Of the group of great poets who make up the English Romantic Revival, who voiced during the first half of the nineteenth century the ferment of new ideas, the greatest is Wordsworth. Stirred, as were the rest, by the teaching of Rousseau—and it is here perhaps that Rousseau’s chief importance lies—he expressed in his poetry the aspirations which in France found vent in an orgy of political philosophy and the eager, endless search for liberty. His poetry and his sister’s journals foretell that art which was to supersede maudlin subjectivism and, in its turn, Parnassian coldness. Coleridge may have more mystery, Shelley more fire, Keats more music, but it was Wordsworth who really felt the common soul in nature, the fusion of the human and the natural into one scale of moods and longings. He realised that mountains can hate, that they can resent intrusion, as can human beings.
‘I dipped my oars into the silent lake
And, as I rose upon the stroke, my boat
Went heaving through the water like a swan;
When, from behind that craggy steep till then
The horizons bound, a huge peak, black and huge,
As if with voluntary power instinct
Upreared its head. I struck and struck again,
And growing still in stature the grim shape
Towered up between me and the stars, and still,
For so it seemed, with purpose of its own
And measured motion like a living thing,
Strode after me.’[11]
—which shows how mountains can be understood even by man who was no climber, who, indeed, made a point of always walking round rather than over any hill on his way. His belief is the same with every aspect of nature. She has her moods, and they are the same as ours. We can realise them because of
‘A motion and a spirit that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.’
Wordsworth’s power of expression, and even more his power of selection, lag far behind his power of feeling. But what may detract from the pleasure of actual perusal cannot lessen ultimate historical importance. Modern art must find in Wordsworth its greatest forerunner in the department of nature. From him, as has been hinted, springs the tendency which permeated French literature at the end of last century. The pantheist art of Symbolism which came to influence England in the nineties is, at bottom, a half-English movement.
A love of nature, therefore, is in Mr. Holmes’ blood, and with this great tradition behind him he is working to give mountains the artistic interpretation which has so long been denied them. In his pictures and drawings of the English lakeland he has externalised an aspect of mountain scenery which is quite new. Some one has well expressed it by saying that he paints mountains not so much as they actually look but as one remembers them to be; and this is the same as saying that repudiation of illusion or naturalism enables him to suggest the ‘mountainness’ of the mountain, the vague, essential something which tells one it is a mountain.
In his heritage from Cézanne, Mr. Holmes has at any rate acquired no clumsiness, but greater skill has not tempted him to too much detail. He has carried to still greater lengths synthesis and simplification. In economy of line he can hold his own with any of the new school of painters. With a few bold strokes he gives the massive strength of hills and rocks. It is now possible to realise how simple is the structure of mountains, but at the same time how clear must be the discrimination between the essential and the superfluous. By adopting the black border with which many of the Fauves surround the objects in their pictures, Mr. Holmes is able to dispense with chiaroscuro—almost with perspective. He paints in flat washes of colour, admirably toned, and separates one plane from another by a band of black. The distance springs into being, and perspective is achieved without elaboration, without destruction of essential outline.
Besides this ‘realism of effect’ as opposed to ‘realism of fact,’ Mr. Holmes has another definite aim, which attaches his art still more closely to Fauvism. He has a keen sense of the decorative importance of a picture. He has said himself: ‘The first function of a picture is architectural—it has to be a beautiful part of the wall surface.’[12] This aim is certainly fulfilled in his work. The lines of the hills run in subtle rhythms, and the whole lies gracefully on the wall and becomes a part of it. As ever, Mr. Holmes is his own best critic. He has summed up this double ideal—synthesis and decorative value—as follows:—
‘At the very birth of art we find the necessity of selection and omission, with a view to emphatic statement, recognised more generally perhaps than it has ever been recognised since. And with this necessity we may note another characteristic of primitive art—the love of rhythm and pattern.’[13]
It has been seen that, with the exception of Cézanne, Mr. Holmes has no direct ancestor in European art. But, nevertheless, he is the ready pupil of centuries. His art is not merely, as in the case of several other prominent Fauves, a slavish return to the primitive. It is founded on a thorough knowledge of the past. A further extract from his book[14] will show that he gives a modern expression to centuries of ideals:—