Evolution of painting.
The whole history of painting may be strung on this single thread—the effort to reconstitute impressions, first the dramatic impression and then the sensuous. A summary and symbolic representation of things is all that at first is demanded; the point is to describe something pictorially and recall people’s names and actions. It is characteristic of archaic painting to be quite discursive and symbolic; each figure is treated separately and stuck side by side with the others upon a golden ground. The painter is here smothered in the recorder, in the annalist; only those perceptions are allowed to stand which have individual names or chronicle facts mentioned in the story. But vision is really more sensuous and rich than report, if art is only able to hold vision in suspense and make it explicit. When painting is still at this stage, and is employed on hieroglyphics, it may reach the maximum of decorative splendour. Whatever sensuous glow finer representations may later acquire will be not sensuous merely, but poetical; Titians, Murillos, or Turners are colourists in representation, and their canvases would not be particularly warm or luminous if they represented nothing human or mystical or atmospheric. A stained-glass window or a wall of tiles can outdo them for pure colour and decorative magic. Leaving decoration, accordingly, to take care of itself and be applied as sense may from time to time require, painting goes on to elaborate the symbols with which it begins, to make them symbolise more and more of what their object contains. A catalogue of persons will fall into a group, a group will be fused into a dramatic action. Conventional as the separate figures may still be, their attitudes and relations will reconstitute the dramatic impression. The event will be rendered in its own language; it will not, to be recognised, have to appeal to words. Thus a symbolic crucifixion is a crucifixion only because we know by report that it is; a plastic crucifixion would first teach us, on the contrary, what a real crucifixion might be. It only remains to supply the aerial medium and make dramatic truth sensuous truth also.
Sensuous and dramatic adequacy approached.
To work up a sensation intellectually and reawaken all its passionate associations is to reach a new and more exciting sensation which we call emotion or thought. As in poetry there are two stages, one pregnant and prior to prose and another posterior and synthetic, so in painting we have not only a reversion to sense but an ulterior synthesis of the sensuous, its interpretation in a dramatic or poetic vision. Archaic painting, with its abstract rendering of separate things, is the prose of design. It would not be beautiful at all but for its colour and technical feeling—that expression of candour and satisfaction which may pervade it, as it might a Latin rhyme. To correct this thinness and dislocation, to restore life without losing significance, painting must proceed to accumulate symbol upon symbol, till the original impression is almost restored, but so restored that it contains all the articulation which a thorough analysis had given it. Such painting as Tintoretto’s or Paolo Veronese’s records impressions as a cultivated sense might receive them. It glows with visible light and studies the sensuous appearance, but it contains at the same time an intelligent expression of all those mechanisms, those situations and passions, with which the living world is diversified. It is not a design in spots, meant merely to outdo a sunset; it is a richer dream of experience, meant to outshine the reality.
In order to reconstitute the image we may take an abstract representation or hieroglyphic and gradually increase its depth and its scope. As the painter becomes aware of what at first he had ignored, he adds colour to outline, modelling to colour, and finally an observant rendering of tints and values. This process gives back to objects their texture and atmosphere, and the space in which they lie. From a representation which is statuesque in feeling and which renders figures by furnishing a visible inventory of their parts and attributes, the artist passes to considering his figures more and more as parts of a whole and as moving in an ambient ether. They tend accordingly to lose their separate emphasis, in order to be like flowers in a field or trees in a forest. They become elements, interesting chiefly by their interplay, and shining by a light which is mutually reflected.
Essence of landscape-painting.
When this transformation is complete the painting is essentially a landscape. It may not represent precisely the open country; it may even depict an interior, like Velasquez’s Meninas. But the observer, even in the presence of men and artificial objects, has been overcome by the medium in which they swim. He is seeing the air and what it happens to hold. He is impartially recreating from within all that nature puts before him, quite as if his imagination had become their diffused material substance. Whatever individuality and moral value these bits of substance may have they acquire for him, as for nature, incidentally and by virtue of ulterior relations consequent on their physical being. If this physical being is wholly expressed, the humanity and morality involved will be expressed likewise, even if expressed unawares. Thus a profound and omnivorous reverie overflows the mind; it devours its objects or is absorbed into them, and the mood which this active self-alienation brings with it is called the spirit of the scene, the sentiment of the landscape.
Perception and art, in this phase, easily grow mystical; they are readily lost in primordial physical sympathies. Although at first a certain articulation and discursiveness may be retained in the picture, so that the things seen in their atmosphere and relations may still be distinguished clearly, the farther the impartial absorption in them goes, the more what is inter-individual rises and floods the individual over. All becomes light and depth and air, and those particular objects threaten to vanish which we had hoped to make luminous, breathing, and profound. The initiated eye sees so many nameless tints and surfaces, that it can no longer select any creative limits for things. There cease to be fixed outlines, continuous colours, or discrete existences in nature.
Its threatened dissolution.
An artist, however, cannot afford to forget that even in such a case units and divisions would have to be introduced by him into his work. A man, in falling back on immediate reality, or immediate appearance, may well feel his mind’s articulate grammar losing its authority, but that grammar must evidently be reasserted if from the immediate he ever wishes to rise again to articulate mind; and art, after all, exists for the mind and must speak humanly. If we crave something else, we have not so far to go: there is always the infinite about us and the animal within us to absolve us from human distinctions.