Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, December 1878

by Various

It seems at first strange that, music being at once the glory and the recreation of the whole German nation, and a knowledge of it being native to the vast majority of individual Germans, there is little existing musical criticism—none as compared with the abounding German criticism on every other branch of art and every other subject under the sun. The field offered here to the cobweb-spinning German brain is wide and attractive. It seems strange that it should be as yet uncultivated, unless we fall back on the theory that art at its vitalest is of necessity uncritical, and that where an inborn love of, and aptitude for, an art exists with a daily enjoyment of its technical perfection, we shall be least likely to find it elaborately criticised theoretically. Where practice is abundantly satisfactory theories are superfluous.

Below, though still in the same category with, the musical gift of the Germans we may cite the literary gift of the English. For though this may not be the greatest literary epoch of England, yet it will not be denied that the greatest of English aptitudes is for literature. The wide appreciation of it in England is unmatched by a like appreciation of any other form of art. The growth of English novel-writing and its healthy development, accompanied, it may be, by many fungus-growths due to over-fertility, afford us the spectacle of a contemporary yet spontaneous English art, unforced by hothouse cultivation, uninfluenced by theories. A century or so hence the hearty, unconscious bloom of narrative literature in our day and language may seem as strange as seems to us the spontaneous blossoming of Venetian painting, of Greek sculpture, or of architecture in the Ile de France. An Englishman of to-day who thinks painters can be spun out of theories would surely laugh with instinctive knowledge of the veritable requirements of their art if one were to propose supplying novelists or poets in a similar way.

If we thus acknowledge that two kinds of art—and those two requiring the greatest amount of imaginative power—can flourish with spontaneity even in so self-conscious a civilization as ours, we shall fail to see in that civilization a sufficient a priori reason why the same might not have been the case with painting. If, however, still keeping to our own day, we look for the reverse of this picture, we shall find some approach to it in the condition of the painter's art in England. Here theory runs wild, practice falls far behind, and a great part of the practice that exists is inspired and regulated by theory. Artists are especially self-conscious, and the public, while much concerned with things artistic and fed on daily food of art-theory and speculation, is specially devoid of an innate artistic sense and an educated faculty for appreciating technical perfection.

In England, more even than on the Continent or with ourselves, is there a passion for story-telling with the brush, a desire to give ideas instead of pictures, a denial of the fact that the main object of a picture is to please the eye just as truly and as surely as the main object of a symphony is to please the ear. If we look through the catalogue of a Royal Academy exhibition, we notice the preponderance of scenes illustrative of English or other literature—of canvases that tell a story or point a moral or bear a punning or a sentimental title. And we notice the great number of quotations introduced into the catalogue without any actual explanatory necessity. Even landscapes are dragged into the domain of sentiment, and Mr. Millais, who copies Nature with the exactest reverence, cannot call his brook a brook, but "The sound of many waters;" and a graveyard is not named a graveyard, but "Where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap;" and instead of Winding the Clock we are told "The clock beats out the life of little men." A canvas representing "untrodden snow" must be ticketed, for increase of interest, "Within three miles of Charing Cross." Another is marked, "Christmas Eve: a welcome to old friends. (See Silas Marner.)" And so on, ad infinitum. May one not say ad nauseam before a piece of marble labelled "Baby doesn't like the water," or a canvas by Faed, R. A., called "Little cold tooties," or the portrait by the president of the Academy of a child on her pony denoted not only by the child's name in full, but her pony's also?

Prominent also at a first visit to a London exhibition stands out the hesitancy; of English artists to deal with large canvases and life-size figures—their strict confinement to genre of a domestic or bookishly archæological type. This is not the place to discuss the causes of such a fact, nor to insist on the lack of certain technical qualities in even the best English work. Such discussions can only be profitable when the originals are at hand to recriticise the criticism.

More striking than anything to be seen in 1877 at the Royal Academy was the small collection of pictures at the Grosvenor Gallery, organized and controlled by a noble amateur—himself a painter also—with the avowed intention of exhibiting the latest and most eccentric phases of English art. To a Londoner the opening day was interesting, as revealing the newest works of the most conspicuous London artists. To a stranger fresh from continental pictures, old and new, eager to see the touch of hands so often described in print, it was a revelation not only of a few men's work, but of the tendency of a national art and the artistic temperament of a whole people. Superficially, these pictures seemed the exact opposite of those at the conservative Academy—as aberrant as the latter were commonplace. But to one who knew them as the work of a fashionable, highly-educated clique they seemed merely a reaction of the same spirit that produced the elder style. In striving to get out of the rut of commonplace which had so long held in its grip the wheels of English art, not originality, so much as deliberate, sought-out eccentricity, was the result. The scale of work, starting from the original bathos of domestic sentimentality, runs up to the veriest contortions of affected mediævalism, rarely striking out a note of common sense. Simple English art is the apotheosis of the British middle-class spirit, of Mr. Arnold's "Philistinism." English art departing from this spirit shows, not Mr. Arnold's "sweetness and light," not calmness, repose, sureness of self, unconsciousness of its own springs of life, but theories running into vague contradictions, a far-fetched abnormalness, a morbid conception of beauty, a defiant disregard of the fact that a public exists which judges by common sense and the eye, not by a fine-spun confusion of theories and an undefined but omnipotent and deified "æsthetic sense" non-resident in the optic nerve. Mr. Whistler's pictures to-day, cleverly as he can paint if he will, are not pictures—I do not mean in fact, which is certainly true—but in title. They are "Natures in Black and Gold," or "In Blue and Silver," or "In Blue and Gold," or "Arrangements in Black," or "Harmonies in Amber and Brown." Here we have the desperate reaction from the idea that l'anecdote is everything to the idea that it is sufficient to represent nothing (poetically conceived!) with little color and less form, with the vaguest and slightest and most untechnical technique. It is hard to say which would most puzzle Titian redivivus—"Little cold tooties," or a blue-gray wash with a point or two of yellow, bearing some imaginary resemblance to the Thames with its gaslights, and called a "Nocturne in Blue and Gold."

The French "impressionalist" clique, similar in spirit to these Englishmen, though less outré in practice, is not by any means of so great importance in France as they are in England. It has more than once been remarked in England that the old-fashioned amateur—patron and critic, kenner—is dying out, and that his modern substitute must not only choose, but experiment—not only admire, but be admired. This spirit, spreading through a nation, will not make it a nation of artists, but will make the nation's artists amateurs. No critic, no amateur, is more loath to try his own hand than the one who most deeply and rightly appreciates the skill of others, and the rare and God-given and difficult nature of that skill. The confusion of amateur with professional work lowers the standard, so there will be every year fewer to tell the mass of the nation that most useful of truths—how earnest a thing is true art, and how rare a native appreciation of its truest worth.

There is no place where the interest excited by national art is so widespread, where the exhibitions are so crowded, where they so regulate times and seasons, annual excursions to and departures from town, as in England. Yet there is no place where the interest in art seems to a stranger so factitious, so much a matter of fashion and custom, of instinctive following of chance-appointed bell-wethers. It would scarcely be a matter of surprise if the whole thing should collapse through some pin-thrust of rival interest or excitement, and next year's exhibition be a desert, next year's artists paint their theories and their souls for unregarding eyes, or rather for unheeding brains. Have we not an apology for such a suggestion in the history of the rage for Gothic architecture, so thoroughly demonstrated in every possible theoretical and philosophical way to be the only proper style for Englishmen present or future, so devotedly and exclusively followed for a while by the profession, only to be suddenly abandoned for its fresher rivals, the so-called styles of Queen Elizabeth and Queen Anne?

In the throngs that flocked to the opening of the Royal Academy, waiting hours before the doors were opened, fighting and struggling for a foothold on the stairs, eager to be the first to see, though there were weeks of opportunities ahead—in the rare recurrence through the hum of the vast criticising crowd of a word of technical judgment or sober artistic criticism—it was easy to recognize the same spirit that confuses morality with chair-legs, that finds a knocker more "sincere" and "right" than a door-bell, that insists as upon a vital necessity that the heads of all nails should be visible and that all lines should be straight, and would as soon have a shadow on its conscience as in the pattern of wall-paper. Nowhere was decorative art so non-existent a few years ago as in England—nowhere is it so universally dwelt upon to-day. Yet it is easy to see how entirely the revival is a child of theory and books and teachers and rules—how little owing to a spontaneous development of art-instinct in the people, a spontaneous desire for more beauty in their surroundings, a spontaneous knowledge of how it is best to be obtained.

The literary and un-painterlike—if I may use such an awkward term—nature of English art is shown perhaps more forcibly in its critics than in artists or public. One is especially struck in reading criticisms of whatever grade with the excessive prominence given to the artist's personality. The work of this year is judged not so much by its excellence as by comparison with the work of last year. A——'s pictures, and B——'s and C——'s and D——'s, are interesting and valuable mainly as showing A——'s improvement, or B——'s falling off, or C——'s unexpected change of theme, or D——'s fine mind and delicate sensibilities.