OUR IMAGINATIVES
Is it vision that creates temperament or temperament that creates vision? Physical vision is responsible for nearly everything in art, not the power to see but the way to see. It is the eye perfect or the eye defective that determines the kind of thing seen and how one sees it. It was certainly a factor in the life of Lafcadio Hearn, for he was once named the poet of myopia. It was the acutely sensitive eye of Cézanne that taught him to register so ably the minor and major variations of his theme. Manet saw certainly far less colour than Renoir, for in the Renoir sense he was not a colourist at all. He himself said he painted only what he saw. Sight was almost science with Cézanne as it was passion.
In artists like Homer Martin there is a something less than visual accuracy and something more than a gift of translation. There is a distinguished interpretation of mood coupled with an almost miniature-like sense of delicate gradation, and at the same time a something lacking as to a sense of physical form. In the few specimens of Martin to be seen there is, nevertheless, eminent distinction paramount. He was an artist of "oblique integrity": He saw unquestionably at an angle, but the angle was a beautiful one, and while many of his associates were doing American Barbizon, he was giving forth a shy, yet rare kind of expression, always a little symbolic in tendency, with the mood far more predominant. In "The sand dunes of Ontario" there will be found at once a highly individualistic feeling for the waste places of the world. There is never so much as a hint of banality in his selection. He never resorts to stock rhetoric.
Martin will be remembered for his singularly personal touch along with men like Fuller and Ryder. He is not as dramatic as either of these artists, but he has greater finesse in delicate sensibility. He was, I think, actually afraid of repetition, a characteristic very much in vogue in his time, either conscious or unconscious, in artists like Inness, Wyant, and Blakelock, with their so single note. There is exceptional mysticity hovering over his hills and stretches of dune and sky. It is not fog, or rain, or dew enveloping them. It is a certain veiled presence in nature that he sees and brings forward. His picture of peaks of the White Mountains, Jefferson and Madison, gives you no suggestion of the "Hudson River" emptiness. He was searching for profounder realities. He wanted the personality of his places, and he was successful, for all of his pictures I have seen display the magnetic touch. He "touched it off" vividly in all of them. They reveal their ideas poetically and esthetically and the method is personal and ample for presentation.
With George Fuller it was vastly different. He seemed always to be halting in the shadow. You are conscious of a deep and ever so earnest nature in his pictures. He impressed himself on his canvases in spite of his so faulty expression. He had an understanding of depth but surface was strange to him. He garbled his sentences so to speak with excessive and useless wording. "The Octoroon" shows a fine feeling for romance as do all of the other pictures of Fuller that have been publicly visible, but it is romance obsessed with monotone. There is the evidence of extreme reticence and moodiness in Fuller always. I know little of him save that I believe he experienced a severity of domestic problems. Farmer I think he was, and painted at off hours all his life. It is the poetry of a quiet, almost sombre order, walking in the shadow on the edge, of a wood being almost too much of an appearance for him in the light of a busy world.
Why is it I think of Hawthorne when I think of Fuller? Is there a relationship here, or is it only a similarity of eeriness in temper? I would suspect Fuller of having painted a Hester Prynne excepting that he could never have come to so much red in one place in his pictures.
There was vigour in these strong, simple men, masculine in sensibility all of them, and a fine feeling for the poetic shades of existence. They were intensely serious men, and I think from their isolation in various ways, not popular in their time. Neither are they popular now. They will only be admired by artists of perception, and by laymen of keen sensibility. Whether their enforced isolations taught them to brood, or whether they were brooders by nature, it is difficult to say. I think they were all easterners, and this would explain away certain characteristic shynesses of temper and of expression in them. Ryder, as we know, was the typical recluse, Fuller in all likelihood also. Martin I know little of privately, but his portrait shows him to be a strong elemental nature, with little feeling for, or interest in, the superficialities either of life or of art. Of Blakelock I can say but little, for I do not know him beyond a few stylish canvases which seem to have more of Diaz and Rousseau in them than contributes to real originality, and he was one of the painters of repetition also. A single good Blakelock is beautiful, and I think he must be included among the American imaginatives, but I do not personally feel the force of him in several canvases together.
All of these artists are singularly individual, dreamers like Mathew Maris and Marées of Europe. They all have something of Coleridge about them, something of Poe, something of the "Ancient Mariner" and the "Haunted Palace", sailors in the same ship, sleepers in the same house. All of these men were struggling at the same time, the painters I mean, the same hour it might be said, in the midst of conventions of a severer type of rigidity than now, to preserve themselves from commonplace utterance. They were not affected by fashions. They had the one idea in mind, to express themselves in terms of themselves, and they were singularly successful in this despite the various difficulties of circumstance and of temper that attended them. They understood what this was better than anyone, and the results in varying degrees of genius attest to the quality of the American imagination at its best.