[4]. A most interesting discussion of what the ancient peoples knew of lights and colors is to be found in Franz Delitzsch, Iris, Studies in Color, etc., Edinb., 1899.
The eyes of the workmen who select the skeins of colors for the Gobelin tapestries are physically not different from other eyes, but they recognize scores of tints and shades that your perception and mine cannot grasp at all. This is usually assumed to be the result of the training of the eye; but the eye cannot be trained like the hand. It is passive and receptive; not active. The training is that of the mind to note the sensations of the eye. So far as keenness and clearness of vision are concerned, I know of no people more remarkable than the Papago and Yuma Indians, and yet in the Colorado Desert I have frequently called their attention to the lilac shadows upon sand-banks, to the pink and yellow hazes of sunset, to the blue-steel glow of mountain walls at noonday, without ever finding one of them to nod an affirmative. They know form, outline, movement, and crude color in large masses, but the refinements of hue, the subtleties produced by light-and-shade, though doubtless seen by the eye, are not recognized by the mind.
Much of the fumbling with the paint brush found in present-day pictures is no doubt due to an inadequate perception of the model. In the studios you will often hear painters declaring that they can see things clearly enough, but their “technique bothers them;” they cannot get their fingers or canvases or colors or brushes to work properly. But the trouble is really more fundamental. It is their lack of perception that bothers them. Whenever a person in art or in literature knows his subject thoroughly there is no difficulty about words or lines or colors to express it. Men like Leibl and Meissonier, who see acutely every feature before them, are not worried by a want of technical expression. That their work, with all its cleverness of hand and keenness of vision, is somewhat mechanical—lacking in inspiration—may suggest that clearness of view is not the only requisite of art. It is, no doubt, a valuable accomplishment with any painter, and yet if the picture tells only a tale of facts it has fallen short of the highest aim. Keen eyes and a clever hand will not take the place of that vital quality of all great art—the imagination of the artist. For the imagination is, perhaps, the very essence of artistic seeing.
In the ordinary acceptation of the word the imagination is little more than the image-making power—the ability to see a thing in the mind’s eye. We all of us have the power in some degree and can summon up scenes out of the past at will, travelling fair lands that we have not known for years, and seeing faces that have long been shut away in the grave. In boyhood, when the imagination is active and disposed to build air-castles, you doubtless saw yourself many times as the hero of imaginary deeds of daring, carrying off the beautiful princess from the enchanted castle, just as older people like Dumas saw the adventurous D’Artagnan, and painters like Rossetti saw the Blessed Damosel leaning from the gold bar of Heaven with eyes far
“Deeper than the depth
Of waters stilled at even;
She had three lilies in her hand,
And the stars in her hair were seven.”
Such flights of the imagination as these, you will understand, are connected and associated with “memories,” of which we shall have something to say further on; but they are not the less connected with the image-making power.
When the object or the cause is present before us instead of far back in the past, the process of image-making is not radically different. We see and comprehend by an image in the mind. A portrait painter, to take an example at once from pictures, does not exercise his imagination upon a sitter by conceiving him as a great lawyer, a great poet, or a great general. He does not think of him in connection with what he has done or has been. Nor does he eliminate the Mr. Hyde from his appearance, and give only the good Dr. Jekyll part of him. That would not be pictorial imagination so much as pictorial falsehood, the popular belief to the contrary notwithstanding. What he really does is to look over his sitter with an eye to his exterior appearance; then he imagines him as he would look upon canvas, and finally he takes up a brush and tries to paint the image he sees in his mind. That image in his mind is his conception, his idea—yes, his ideal, if you choose to use that badly misused word. His imagination has rounded and shaped the appearance, and just as is the weakness or the strength of his image-making power so will be the weakness or strength of his portrait, the execution, for the present, being disregarded.