The fantastic is also a product of the imagination, but it is a lighter, more volatile and irresponsible expression than fancy. It is the imagination just escaping from control, dominated by caprice and leaning toward the bizarre. The griffins and the spouting dragons along the gutters of the Gothic churches, and the boar-headed, bird-footed devils of early art are perhaps fair illustrations of it. In modern painting Blake and Monticelli came perilously near the fantastic in some of their creations. Turner in his last years quite lost himself in fantasy, and a number of the painters in France and England might be named as illustrating the tendency to the bizarre. When the bizarre is finally reached we may still recognize it as the working imagination, but uncontrolled by reason. Our dreams which often strike us as so absurd are good instances of the play of the imagination unfettered by reason; and if our dream-land conceptions could be reduced to art we would undoubtedly have what we have called the bizarre. Caricature and the grotesque are different again. They are conscious distortions, designed exaggerations of certain features for effect. They are not ruled so much by either fancy or caprice as by a sensible view of the extravagant.
XV.—TINTORETTO, Miracle of Slave. Academy, Venice.
There is no metaphysical or æsthetic term to designate an absence of the imagination, but possibly the words “baroque” or “bombastic” will suggest the results in art. And there is no lack of material to illustrate it. Unfortunately the master minds in both poetry and painting have been few and far between. The names and works that have come down to us from the past are the survivals from many siftings; and the few geniuses of the present are perhaps still obscured by the bombastic performances of smaller men. The Robert Montgomerys and the Martin Farquhar Tuppers somehow contrive to make a stir and delude the public into considering them as great originals. They have not imagination of their own, so they imitate the imaginative utterances and styles of others. Not one but many styles of many men are thus brought together in a conglomeration that may deceive the groundlings into thinking it genuine poetry; but the judicious soon find out its true character. Of course, all imitators try to imitate the inimitable individualities. The Montgomerys and the Tuppers aspire to no less than Shakespeare and Milton. Just so in pictorial art. Vasari, Guido, the Caracci reached out for the imaginations of Michael Angelo, Raphael, and Correggio. The result was the contorted bombastic art of the Decadence than which nothing could be less imaginative and more monstrous. The mind of a Michael Angelo of necessity distorted the image in the first place and then a Salviati came along to distort the distortion! The figure of a Madonna, for instance, is elongated by Correggio for grace, and Parmigianino following after elongated the elongation! This is what I have called the bombastic. It is indicative of a lack of imagination. Modern painting is full of it. The attempts at the heroic that overstep the sublime and fall into the ridiculous, the rant and high-sounding utterances of the brush, the inflated figures of allegory and the vacuous types of symbolism, are all illustrative of it.
But the bombastic and its companion evils in art need no further consideration at this time. It is not my aim to illustrate the deficiencies of painting, but to point out its higher beauties, and if the reverse of the shield is occasionally shown it is but to illustrate and emphasize the brighter side. Perhaps one may be pardoned for thinking that sometimes the analysis of error is a potent factor in the establishment of truth.
CHAPTER IV
PICTORIAL POETRY
Time was, and not very long ago at that, when an argument for poetic thought in art would have been considered superfluous. Everyone was agreed that the higher aim of language was to convey an idea, a feeling, or an emotion. That the language should be beautiful in itself was an advantage, but there was never any doubt that the thought expressed was greater than the manner of its expression. To-day it would seem that we have changed all that. The moderns are insisting that language is language for its own sake, and art is art for art’s sake. They are, to a certain extent, right in their contention; for there is great beauty in methods, materials and the general decorative appearance.[[6]] But perhaps they insist too much. We are not yet prepared to admit that because Tennyson’s poetry sounds well, his thoughts have no value; nor, for all Tintoretto’s fine form and color, can we believe his poetic imagination a wholly unnecessary factor in his art.
[6]. I have stated the case for the decorative side and for the technical beauties of painting in Art for Art’s Sake, New York, 1902.
The technical and the decorative beauties of painting, however important they may be, are not necessarily the final aim of the picture. In the hands of all the great painters of the world they have been only a means to an end. The Michael Angelos, the Rembrandts, the Raphaels, and the Titians have generally had an ulterior meaning in their work. And by “meaning” I do not mean anything very abstruse or metaphysical, nor am I thinking of anything ethical, allegorical, or anecdotal. The idea which a picture may contain is not necessarily one that points a moral, nor need it have anything to do with heroic action or romantic sentiment or fictional occurrence. There are many ideas, noble in themselves, that find expression in literature better than in painting, and it is a sound rule in all the arts that a conception which can be well told in one art has no excuse for being badly told in another art. The materials and their application to the best advantage are always to be regarded. Why waste effort in cutting glass when you can blow it? Why chisel curtains in marble when you can weave them in cloth? Why tell sequential stories, moral, narrative, or historical, in paint when it can be done more easily in writing? And why describe landscapes in writing when you can do it so much better in painting? It is mere consumption of energy and distortion of materials to write down the colors of the sunset or to paint the history of Greece or Rome.