And again after his death:—
"Beauty of every kind played on a very sensitive instrument, when it made an appeal to his nature, giving him very positive joy: no complication of subtle interest beyond the actual influence being required before a responding echo was sounded, because so pure and innocent was this joy he had in the charm of beauty;—so also attendant on his personal influence, there was no power of mesmerism, nor of the black arts. In every direction it was healthy and bracing. Even a Nordau could have discovered no remotest taint of the degenerate!"
It is the emotions which art suggests outside itself which have been viewed by one school as more interesting than art itself, and it is the sensuous qualities in painting—colour and texture—which are the visible agents, and convey more readily these suggestions of emotions in our northern temperaments than do beautiful lines and forms. Our northern temperaments also love symbolism and mysticism, therefore are apt to favour the art that meets a veiled condition of things; and the perfection of complete finish in nature's form is no longer held up as a standard for the student to aim at. Leighton had no sympathy with the artificial, neither had he any with the shadow put in the place of the substance. The actual was ever sufficient for him, for in nature herself he never failed to find sufficient inspiration. The mind of the Creator in matter is what the ingenuous artist temperament searches for and is inspired to record; whereas it is, on the one hand, phases of human moods, selections from human passions, good, bad, and indifferent, which are made to saturate the feeling in much of our modern art, or, on the other hand, aspects of nature's moods given without the framework of her structure, and without the detail of her perfection.
It may be argued, however, that there are among the most beautiful effects in nature those which are not fully distinct to the sight—the shimmering iridescence on a shell, where one colour is seen sparkling against another through a film, or the waving branches of a willow, the liquid shifting of a flowing stream, or the endless effects of cloud and mist in a northern sky. To express this in paint requires an appropriate treatment in the manipulation of the pigment itself. Watts' theory was that you have to unfinish the record of certain facts in order to render the truth of the whole fact (see also Steinle's criticism on Leighton's head of "Vincenzo," 1854). He would, therefore, film his painting over with a scumble of white, and only partially repaint the surface, in order to get at that whole truth which includes the bloom of atmosphere and the veil of northern mists. Leighton is thought at times to have erred on the side of explicitness, and the texture of his surface is apt undoubtedly to lack the vibrating quality which carries with it a beauty of its own. This is partly accounted for by the fact that he had imbibed the rudiments of his teaching in a school whose followers were not sensitive to the finest qualities in oil painting, but also probably from his extreme desire to give expression to his sense of the intense finish in nature.
Doctrinaires of the very latest fashion in art insist that nothing comes legitimately within the province of the pictorial, except the impression of nature transmitted to the physical organ detached from memory, experience, and mind. By this faction the eye is treated solely as a machine. Sound as may be the doctrine that art has nothing to do with what the eye cannot see, or with those facts which experience alone teaches us are there, it is also no less true that the human eye sees, according to its intuitive power of transmitting to the brain, the different component parts of the actual object of its vision. It was no knowledge of anatomy which enabled Pheidias to see every subtilty of form in the human figure with consummate insight—any more than it was a knowledge of the laws of the flow and ebb of the tides, which enabled Whistler to give an actual sense of the swaying surface of the waves in "Valparaiso Bay"; again, it was no knowledge of botany which enabled Leighton and Millais to reproduce the structure of plants so perfectly, that they evoked unmitigated admiration as botanical studies from so high an authority on botany as Sir W.C. Thistleton Dyer. We may be told that what we really see is only the relation of tone, of light and shadow; but the fact that the architecture of the whole visible world, the meaning-full construction of all things that nature builds, is being constantly realised by our sight, makes the truth of this theory at least doubtful. That our eye cannot discern these natural objects without light goes without saying; further, that light and shadow shape the forms to be rendered by the brush is also true: but the assertion that what we see is only light and shade playing upon form, is shutting the door on another equally obvious truth. The eye, gifted with a natural sense of form, records ingenuously to the brain the sense of projecting and receding planes, the foreshortening of masses, the straightness, slant, or curve in a surface or in a line. A complete and exhaustive result may be achieved in a painting through this sense of form, as in the work of Van Eycke and of Leonardo da Vinci; or a shorthand record may be made, as in that of Phil May's sketches. But we feel that in both the sense of the whole form has been felt. However, volumes would not exhaust the arguments for and against the so-called impressionist's view of art; so-called—but surely a term unfortunate and misleading, and in nowise explanatory. Every touch a true artist ever puts upon canvas is a record of an impression—whether that impression comprises the structure, light and shade, true colour and tone, all combined,—or only certain surface qualities extracted from its entirety and enforced so that the most obvious appearances start into relief, giving doubtless a sense of vitality to a work, but remaining nevertheless only a partial record of the object. Needless to say, Leighton sought to record his impressions of nature in their entirety, and this necessitated a balancing of their component attributes. The startling element is never found in his art.
He viewed the influence of art as one which should perfect the life of every class; should purify in all directions the debasing elements of materialism and self-interest; should put zest and gratitude into the hearts of all men and women who can see and feel, by awakening a sense of the perfection and beauty of nature, art forming an explanatory and illuminating link between her and mankind—a translation of her perfection transmitted with all reverence by the artificer;—a perfecting beautiful pinnacle in the erection and development of a noble human being.
No words could better describe Leighton's high endeavour in training his own mind and those whom he tried to influence, than the following, written by Lord Acton and quoted by his friend, Sir M. Grant Duff.[7] "If I had the power," writes Sir M. Grant Duff, "I would place upon his monument the words which he wrote as a preface to a list of ninety-eight books he drew up, and about which he still hoped to read a paper at Cambridge when he wrote to me on the subject last autumn. 'This list is submitted with a view to assisting an English youth, whose education is finished, who knows common things, and is not training for a profession, to perfect his mind and open windows in every direction; to raise him to the level of his age, so that he may know the forces that have made the world what it is, and still reign over it; to guard against surprises and against the constant sources of errors within; to supply him both with the strongest stimulants and the surest guides; to give force and fulness, and clearness and sincerity, independence and elevation, generosity and serenity to his mind, that he may know the method and lay of the process by which error is conquered and truth is won, discerning knowledge from probability and prejudice from belief; that he may learn to master what he rejects as fully as what he adopts; that he may understand the origin as well as the strength and vitality of systems, and the better motives of men who are wrong; to steel him against the charm of literary beauty and talent, so that each book, thoroughly taken in, shall be the beginning of a new life, and shall make a new man of him.'" In a like spirit Leighton sought to arrive at viewing art; and what Lord Acton sought to effect by the general culture of men's minds and natures through reading, Leighton sought to effect in his special vocation by inducing other artists to study all that was greatest in Art from a wide and unprejudiced point of view—making it their own, so to speak, by thoroughly realising and appreciating the qualities in it which make it great. Each true masterpiece in Art, he urged, should be thoroughly taken in, and should be the beginning of a new effort. On the other hand, he sought to make the student "learn to master what he rejects as fully as what he adopts, that he may understand the origin as well as the strength and vitality of systems, and the better motives of men who are wrong." His desire was to guide art into the current of the world's best interests—the current in which good literature is so forcible an agent—on the highest, broadest, most catholic lines. He endeavoured to do so by his example as a working artist, by his Discourses, by his labours for the public in every direction where the Art of his country was concerned, and more directly by his influence on those with whom he personally came in contact.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] This picture has, I believe, unfortunately left the country. It was suggested by a passage in the second Idyll of Theocritus: "And for her, then many other wild beasts were going in procession round about, and among them a lioness." Sketches for portions of the picture and the squared tracing for the complete design can be seen in the Leighton House Collection. The full-length portrait of Mrs. James Guthrie was exhibited the same year as this second processional picture, which appeared on the walls of the Academy eleven years after the "Cimabue's Madonna." The head of the central figure, the Bride, Leighton painted from Mrs. Guthrie. The following charming letter from Mrs. Norton, the most notable of Sheridan's three beautiful daughters, refers to this picture:—