This is not merely figure of speech, but statement of fact. None of the American painters spoken of in these pages, with the exception of La Farge, came from what might be called an artistic family, or had æsthetic antecedents. They were boys on a farm or grew up in the atmosphere of trade or profession, and came to art at twenty or thereabouts. They then learned the technique of painting quickly, and with much facility, but their mental attitude toward art was untrained and remained undetermined. Long after they knew how to paint they knew not what to paint or how to think. Their point of view was superficial or commonplace, or otherwise negligible. I have excepted La Farge, for, as we shall see hereafter, he did have an æsthetic legend behind him. Is that why he is now placed as the one Olympian of the period? I would also partly except Inness, Wyant, and Martin, who did know and follow at one time the rather feeble Hudson River school tradition. I ask again is that why they remain, even to this day, the best of our rather long line of landscape-painters?
Is tradition then synonymous with the academic? Not entirely; though the academies are usually the custodians and conservers of it. Unfortunately, their practice tends to perpetuate a manner that soon becomes a mannerism, and finally the mannerism usurps the place of style. The academic in France or Germany or Italy has of recent years become a term of reproach. All the rebels in art have been opposed to it. When they rebelled, their rebellion was called by them, or their biographers, “the break with tradition.” Rather was it a break with an indurated method or the tyranny of a hanging committee. For tradition has to do more with the spirit and style of art, while the academic is recognized in a method or a formula which, endlessly repeated, finally becomes trite and even banal.
The art of old Japan ran on for centuries and was excellent art notwithstanding it was academic and based in tradition. It did not run into formalism and never became trite until recent years. Its ruin lies straight ahead of it if it shall abandon its traditions and continue to coquette with Occidental art. But the bulk of painting by the young men of the Society of American Artists became commonplace within a dozen years after their return because they had learned abroad only a manner and reproduced it here in America with the persistence of a mannerism. They never knew the academic in its larger significance; they never felt the spirit and style of the traditional.
That is not to proclaim their work worthless or their movement inconsequent. On the contrary, almost everything that one generation in art could do was done. And well done. They established a foundation in sound technique. It remains to be seen if those who come after will build upon it or cast it down. Moreover, as an expression of the individual quite apart from the time, place, or people, as a representation of cosmopolitan belief about art, it must be accorded a very high place. Whistler and Sargent happen just now to be the most talked about exponents of the cosmopolitan, but dozens of painters here in America since 1876 belong in the same class and have the same belief. It is all along of a new departure in art, and how it shall work out no one can say, but that it does not entirely satisfy contemporary needs is already manifest. In spite of present practice, and quite apart from Ten O’Clock and other painter extravagances, art is still believed to be in some way an expression of a time, a place, and a people. The world has not yet grown so small that it does not continue to exhibit race characteristics in its art manifestations. That the all-the-world-as-one idea may be farther-reaching, more universal in its scope, and therefore loftier in its art expression than any national or race expression is very possible; nay, probable. Still, even then, with cosmopolitanism in the saddle, there will be the need and the use of tradition—the consensus of opinion and body of belief as to what constitutes style in art.
II
GEORGE INNESS
1825-1894
A plain man of the business world, knowing nothing of the peculiar manifestations of the artistic mind, would be very apt to wonder over the mental make-up of a George Inness. An artist’s way of looking at things is never quite sensible to the man in the street. It is too temperamental, too impulsive; and Inness was supertemperamental even for an artist. When he expressed himself in paint he was very sane; but when he argued, his auditors thought him erratic. And not without reason. He was easily stirred by controversy, and in the heat of discussion he often discoursed like a mad rhapsodist. His thin hands and cheeks, his black eyes, ragged beard, and long dark hair, the dramatic action of his slight figure as he walked and talked, seemed to complete the picture of the perfervid visionary.
He was always somewhat hectic. As a boy he was delicate, suffered from epilepsy, and was mentally overwrought. His physician had nothing to recommend but fresh air. As a man, one of his hearers over the dinner-table, after listening to his exposition of the feminine element in landscape, or some allied theme, said: “Mr. Inness, what you need is fresh air.” Inness used to tell this story about himself with a little smile, as though conscious of having appeared extravagant. As for fresh air in the sense of out-of-doors, he knew more about it than all his business acquaintances put together; but in the sense of its clearing the vision so that he could see things in a matter-of-fact light, it was wholly unavailing. He was born with the nervous organization of the enthusiast. That is not the best temperament imaginable for a practical business man.
And yet Inness certainly thought that his views about life, faith, government, and ethics were sound and applicable to all humanity. Art was only a part of the universal plan. In his theory of the unities everything in the scheme entire dropped into its appointed place. He could show this, to his own satisfaction at least, by the symbolism of numbers, just as he could prove immortality by the argument for continuity. All his life he was devoted to mystical speculations. He had his faith in divination, astrology, spiritualism, Swedenborgianism. And he was greatly stirred by social questions. During the Rebellion he volunteered to fight for the freedom of the slave but was rejected as physically unfit; and later he became interested in labor problems, believed in Henry George and the Single Tax, and had views about a socialistic republic. He never changed. In his seventieth year he was still discoursing on Swedenborg, on love, on truth, on the unities, with unabated enthusiasm. To expect such a man to be “practical” would be little less than an absurdity, and to expect a practical man to understand him would be almost as futile.