It is not the heaping of fact upon fact that flashes the truth upon us—at least not in art, though it may in logic or in law. Indeed, the accumulation of evidence often confuses. It is common studio experience that a sketch of a picture is frequently better than the picture itself. The attempt to “finish” (that is, to put in all the details and minutiæ) makes it dull and unsuggestive. The unfinished marbles of Michael Angelo, do they really suffer much by being unfinished? I have sometimes thought that the figure of “Day” in the Medici Chapel gained by its incompleteness—that it was better than the “Night” upon the opposite side of the tomb because the sculptor’s intention is perfectly obvious and yet the spectator’s imagination is not stifled. There, like a fallen god, he lies, half embedded in his matrix of stone with a suggestion of mighty power, never so strongly felt in any other marble in this world. The lack of finish, the mystery, the uncertainty, help on the imagination. One may fancy, as many have done, that the figure symbolizes the loss of Florentine freedom, and that the grand captive, with his massive brow and sunken eyes, half-rises wearily to view the morning light shining for him in vain. And again one may imagine he is a new Prometheus bound to the rock; one of the Gigantes; or perhaps a conquered Titan lying along the hills of Tartarus in the drear twilight, brooding in melancholy silence over the loss of Olympus. To whatever the mind may conjure up regarding the figure, the element of reserved strength will lend assistance. Cut the captive from his bed of stone and the strength falls short, lacking the foil of resistance; finish the marble and an existent fact precludes the possibility of wide imagination.
The great English master of art, how well he knew what to leave out! The lovers Lorenzo and Jessica are in the still, evening air, and with what consummate skill Shakespeare paints the landscape with that one suggestive line:
“How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank.”
Not a word about the trees or grasses or ponds or meadows; not a word about the stillness of the night, the hushed winds, and the shining stars; but do you not see them all? Do they not rise up before your eyes as by magic? Your realist would have put us to sleep with dreary descriptions of grass and groves and glittering dew-drops instead of the moonlight. And Shakespeare himself might have written a volume of description and still not roused us to his meaning so quickly as with that one suggestive line. The value of the sign in art, whether it be pictorial, sculptural, or literary, lies in its suggestive quality; and the “Sower” of Millet, the “Day” of Michael Angelo, and the moonlight of Shakespeare are merely so many suggestive signs.
V.—PAOLO VERONESE, Marriage in Cana. Louvre, Paris.
Thus far our inquiry has extended no farther than the truth of nature—the truth of appearance as shown in realistic art. But there are other truths with which the picture has to do that perhaps call for a moment’s consideration. The truth of history for which the public contends so valiantly need not detain us long. That Paolo Veronese and his contemporaries chose to garb the sacred characters of the “Marriage in Cana” (Plate [5]) or “Moses saved from the Nile” (Plate [23]), in Venetian costume, is matter of small importance. And it is of still less importance whether Christ and the Apostles show the Semitic cast of countenance or not. The intense reverence for local and ethnographical truth possessed by the Holman Hunts and Alma-Tademas of the art world would seem somewhat misplaced. No matter what care is bestowed upon the archæology, there is always something not quite true to the fact. And moreover, all art in all times has pictured its own race, costume, and country. It would not be worth much unless it did. The marble gods of Greece are all Greek, the painted Madonnas of Italy are all Italian. How otherwise would you have it? Marlowe’s Mephistopheles talks English, and Goethe’s Mephistopheles talks German. What language should they talk? When art deals with the past it translates it into the present. It could not possibly do otherwise. No Anglo-Saxon could feel, think, or work like a Greek, simply because he is an Anglo-Saxon.
There is another truth of far more consequence than historical accuracy, and that is the truth of art. This comes in here opportunely enough, for art-truth is produced by the suggestive method of dealing with facts which I have just been illustrating. The method is absolutely essential to all strong work in all departments. It is usually known in painting as the “law of sacrifice”; and you will find it in literature under the name of “dramatic force.” We should never have had such characters as Faust and Macbeth had all the other characters in the plays been treated with an importance equal to that of the heroes. Hamlet is an elevated Hamlet simply because the other characters are subordinate characters, just as Corot’s light is light, because everything else in the picture is sacrificed to it. There is no quarrel with truth to nature in this truth to art. Great art seldom falsifies, but it always selects, emphasizing some features and subordinating other features. It usually gives the large truths and merely implies the small ones. Millet in his “Sower” has no notion of telling you more than a few prominent facts about the man and his work. He shows a peasant, working under the shadow of a hill, working late in the evening, swinging and sowing with rhythmic motion of foot, hand, arm and body. It is matter of no importance whether he wears linen or woollen or cotton, whether his blouse has buttons upon it or not, whether his face is clean or not. The all-pervading truth of the picture lies in the swinging form of the sower, and to keep your attention upon that he omits everything else. The figure is but a suggestion, a something that stands as an equivalent for that man whom Millet thought should be recognized for his patience and fortitude of spirit, his nobility and dignity in the hard labor of life, his fine pictorial qualities as seen against the background of his native heath. That is the ulterior meaning which he would show us. The sign is true to the great truth of a sower, the meaning is true within the limits of pictorial creation, and finally the recording of it is true to the truth of art.
This method of procedure, wherein suggestion becomes such an important factor, implies two people in the work of art rather than one. The spectator must do his part as well as the artist. The latter suggests, the former takes up the suggestion and builds upon it. When Velasquez painted Christ on the cross, hanging there alone in the night, the head bowed forward on the breast, and the long dark hair tailing over the face and half covering it, he did not think to obliterate the face—to take it out of the picture completely. He knew very well that the imagination of the spectator would go behind the veil and picture that face more vividly than he could paint it. What painter ever yet produced a wholly satisfactory face of Christ? Velasquez was wise in leaving it to the imagination of the spectator. How wise he was you can perhaps gather by contrasting his “Christ on the Cross” with the same subject by Léon Bonnat—one of the noblest of the latter-day realists. Bonnat simply took a dead body from the morgue and hung it upon a cross in the court-yard of the École de Médecine, and painted it exactly as he saw it. But it is not Christ; it is the dead body he took from the morgue. There is strain of arm and leg and torso, the anatomy is wrenched, the muscles are contorted, the veins are swollen. But there is no suggestion of anything that had been noble or exalted in the living. In fact there is not a suggestion of any kind. Everything is told and the spectator’s imagination is not called upon. Realism has been pushed into the last ditch, and yet has produced only a sign standing for Christ on the cross, and not the real thing—a sign which, in gaining an elaborate truth to fact, has lost its truth to art and its power of suggestion.
