more wonderful than anything we could imagine. But the full significance of reality is not displayed on the highway so that even the most careless and indifferent cannot fail to see it: it is only to the lover that the beauty of reality is revealed.
In a remarkable article dealing with certain modern developments in the art of painting which Mr. Fowler has recently published, a passage occurs which throws considerable light on his own aims as a painter. After criticising the absence of beauty which is noticeable in many of the works of the modern impressionists, and commenting on the tendency of such movements to harden into a formula, he writes: "Perhaps the demand is unreasonable, but what one would wish to see in the near future is the work of an artist who uses the brush simply, directly, and delightfully, and with such a sense of structure that all the finest nuances of form, even the most vague and distant—whether of cloud or mountain-side—get built in air as if by magic; whose colour will be so exquisitely true that, unlike the spectral treatment, no amount of analysis will disclose its secret; whose luminosity will not depend on theoretic and mechanical separation of colours, but on a more vivid visual analysis, and more consistent with the natural handling of a brush. Added to this one wants—abstracted from the natural scene—the noble elements of decoration and design. Also a hand so swift and sure that it is amply able to cope with the quickly-passing phase, and able to give back, in fact, tint for tint and tone for tone, and reproduce that inexorable logic and consistence of lighting on which the illusion of visual Nature herself depends. This will be 'to copy Nature,'"—and to copy nature is, according to many artists and writers, a thing to be avoided. "Well," adds Mr. Fowler, "it may be so. If one could only see it done once, one could be a better judge."
It seems to me that the artist has done well to insist upon this point. We hear so much of the antithesis of Beauty and Nature that we are apt to forget that beauty may be natural and nature beautiful. Hazlitt and Ruskin especially were constantly falling into the mistake of making the distinction between beauty or art and nature far too cutting. "Nature," wrote Hazlitt, "is consistent, unaffected, powerful, subtle; art is forgetful, apish, feeble, coarse. Nature is the original, and therefore right; art is the copy, and can but tread lamely in the same steps." But if art is the copy of nature, it is difficult to see how it can be so absolutely unlike its original as Hazlitt's impassioned rhetoric would make it out to be. Reynolds was not only a better painter than Hazlitt, but he proves himself a better critic when he insists that "a comprehensive and critical knowledge of the works of nature is the only source of beauty and grandeur"; and when he writes, "The terms beauty, or nature, are but different modes of expressing the same thing." Reynolds was therefore consistent when he blamed the Dutch painters—not for imitating nature, but for copying nature in a one-sided and vulgar way, and for missing the beauties that intelligent insight and loving sympathy can always discover.
Mr. Fowler is right in refusing to admit that beauty is unnatural or that nature is unbeautiful. He is right in maintaining that it is not by listening to the "fond illusion of his heart" that the poet or the artist should create for us, but that he should see more clearly into the nature of reality than the majority of men. In his landscapes, at least, he has given up—so far as it may be—the desire to
add the gleam,
The light that never was, on sea or land,
and has resolved to "welcome fortitude, and patient cheer, and frequent sights of what is to be borne." That such a man should find so much of beauty and of joy in the world as Mr. Fowler has evidently found is surely something to be grateful for.