Another Study for the Wolf-Charmer.
Now, in this individuality of his art, there is a weaker as well as a stronger side. It cannot be ignored by those who admire his larger and statelier designs that they lack something of stateliness. The figures in his small woodcuts are carried out of the strict and grave system of academic drawing into an extreme of freedom of gesture and movement, and that with the evident purpose of expressing in the strongest possible way the intense meaning of the artist; but this hardly allows of mention except as a virtue. Bishop Hatto in his screaming agony, as the rats attack him on every side while he crouches at the foot of the column on the capital of which the cat has taken refuge (for each and all the details of which see Southey's poem)—Bishop Hatto is almost liquified, has almost lost the solid substance of his corporeal form, in his horror and hopelessness. Enoch Arden, "the long-haired, long-bearded solitary," hardly shows the strong man, the vigorous sailor under his rags and through his squalor; the emphasis is laid on the fourteen years' solitary confinement in this lonely island, and the "strong heroic soul" which the poet drew has not interested the artist as part of this design. These are small drawings for wood-engraving and for book illustration; but the same character of design occurs again and again in the larger and statelier pieces; and it may there be less easy to accept. The impression made upon a student of mural painting, ancient and modern, by such a painting as that in the Church of the Ascension is that it is, in a sense, lacking in repose. The Adoring Angels around the risen Saviour are individual in their gestures, in the pose of their bodies, in the expression of their faces. They are personalities rather than parts of a "Glory of Angels." The figure of Christ itself has the same peculiarity and is marked by a singularly free and unconventional pose of the body and gesture of the right arm, suggestive rather of the teacher of men than of the Son taken up to his Father. Moreover, this effect as of too much movement and incident, as of too little stability and gravity, is heightened by the flowing drapery, which is so marked a feature of the composition that it remains uppermost in the minds of many students to the very end of their study of the picture. Something of this may be seen in the illustration given here of the noble window which was sent to the Exhibition of 1889 [[page 15]]. The subject is the Sealing of the Servants of God. These groups are of indubitable truth and power as illustrations of the passage in the Apocalypse; but as parts of a solemn color design another standard needs to be applied to them.
The Floating Head.
So much for the less agreeable side of this familiar and personal way of designing. In the favorable aspect there would, of course, be very much to be said, for he is no illustrator, he is no story-teller, he is no composer of pictured fable or pictured record who does not understand how to give his figures that life and movement, that action and expression, which will explain all that is explainable of their purpose and their function. Nothing, for instance, can be more perfect as a bit of mystical story-telling than the Wolf-Charmer, the picture in which the gaunt and haggard magician, with his pipe at his lips, comes out of the forest surrounded by his drove of gigantic wolves. Two studies for the wolves are given here; and the spirit of the design is interesting to trace in them. To give the savage creatures something more than their due size, and, above all, something more than their due ferocity, is a natural and obvious device; but to express, as the artist has expressed, their familiarity with their leader, their sympathy with him, their spirit entering into his as he heads and controls them, is something admirable in descriptive art. So in that grim picture in which some part of the spirit of feudal Japan is contained; the picture which tells the tale of little Kio-Sai; the rushing and turbulent stream between its high banks is gray and sombre as if with the swollen waters of a flood; and upon it, whirled along in its course, the severed head which frightened the child floats face upward with something of its living expression still lingering about the eyes and lips, but still as dead, as corpse-like as a severed head could be. This powerful drawing, made within the last two years, is to be cited as a characteristic specimen of expressional art. There is nothing in the picture but whirling water and floating head; and yet the stern, fierce, half-savage, feudal system of Japan, which coexisted with an almost too subtle refinement of manners and of thought, both literary and artistic, is expressed in this little square of grave coloring. So, in the numerous South Sea Island studies which have filled many a frame and delighted so many a student of water-color drawings, it is hard to say whether the pictures of movement and action, of fishing with cormorants, of riding and marching, of bustle and life, or the pictures of tropical and oriental men and women in repose, are more delightful—half naked girls carrying canoes, seated dancers going through the sacred movements of the siva, portraits of individuals, and studies of groups intended to preserve for the artist the recollection, and for the instruction of those at home the singular life, of these brown islanders, so different from the negroids of the southern groups, so over-civilized in ceremony and tradition, with all their lack of policing and of steady social conditions. In all this work the artist's indifference to the accepted conventional ways of expressing his meaning is altogether fortunate for his art. He knows how to tell a story in pictures which have very much, if not all, of his highest artistic qualities, and this he would hardly be capable of were he more fettered than he is by the rules of the academies as to how the action of man should be put into form and color.
A Study.