PART I.
The notion that Painting and Sculpture are concerned only with the "imitation of Nature,"—that is, with copying the forms and colors of existing things,—though so often expelled, as it were, with a pitchfork, persistently recurs, not only in popular talk, but in deliberate criticism, and in the practice of artists. There are periods when this notion gets the upperhand, as at the end of the fifteenth century, and again at the end of the eighteenth, when Rousseau prescribed a return to Nature as the panacea for all defect, in Art as elsewhere. Then Winckelmann and his successors triumphed over it for a while,—showed at least the crudity of that statement. This is the purpose of much of Sir Joshua Reynolds's lectures. Now it seems to be coming up again,—thanks partly to Mr. Ruskin, though he might be quoted on both sides,—and this time with some prospect of demonstrating, by the aid of photography, what it does in fact amount to.
It is a very general opinion that photography has made painting superfluous,—or, at least, that it will do so as soon as further improvements in the process shall enable it to render color as well as light and shade. And our artists seem to give in to this view, in the deference they show to the subject, as if it mattered not so much what it was, or how, as that it is there,—a pious tenderness towards barns and rail-fences and stone walls and the confused monotony of the forest, not as having any special fitness, not as beautiful, but because they exist,—a scrupulous anxiety to give the every-day look of the objects they portray, as any passer-by would see them, free from any distorting personality. To do them justice, however, this submissiveness to the matter-of-fact, with the more gifted at least, is a virtue that is praised and starves. They do it lip-service, and suppose themselves loyal; but when they come to paint, they are under a spell that does not allow them to see in things only material qualities, but, without any violence to Nature, raises it to a higher plane, where other values and other connections prevail. Art, where it exists to any serious purpose, follows Nature, but not the natural,—according to Raphael's maxim, that "the artist's aim is to make things not as Nature makes them, but as she intends them."
But these audacities, though they make their own excuse in the work itself, do not pass in a statement without cavil at the arrogance that would exalt the work of men's hands above the work of God. Shall we strive with our pigments to outshine the sun, or teach the secrets of form to the cunning Artificer by whom the world was made? What room for Art, except as the feeble reflex of the splendors of the actual world?
But if that be all, how to account for the existence of Art as distinct from upholstery? Why pile our mole-hills by the side of the mountains? We can see the landscape itself any day;—whence this extraordinary interest in seeing a bit of it painted,—except, indeed, as furniture for the drawing-room, to be ordered with the frame at so much the yard from the picture-dealer?
The root of the difficulty lies in this slippery phrase, Nature. We talk of the facts of Nature, meaning the existence now and here of the hills, sky, trees, etc., as if these were fixed quantities,—as if a house or a tree must be the same at all times and to everybody. But in a child's drawing we see that these things are not the same to us and to him. He is careful to give the doors and windows, the chimneys with their smoke, the lines of the fence, and the walk in front; he insists on the divisions of the bricks and the window-panes: but for what is characteristic and essential he has no eye. He gives what the house is to him, merely a house in general, any house; it would not help it, but only make the defect more prominent, to straighten and complete the lines. An artist, with fewer and more careless lines, would give more of what we see in it; and if he be a man of high power, he may teach us in turn the limitation of our seeing, by showing that the vague, half-defined sentiment that attaches to it has also a visible expression, if we knew where to look for it.
We hear people say they know nothing of Art, but that they can judge as well as anybody whether a picture is like Nature or not. No doubt Giotto's contemporaries thought so, too, and they were grown men, with senses as good as ours; but we smile when Boccaccio says, "There was nothing in Nature that Giotto could not depict, whether with the pencil, the pen, or the brush, so like that it seemed not merely like, but the thing itself." We smile superior, but Giotto had as keen an eye and as ready a hand as any man since. The lesson is, that we, too, have not come to the end of even the most familiar objects, but that to another age our view of them may seem as queer as his seems to us. For the facts in Nature are not fixed, but transcendental quantities, and their value depends on the use that is made of them. It is in this direction that the artist's genius avails; his skill in execution is secondary and incidental. The measure of his ability is the depth to which he has penetrated the world of matter, not the number or the accuracy of his facts. Every landscape wears many faces, as many as there are men and different moods of the same man. To one the forest is so many cords of wood; to another, an arboretum; to another, a workshop or a museum; to another, a poem. What each sees is there; the forest exists for beauty and for firewood, and lends itself indifferently to either use.
Nature wears this air of impartiality, because her figures are only zeros, deriving all their significance from their position. We do not require a like impartiality in the artist, because what he is to give is not Nature, but what Nature inspires. His endeavor to be impartial would result only in giving us his opinions or the opinions of others, instead of the utterance of the oracle. For Nature hides her secret, not by silence, but in a Babel of sweet voices, heard by each according to the fineness of his sense: by one as mere noise, by another as a jangle of pleasing sounds, by the artist as harmony. They are all of them Nature's voices;—he adds nothing and omits nothing, but hears with a preoccupied attention, the justification being that his hearing is thus most complete, as one who understands a language seizes the sense of words rapidly spoken better than he who from less acquaintance with it strives to follow all the sounds.
The test of "truth," therefore, in the sense of fact, is insufficient. The question is, Truth for whom? Not for a child or a savage. If we were to show a fine landscape to a Hottentot, it would be a mistake to say he saw it, though the image might be demonstrable on the retina of his eye. He would not see what we mean when we speak of it, any more than we should see the footstep on the ground or hear the stirring in the grass that is plain enough to him, and hits our organs, too, though we are not trained to perceive it. If the test of merit be the production of a likeness to something we see, then the artist should know no more of Nature than we do. But then, though it may surprise us into momentary admiration to recognize familiar things in this translation,—just as common talk sounds finer in a foreign tongue,—yet it is but for a time, and then the inevitable limitations of the counterfeit come in,—its narrowness and fixity,—crude paint for sunbeams, cold and colorless stone for the living form. The only test of a work of Art is, how far it will carry us,—not any comparison by the yardstick. We demand to be raised above our habitual point of view, and be made aware of a deeper interest than we knew of. It is in hope of this alone that we pardon the necessary shortcoming of the means.
This deeper interest has its root in nothing arbitrary, or personal to the artist. It is not inventing something finer than Nature, but seeing more truly what Nature shows, that makes the artistic faculty. This is the lesson taught by the history of Art. Take it up where you will, this history is nothing but the successive unfolding of a truer conception of Nature, only speaking here the language of form and color, instead of words. It is this that lies at the bottom of all its revolutions, and appears in its downfall as well as in its prosperity.