NOCTURNE IN BLUE AND SILVER.
What wonderful rain and snow this man has painted! What vast expanses of water as mystic as the night! And those vagrant mists, that envelop everything and blot out the very existence of things! There has not been anything in art since Turner that could be compared with it. There are no banal sunsets, no glaring moonlights, only the more intricate moods of nature, snowfall, mist, late evening and night. Also in the choice of his subject he added a new note.
The art of a landscape painter is determined by a thousand influences upon his mind other than those of nature. The essence of Monet's art is one of an hour, but with such a painter as Daubigny or Rousseau it is one of a place. There is the sense of the atmosphere of the moment given by one school of landscape painters, of locality by another, poetry by a third and of the historic associations of a place by yet another school. These things are, of course, determined by temperament, and schools of painting may be classified in this way more adequately than they are. Human association creeps into landscapes in various degrees, and also in other ways than the historical way which we feel,—as in F. E. Church's pictures, for instance,—but landscape, generally subordinate to the human interest, now sometimes tries to free itself from this influence entirely. It has become like poetry, simply the record of an emotion or mood remembered in colour. This is Whistler's peculiar innovation.
And yet the final significance of the nocturne in the world of art is still an open question. Time alone can decide its value. The rest is mere hypothesis. Many—and I only talk of people who understand—argue that despite its perfection, the nocturne represents a minor phase of art. Of course, a nocturne, no matter how beautiful, cannot compete in importance with the "Portrait of Carlyle," or "The Artist's Mother." Size does not mean much, but it means something. A small painting can be as exquisite in workmanship as a large one, but it can never rise to the same dignity of expression. A frescoe by Chavannes would lose much if executed in the size of the average easel picture.
But the nocturne stands for something in modern art which lends it special importance, aside of all workmanship and beauty of pictorial treatment. It represents a return to the art of painting for painting's sake. Every art, may it be music, poetry, dancing, sculpture or painting, has its own peculiar technique, which the technically ignorant person cannot appreciate. Poetry which has no formal conventions is inconceivable. And, in a similar manner, painting has the charm of texture and brushwork, the charm of how the paint is actually put on and displayed on the canvas. The æsthetic satisfaction derived from an art is in exact proportion to one's knowledge of the art's technique.
This largely explains the general public's indifference to art. And the everlasting fight between the artist and the public has been on these lines. The plea of the modern experimentist that all poetry of painting should be in the paint, which also Whistler advanced, is a just one if not carried to extremes. Absolute paucity of idea is as unfavourable as story-telling. The intrinsic beauty of a painting lies in the method of painting, and the only guide for the painter is colour and the general arrangement—not a method learned by rote, not an arrangement garroted by a thousand rules which others have invented, but that personal style or rhythm which is inveterately the painter's own. So Whistler's style is beautiful because it is personal. His revolt was against story-telling, against the genre pictures, which adulterated painting with the skill of the novel writer. It is for future æsthetics to decide whether the introduction of musical ideals is not just as dangerous as the intermixture of any other art. There is no doubt, however, that the new combination grants a higher pleasure to the connoisseur at present. Music is the most fashionable and, perhaps, most widely understood art to-day.
This be as it may, Whistler did a great service to modern art. By realizing its limitations he bestowed upon it a new vitality and glow. His art, far from being lawless, is the expression of a new law. Make any kind of pictures you like, dear painters, provided they are beautiful. For each age there is a different beauty. Old forms and old perfections wither.
There has been too much story-telling. The David school, with its pompous historical, allegorical and mythological representations, has become intolerable to us. David, Vernet, etc., up to Ingres and Delaroche all seem lifeless. Also the Romanticists, who were the interpreters of poets, appear highstrung to more recent art ideas. The reaction was inevitable. The Impressionists—and their merit lies principally in that their work represents a technical reaction—went too far, inasmuch as it allows scarcely any scope to intellectual expansion. It is based on immediate vision, and occupies itself only with the consideration of light and colour, and keen observation of modern life. All the great painters met the public half way. The great painters, we need only to recall Rembrandt, Velasquez or Leonardo, were painters as much as they were poets, but each in equal measure. The qualities balanced each other, and they did not, like the modern painters, sacrifice one for the other.
Whistler has to be classified as an Impressionist, but he remained true to the old tradition. He was as much a reactionist against classic and romantic painting as any of them; but he had no use for the new technique. Like Monet, he went back to Velasquez and Goya, Franz Hals, Van Dyke and all the Old Masters who could paint. Like Courbet, he reduced a scene to three or four broad tones, but he was more exact in the grade of tones, and invariably endeavoured to explain the sentiment inspired by them. His work was never anti intellectual. On the contrary he was a true visionary.
He protested against literary elements, but emphasized the psychological and symbolical qualities of painting. Nobody was further remote from gross superficial realism. Like Flaubert and the Goncourts, he proved that realism can go hand in hand with refined form and delicate psychology. He was sane throughout. And that is why the æsthetic revolution, produced by him, is not yet at an end.