And the artist—has lost his inner vision. And in his place a new one has been evolved; one who is equal to the task that we have set him: he paints—not ideas but—life as he finds it; he paints experiences; he records emotions; if he receives a visual shock—he cannot make enough haste to do a picture recording it; for to him it is a psychological experience and therefore supremely worth recording. We here set him about with evils and surround him with the sordid and ostentatious; the spirit working in him by a new alchemy has called evil good; what will happen to the world if he should forget and call good evil! Let us hope rather that the spirit of vision—guiding him now to look outward on the visible world for his subject—will inspire him to penetrate the darkness of the æsthetic desert we have set about him; and that—again communing with the spirit—he will give us—not, as before, ideals from his own mental psychology but—see for us and reveal to us finely the mass-psychology of mankind. But it is not possible to prophesy what the art of the future may be that mankind of the future will approve.
France has now no national art—save her sense of humour (and we all know to what she turns infallibly for stimulation in that!) but she does know a great man when she produces one; nor does she confound him with a lesser artist, however much excitement she may indulge in in making a passing fashion of the latter: her pride in Puvis de Chavannes does not waver. She has recently had some men of genius, and they are typically French, but can we accept them as having founded a national art in France? No—for we experience the fact that the truths that Cézanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin came to teach are no truer for restatement by their disciples, nor have they been further illuminated for us by the endless repetitions of their personal conventions. But the astonishing fact is now being daily insisted upon by some among us that the art of these Frenchmen is national to England!
England once came near to having a national art—in the school of Reynolds, Gainsborough, Romney and Lawrence. At any rate their work, reproduced in coloured-engravings by men almost their equal, did reach the people in response to their demand for it and so became at least a national tradition; brilliant but all short-lived.
Joseph Crawhall
Ultimately it is the love of the people that alike crowns the king or acclaims the artist, and until this happens no artist can be sure of a prominent rank among the great; however much seeming popularity he may enjoy in his lifetime. But there are reasons why an artist is sometimes not given the rank he deserves until long after he should be—apart from those supplied by the uncatholic point of view engendered in the people by lack of education and the jealousy engendered in his contemporary artists by their struggle for recognition. For instance—he may complete very little work; or else his work may not be seen or known except to a few private collectors and dealers, who are wisely but selfishly exploiting it commercially; thus the recognition of his work by the public may be retarded, for the simple fact that it does not know of its existence: as in the case of Joseph Crawhall, who, when his work is known, will undoubtedly be given the high rank he deserves and become as famous to the public as he is now to the collector. I do not hesitate to prophesy this in spite of the fact that I once heard one of our best known critics state with considerable fervour that he wished Crawhall had destroyed all he had ever done instead of only what he did destroy (probably nearly or quite half his work).
An artist as a rule lives by selling his work and though the fact that works of art are articles of commerce may delay or accelerate the verdict on him it will not ultimately affect it. These things are on the knees of the gods; for though he, in his lifetime, may receive from educated people a concensus of approval, posterity may yet reverse the judgment. He may have been approved because his work was bought, and his work may have been bought for much the same reason that some persons back horses. In fact there is a certain resemblance between the two. In the art world, as on the race-course, the favourites are obvious and expensive; and, to continue the analogy, outsiders have a most unexpected way of turning out to be winners. But here the analogy must end—for a dead artist may be a little gold-mine whereas a dead racehorse is merely cat’s-meat. Michelangelo is still a winner: it is interesting to know that reproductions of his drawings are, to-day, sold in far larger numbers than are the reproductions of any other man. To the student of drawing he is still a god and, because of his superhuman ability to draw, he lives in the student’s mind in a divine halo.
With regard to works of art considered as speculative investments I offer the following advice: be sure you know a good drawing when you see one, and buy a man’s drawings when he is young. To wait until he has proved himself as a painter before accepting him as a draughtsman is, economically, a bad principle. He—the now arrived painter—will multiply the original price of his early drawings by twenty and pocket his just but belated reward. Belated, because it would have been far more valuable to him in the early days of his career to have sold the same drawings for smaller sums when, probably, money was hard to come by and may have meant much in the completion of his training. And the drawings will probably be as good as any he will ever do; for, later in life, when drawing is practised with a view to painting, the results are generally more summary and, though frequently more masterly, they seldom have quite the same sincerity as those done early in life, when—as a rule forbidden by his teacher to paint—he will put into his drawings the whole of his best endeavour and aim at creating a drawing that shall be a complete work of art in itself; with the result that these early productions are often “arrived” works of art, with a special beauty and interest of their own, even before he has emerged from the student stage himself.