I have not told you about the very serious progress that Mr. George Thompson has made since the last exhibition; I have not described his two admirable pictures; nor mentioned Mr. Linder's landscape, nor Mr. Buxton Knight's "Haymaking Meadows", nor Mr. Christie's pretty picture "A May's Frolic," nor Mr. MacColl's "Donkey Race". I have omitted much that it would have been a pleasure to praise; for my intention was not to write a guide to the exhibition, but to interpret some of the characteristics of the young generation.
The New English Art Club is very typical of this end of the century. It is young, it is interesting, it is intelligent, it is emotional, it is cosmopolitan—not the Bouillon Duval cosmopolitanism of the Newlyn School, but rather an agreeable assimilation of the Montmartre café of fifteen years ago. Art has fallen in France, and the New English seems to me like a seed blown over-sea from a ruined garden. It has caught English root, and already English colour and fragrance are in the flower. A frail flower; but, frail or strong, it is all we have of art in the present generation. It is slight, and so most typical; for, surely, no age was ever so slight in its art as ours? As the century runs on it becomes more and more slight and more and more intelligent. A sheet of Whatman's faintly flushed with a rose-tint, a few stray verses characterised with a few imperfect rhymes and a wrong accent, are sufficient foundation for two considerable reputations. The education of the younger generation is marvellous; its brains are excellent; it seems to be lacking in nothing except guts. As education spreads guts disappear, and that is the most serious word I have to say.
Without thinking of those great times when men lived in the giddiness and the exultation of a constant creation—when a day was sufficient for Rubens to paint the "Kermesse" thirteen days to paint the "Mages", even or eight to paint the "Communion de St. François d'Assise"—and blotting from our mind the fabulous production of Tintoretto and Veronese, let us merely remember that thirty years ago Millais painted a beautiful picture every year until marriage and its consequences brought his art to a sudden close. One year it was "Autumn Leaves", the following year it was "St. Agnes' Eve", and behind these pictures there were at least ten masterpieces—"The Orchard", "The Rainbow", "Mariana in the Moated Grange", "Ophelia", etc. Millais is far behind Veronese and Tintoretto in magnificent excellence and extraordinary rapidity of production; but is not the New English Art Club even as far behind the excellence and fertility of production of thirty years ago?
A GREAT ARTIST.
We have heard the words "great artist" used so often and so carelessly that their tremendous significance escapes. The present is a time when it is necessary to consider the meaning, latent and manifest, of the words, for we are about to look on the drawings of the late Charles Keene.
In many the words evoke the idea of huge canvases in which historical incidents are depicted, conquerors on black horses covered with gold trappings, or else figures of Christ, or else the agonies of martyrs. The portrayal of angels is considered by the populace to be especially imaginative, and all who affect such subjects are at least in their day termed great artists. But the words are capable of a less vulgar interpretation. To the select few the great artist is he who is most racy of his native soil, he who has most persistently cultivated his talent in one direction, and in one direction only, he who has repeated himself most often, he who has lived upon himself the most avidly. In art, eclecticism means loss of character, and character is everything in art. I do not mean by character personal idiosyncrasies; I mean racial and territorial characteristics. Of personal idiosyncrasy we have enough and to spare. Indeed, it has come to be accepted almost as an axiom that it does not matter much how badly you paint, provided you do not paint badly like anybody else. But instead of noisy idiosyncrasy we want the calm of national character in our art. A national character can only be acquired by remaining at home and saturating ourselves in the spirit of our land until it oozes from our pens and pencils in every slightest word, in every slightest touch. Our lives should be one long sacrifice for this one thing—national character. Foreign travel should be eschewed, we should turn our eyes from Paris and Rome and fix them on our own fields; we should strive to remain ignorant, making our lives mole-like, burrowing only in our own parish soil. There are no universities in art, but there are village schools; each of us should choose his master, imitate him humbly, striving to continue the tradition. And while labouring thus humbly, rather as handicraftsmen than as artists, our personality will gradually begin to appear in our work, not the weak febrile idiosyncrasy which lights a few hours of the artist's youth, but a steady flame nourished by the rich oil of excellent lessons. If the work is good, very little personality is required. Are the individual temperaments of Terburg, Metzu, and Peter de Hoogh very strikingly exhibited in their pictures?
The paragraph I have just written will seem like a digression to the careless reader, but he who has read carefully, or will take the trouble to glance back, will not fail to see, that although in appearance digressive, it is a strict and accurate comment on Charles Keene, and the circumstances in which his art was produced. Charles Keene never sought after originality; on the contrary, he began by humbly imitating John Leech, the inventor of the method. His earliest drawings (few if any of them are exhibited in the present collection) were hardly distinguishable from Leech's. He continued the tradition humbly, and originality stole upon him unawares. Charles Keene was not an erudite, he thought of very little except his own talent and the various aspects of English life which he had the power of depicting; but he knew thoroughly well the capacities of his talent, the direction in which it could be developed, and his whole life was devoted to its cultivation. He affected neither a knowledge of literature nor of Continental art; he lived in England and for England, content to tell the story of his own country and the age he lived in; in a word, he worked and lived as did the Dutchmen of 1630. He lived pure of all foreign influence; no man's art was ever so purely English as Keene's; even the great Dutchmen themselves were not more Dutch than Keene was English, and the result is often hardly less surprising. To look at some of these drawings and not think of the Dutchmen is impossible, for when we are most English we are most Dutch—our art came from Holland. These drawings are Dutch in the strange simplicity and directness of intention; they are Dutch in their oblivion to all interests except those of good drawing; they are Dutch in the beautiful quality of the workmanship. Examine the rich, simple drawing of that long coat or the side of that cab, and say if there is not something of the quality of a Terburg. Terburg is simple as a page of seventeenth-century prose; and in Keene there is the same deep, rich, classic simplicity. The material is different, but the feeling is the same. I might, of course, say Jan Steen; and is it not certain that both Terburg and Steen, working under the same conditions, would not have produced drawings very like Keene's? And now, looking through the material deep into the heart of the thing, is it a paradox to say that No. 221 is in feeling and quality of workmanship a Dutch picture of the best time? The scene depicted is the honeymoon. The young wife sits by an open window full of sunlight, and the curtains likewise are drenched in the pure white light. How tranquil she is, how passive in her beautiful animal life! No complex passion stirs in that flesh; instinct drowses in her just as in an animal. With what animal passivity she looks up in her husband's face! Look at that peaceful face, that high forehead, how clearly conceived and how complete is the rendering! How slight the means, how extraordinary the result! The sunlight floods the sweet face so exquisitively stupid, and her soul, and the room, and the very conditions of life of these people are revealed to us.
And now, in a very rough and fragmentary fashion, hardly attempting more than a hurried transcription of my notes, I will call attention to some three or four drawings which especially arrested my attention. In No. 10 we have a cab seen in wonderful perspective; the hind wheel is the nearest point, and in extraordinarily accurate proportion the vehicle and the animal attached to it go up the paper. The cabman turns half round to address some observation to the "fare", an old gentleman, who is about to step in. The roof of the cab cuts the body of the cabman, composing the picture in a most original and striking manner. The panels of the cab are filled in with simple straight lines, but how beautifully graduated are these lines, how much they are made to say! Above all, the hesitating movement of the old gentleman—how the exact moment has been caught! and the treatment of the long coat, how broad, how certain—how well the artist has said exactly what he wanted to say! Another very fine drawing is No. 11. The fat farmer stands so thoroughly well in his daily habit; the great stomach, how well it is drawn, and the short legs are part and parcel of the stomach. The man is redolent of turnip-fields and rick-yards; all the life of the fields is upon him. And the long parson, clearly from the university, how well he clasps his hands and how the very soul of the man is expressed in the gesture! No. 16 is very wonderful. What movement there is in the skirts of the fat woman, and the legs of the vendor of penny toys! Are they not the very legs that the gutter breeds?
No. 52: a big, bluff artist, deep-seated amid the ferns and grasses. The big, bearded man, who thinks of nothing but his art, who lives in it, who would not be thin because fat enables him to sit longer out of doors, the man who will not even turn round on his camp-stool to see the woman who is speaking to him; we have all known that man, but to me that man never really existed until I looked on this drawing. And the treatment of the trees that make the background! A few touches of the pencil, and how hot and alive the place is with sunlight!
But perhaps the most wonderful drawing in the entire collection is No. 89. Never did Keene show greater mastery over his material. In this drawing every line of the black-lead pencil is more eloquent than Demosthenes' most eloquent period. The roll and the lurch of the vessel, the tumult of waves and wind, the mental and physical condition of the passengers, all are given as nothing in this world could give them except that magic pencil. The figure, the man that the wind blows out of the picture, his hat about to leave his head, is not he really on board in a gale? Did a frock coat flap out in the wind so well before? And do not the attitudes of the two women leaning over the side represent their suffering? The man who is not sea-sick sits, his legs stretched out, his hands thrust into his pockets, his face sunk on his breast, his hat crushed over his eyes. His pea-jacket, how well drawn! and can we not distinguish the difference between its cloth and the cloth of the frock of the city merchant, who watches with such a woful gaze the progress of the gathering wave? The weight of the wave is indicated with a few straight lines, and, strangely enough, only very slightly varied are the lines which give the very sensation of the merchant's thin frock coat made in the shop of a fashionable tailor.