Says W. J. Stillman in his impassioned polemic on “The Revival of Art”: “The painter whose devotion to nature is such that he never leaves or varies from her, may be, and likely is, a happier man than if he were a true artist...To men of the other type, the external image disturbs the ideal which is so complete that it admits no interference. To them she may offer suggestions, but lays down no law.”
The complaint of Turner that Nature so frequently put him out contains for us what it should have expressed to Ruskin, the real attitude which he held toward nature, but which Ruskin in his enthusiastic love of nature did not, or would not perceive. What the master artist saw and utilized in nature were forms for his designs and sentiment for emotional expression. [pg 261] Yet the recorder of his labors followed after, verifying his findings with near-sighted scrutiny, lauding him with commendations for keen observation in noting rock fractures, the bark of trees, grass, or the precise shape of clouds, undismayed when his hero neglected all these if they interfered with his art.
The point of the argument as stated by the idealists can be understood only save through the element in our nature from which art draws its vitality. Its deduction is thus bluntly expressed; “the nearest to nature, the farther from art,” an apparent paradox paralleled by the epigram, “the nearer the church, the farther from God.”
Both of them, out of their hollow clamor, echo back a startling truth: Not form, but spirit. Thus did Rembrandt work for the spirit of the man and the art to be got from the waiting subject. Thus did Millet reveal in his representation of a single toiler the type of all labor. Thus did Corot stop, when he had produced the spirit of the morning, knowing well his nymphs would have vanished if the mystery of their hiding-places was entirely laid bare, nor ever come to him again had he exposed the full truth of form and feature.
It is the touch of poesy which has glorified these works and those of their kind, the spring of the unwritten law yielding preeminence to the emotional arts. Impulse is the life of it: it dies when short tethered by specific limitations.
On this basis the way seems opened to settle [pg 262] the changeful formulas of taste; why the rejection of what for the moment has held the pinnacle of popular favor; why, for instance, the waning of interest in the detailists of the brilliant French-Spanish School, the school of Fortuny, Madrazzo, Villegas, Rico, or of the work of Meissonier, who as a detailist eclipsed them all. A simple analysis of their work in toto will prove that their best pictures are those in which a sentiment has dominated and in which breadth and largeness of effect is strongest. Thus Meissonier's “Return of Napoleon from Moscow,” is a better picture than his “Napoleon III surrounded by his staff in Sicily,” which latter is only a marvellous achievement at painting detail in the smallest possible size, and lacks entirely the forceful composition of mass and light and shade of the former. Thus does the “Spanish Marriage” of Fortuny outclass his “Academicians Choosing a Model,” which besides lacking the reserve force of the former has its source in flippant imagination; and so may the many other shifts of time and tide in the graphic arts be measured and chronicled upon the basis of the emotions and the formative touch of the poetic, upon the sequence of the artist's regard for the ideal and the real, and the degree of his approach toward either. The concensus of the ages regarding finish, dexterity, cleverness, and chic is that in the scale of art they weigh less than the simple breadth of effect which they so frequently interrupt. The school of Teniers with all of its detail was preservative of this.
It is on the question of detail and the careful anxiety concerning the surface that the art instinct avoids science, refusing her microscope in preference for the unaided impression of normal sight. The living art of the ages is that in which the painter is seen to be greater than his theme, in which we acknowledge the power first, and afterward the product. It is the unfettered mode allowing the greatest individualism of expression; it is, in short, the man end of it which lives, for his is the immortal life.