Mr. Ruskin is without doubt the most remarkable of English critics, and summarizes so many opposite theories and tendencies that his pages may in some sort be taken as an epitome of the whole matter. It would be impossible to abstract from their great bulk any consecutive or consistent system of thought or precept. His influence has been mainly by isolated ideas of more or less truth and value. It is impossible here to analyze his work. Such is the mixed tissue of his woof that the captive princess who was set to sort a roomful of birds' feathers had scarcely a harder task than one who should try to separate and classify his threads, some priceless and steady, some rotten, false, misleading. Morals, manners, religion, political economy, are mixed with art in every shape—art considered theoretically and technically, historically, philosophically and prophetically. Various as are his views on these varying subjects, on no one subject even do they remain invariable. Yet such is the charm of his style, delightfully sarcastic, and eloquent as a master's brush, so vividly is each idea presented in itself, that, each idea being enjoyed as it comes, all seem at first of equal value. We realize neither the fallacy of many taken singly nor the conflict of all taken together. His points are often cleverly and faithfully put, and our attention is so riveted on this cleverness and faithfulness that we take for granted the rightness of his deductions, slovenly, illogical or false though they may be. What we most remark in his books is how the purely artistic element in his nature—of a very high grade and very true instincts—is dwarfed of full development and stunted of full results by the theorizing literary bent which he has in common with his time and people. In theorizing even on truly-felt and clearly-stated facts, in explaining their origin and unfolding their effects, his guidance is least valuable. We may more safely ask him what than why. His influence on English art has been great at the instant: whether it will be permanent is doubtful. At one time it was said that without having read his books one could tell by an inspection of the Royal Academy walls what Mr. Ruskin had written in the past year. Now, the most notable exponents of his teaching, whether consciously so or not, are on the one hand the shining lights of the Grosvenor Gallery—hierophants of mysticism and allegory and symbolism and painted souls and moral beauty expressed in the flesh, copying Ruskin's Botticelli line for line, forgetting that what was naïveté in him, and in him admirable, because all before him had done so much less well, becomes to-day in them the direst affectation, is reprehensible in them because many before them have done so much better. On the other hand, we have a naturalistic throng which follows Mr. Ruskin's precepts when he overweights the other side of the scale and says that art should "never exist alone, never for itself," never except as "representing a true"—defined as actually-existing—"thing or decorating a useful thing;" when he declares that every attempt by the imagination to "exalt or refine healthy humanity has weakened or caricatured it." Mr. Ruskin bade men "go to Nature in all singleness of heart, and walk with her laboriously and trustingly, having no other thought but how best to penetrate her meaning, rejecting nothing, selecting nothing and scorning nothing;" and Mr. Hamerton was literally obeying him when he exiled himself for five years in a hut on an island in a bleak Scotch lake to learn faithfully to portray the shores of that single lake. Was it thus that Titian studied in his youth, and learned how, years after in Venice, to paint the chestnuts and the hills of Cadore a thousand-fold more artistically and more truly, because more abstractly and more ideally, than could all the "pre-Raphaelite" copyists of to-day? Thus we see the two extremes of Mr. Ruskin's teaching—see him at one time exalting imagination and feeling over the pictorial part of art, at another degrading art into the servilest copying.
Observers may disagree as to whether these cognate things—self-consciousness in the artist, æsthetic philosophizing in the critic, and the taste for a literary rather than a pictorial value in the public—are on the increase or on the decrease in the various centres of art. Annual exhibitions—a significant illustration of our high-pressure life in art as in other things—would seem to tend toward deepening these faults. Attention must be attracted at all hazards, and the greater the number of exhibitors and the average attractiveness of their canvases the greater becomes the temptation to shine, not by excellence, but by eccentricities of treatment, or, still more, by the factitious interest of a "telling" subject. Is it due, perhaps, to this constant desire for notoriety on the part of the artist, and for more and more excitement on the part of the public, that in all modern schools, landscape art, as less possibly influenced by such a state of things, stands ahead of the art which has humanity for its subject? It is scarcely possible to find in France to-day a figure-painter who is a Daubigny, still less a Jules Dupré. Next to these unquestionably stand such animal-painters as Bonheur and Troyon; and it would be hard among the youngest file of artists to find a figure-painter who in his line should rival Van Marcke in his. In England also landscape ranks ahead, and it is perhaps in comparing it with French landscape that the difference between the schools is most truly though not most glaringly displayed. Even here, and in the allied fields of animal-painting, the desire for l'anecdote creeps in, and Landseer with all his talent often prostitutes his brush in the attempt to make his brutes the centre of dramatic action, and forces into them semi-human characteristics in order to extract from them tales or ideas of human interest. It was not thus that Veronese painted dogs or Franz Snyders his lions and boars—not thus that the Greeks have put the horse into art. Nor, to take the best contemporary comparison, is it thus that Barye's bronzes are designed.
Landscape brings us inevitably to Turner. The most highly gifted of all English artists, past or present, his genius was hardly a logical outcome of the contemporary spirit of his nation. We have no right to say this of an artist, no right to call him anomalous, while we are still in doubt as to whether he may be only the advance-guard of a new national art, the herald of a new avatar. But when he with his generation dies, when another generation develops and bears fruit, and a third is beginning to blossom, and he still seems anomalous, it is fair to hold him exceptional in his country's art, rather than characteristic thereof. Together with wonderful endowments of eye and hand, and a prodigious power of work, Turner's earlier works show us an unconscious development and a healthy oblivion of his own personality. But later the fatal modern fever entered his blood, ending in something very like delirium. From a painter he became a theorist, contaminated by a rush of criticism alike indiscriminate in praise and injudicious in blame. We shall see the baleful effects of modern methods if we look, in the wonderful series at the National Gallery, first at the pictures painted when Turner was an artist thinking of painting, then to those done when he was a self-conscious experimentalist thinking of Turner—Turner worshipped by Ruskin, Turner sick with envy of the Dutchmen and defiance of Claude.
I have but a line to give to the one or two other men of abnormally splendid gifts whom this century has seen. Henri Regnault's extraordinary talent was extinguished almost at the first spark, and it is beyond prophecy to tell what it might have produced. His eccentricities seem to have been quite genuine, due to an overflow of power rather than to posing or grimace. His love of his art, his passion for color, were almost frantic in their intensity, but sincere. A certain exaggerated phrase of his is but the protest of reaction against the literary painting, the erudite and philosophical art, of his time. "La vie," he cries, "étant courte, il faut peindre tant qu'on a des yeux. Donc on ne doit pas les fatiguer à lire des stupides journaux." A crude way of putting the idea that to be an artist one needs but art.
Another wonderful talent is Hans Makart. Such an eye for color, it is quite safe to say, has not been born since Veronese. Had he been born at Venice among his peers, forced to work instead of experiment, outvied instead of foolishly extolled, surrounded by artists to surpass him if he tripped for a single instant, instead of critics to laud his most glaring faults and amateurs to pay thousands for his spoiled paper, we should have had another name to use as explanatory of genius. As it is, he is, according to present indications, utterly spoiled. Only those who know how he can draw if he will, how he has painted—portraits best, perhaps—when he would, are vexed beyond endurance by the folly and the carelessness and the sins he chooses to give us. It has been said that Raphael Mengs was a born genius spoiled by the coldness, the pseudo-classicism, the artificiality and eclecticism of the eighteenth century. A companion portrait is Hans Makart, ruined by the amateurishness, the rhapsodizing, the theorizing, the morbid self-consciousness of the nineteenth.
The so-called Spanish school of to-day is as yet too new for us to see exactly whither it tends. Its passion for glaring, metallic, aniline compound tints—tints that "scream," to use a French phrase—its horror of all shade and depth and of pure and simple colors, are, however, most certainly unhealthy. It is a diseased eye that in the desire for violent color loses all memory of chiaroscuro.
I have left till now unnoticed the contemporary Netherland artists, though their works are perhaps more entirely satisfactory than those of either of the three schools we have discussed. But their characteristics are less markedly distinct, less available for comparison, and can be best noted and appraised by a previously-gained knowledge of the peculiarities of English, French and German painting. The Belgian school is most closely allied to the French, and in technique is often its equal. In landscape and cattle-painting the types are similar, while Belgian figure-painting gains by the lack of the element which a French critic notes when he says modern art has become mondain—surtout demi-mondain. Nowhere does contemporary art seem so healthy and sane, so sure of itself, so consonant with the best nature and gifts of the people, as in the Netherlands: nowhere are its ideals so free from morbidness, affectation or sentimentality. Is it perhaps that in the studios of Amsterdam, in the great school of Antwerp, even in the galleries of Brussels, one is somewhat out of the wildest stream of modern life—less driven to analysis and theorizing and self-consciousness than in London, Paris or Munich? Whatever is cause, whatever effect, the Netherland school shows two things side by side—the least measure of self-consciousness, and the soundest contemporary painting: if not the most effective, it is, I think, the most full of promise. There seems to be forming the most healthy national soil for the development of future genius.
In conclusion, it may be noted that we in America, whose art is just beginning even to strive, are subjected to a somewhat strange cross-fire of influences. Lineally the children of England, we are spiritually and by temperament in many things her opposites. Our taste in art seems to turn resolutely away from her. For each hundred of French and score of German pictures that comes to us, how many come from England? What can one who has not crossed the sea learn of English pictures from our private collections and picture-dealers' shops? Was not all we knew prior to the Exhibition of 1876 gleaned from Vernon Gallery plates and Turner's Rogers or Rivers of France? But while our dealers and students and millionaires throng the studios of Paris and Munich, and our eyes are being daily educated to demand above all things technique, our brains are constantly being worked upon by a stream of art-literature from England. Taste pulls us one way—identity of English speech, with consequent openness to English ideas, pulls us the other. Pictures preach one thing, books another. Our boy who has worked in Paris comes home to try to realize Ruskin. Both influences are too new, and our art is as yet too unsteady, for any one to guess as to the ultimate result. One thing only can be unreservedly inculcated: Let us shun self-analyzation, self-consciousness, morbidness, affectation, attitudinizing. Let us look ahead as little as possible, keeping our eyes on our brushes and on the world of beauty around us. One thing only can with safety be predicted: If we are, or are to be, a people of artists, creative or appreciative as the case may be, we shall learn whatever of technique the world has to teach us, and shall improve upon it, and we shall perhaps digest the small measure of theory for which we have appetites left. But if we are not artists, actual or future, technique will be impossible, and will seem undesirable. We shall greedily fill our stomachs with the wind of art-philosophy, shall work with the reason instead of with the eye and the fingers, shall symbolize our aspirations, our theorizings, our souls and our consciences, and fondly dream we are painting pictures. Or we shall copy with a hopeless effort after literalness the first face or weed we meet, and call the imperfect, mechanical result a work of art.
M. G. Van Rensselaer.