But there is a deeper kind of perspective, not so easily manufactured, though the manufacture of this, too, is often attempted, namely, Composition. The true ground of perspective in a picture is not a mechanical arrangement of lines, but a definite vision,—an affection of the painter by the subject, the net result of it in his mind, instantaneous and complete. It is a mistake to suppose that Composition is anything arbitrary,—that in the landscape out-of-doors we see the world as God made it, but in the picture as the painter makes it. Composition is nothing but the logic of vision; an uncomposed view is no more possible than an unlogical sentence. The eyes convey in each case what the mind is able to grasp,—no less, no more. As to any particular work, it is always a question of fact what it amounts to; the composition may be shallow, it may be bad,—the work of the understanding, not of the imagination,—put together, instead of seen together. But a picture without composition would be the mathematical point. Mr. Ruskin thinks any sensible person would exchange his pictures, however good, for windows through which he could see the scenes themselves. This does not quite meet the point, for it may be only a preference of quantity to quality. The window gives an infinitude of pictures; the painter, whatever his merit, but one. A fair comparison would be to place by the side of the Turner drawing a photograph of the scene, which we will suppose taken at the most favorable moment, and complete in color as well as light and shade. Whoever should then prefer the photograph must be either more of a naturalist than an artist, or else a better artist than Turner. The photograph, supposing it to be perfect in its way, gives what is seen at a first glance, only with the optical part of the process expanded over the whole field, instead of being confined to one point, as the eye is. The picture in it is the first glance of the operator, as he selected it; whatever delicacy of detail told in the impression on his mind tells in the impression on the plate; whatever is more than that does not go to increase the richness of the result, as picture, but belongs to another sphere. The landscape-photographs that we have lately had in such admirable perfection, however they may overpower our judgment at first sight, will, I believe, be found not to wear well; they have really less in them than even second-rate drawings, and therefore are sooner exhausted. The most satisfactory results of the photograph are where the subject is professedly a fragment, as in near foliage, tree-trunks, stone-texture; or where the mind's work is already done, and needs only to be reflected, as in buildings, sculpture, and, to a certain extent, portrait,—as far as the character has wrought itself into the clothes, habitual attitude, etc. Is not the popularity of the small full-length portrait-photographs owing to the predominance they give to this passive imprint of the mind's past action upon externals over its momentary and elusive presence? It is to the fillip received from the startling likeness of trivial details, exciting us to supply what is deficient in more important points, that is to be ascribed the leniency to the photograph on the part of near relatives and friends, who are usually hard to please with a painted likeness.
But all comparisons between the photograph and the hand-drawn picture are apt to be vitiated by the confusion of various extraneous interests with a purely artistic satisfaction resting in the thing itself. It is the old fallacy, involved in all the comparisons of Art with Nature. Of course, at bottom the interest is always that of the indwelling idea. But the question is, whether we stop at the outside, the material texture, or pass at once to the other extreme, the thought conveyed, or whether the two sides remain undistinguished. In the latter case only is our enjoyment strictly æsthetic, that is, attached to the bare perception of this particular thing; in the others, it is not this thing that prevails, but the physical or moral qualities, the class to which it belongs. It is true all these qualities play in and influence or even constitute the impression that particular works of Art make upon us. One man admires a picture for its handling, its surface, the way in which the paint is laid on; another, for its illustration of the laws of physiognomy; another, because it reminds him of the spring he spent in Rome, the pleasant people he met there, etc. We do not always care to distinguish the sources of the pleasure we feel; but for any criticism we must quit these accidents and personalities, and attend solely to that in the work which is unique, peculiar to it, that in which it suggests nothing, and associates itself with nothing, but refuses to be classed or distributed. This may not be the most important aspect of the thing represented, nor the deepest interest that a picture can have; but here, strictly speaking, lies all the beauty of it. The photograph has or may have a certain value of this kind, but a little time is needful before we discriminate what is general and what is special. Its extraneous interest, as specimen, as instance only, tends at once to abate from the first view, as the mind classifies and disposes of it. What remains, not thus to be disposed of, is its value as picture. Under this test, the photograph, compared with works of Art of a high order, will prove wanting in substance, thin and spotty, faulty in both ways, too full and too empty. For the result in each case must be proportionate to the impression that it echoes; but this, in the work of the artist, is reinforced by all his previous study and experience, as well as by the force and delicacy which his perception has over that of other men. It is thus really more concrete, has more in it, than the actual scene.
But when Composition is decried as artificial, what is meant is that it is artifice. It must be artificial, in the sense that all is there for the sake of the picture. But it is not to be the contrivance of the painter; the purpose must be in the work, not in his head. Diotima, in Plato's "Banquet," tells Socrates that Eros desires not the beautiful, but to bring forth in the beautiful; the creative impulse itself must be the motive, not anything ulterior. We require of the artist that he shall build better than he knows,—that his work shall not be the statement of his opinions, however correct or respectable, but an infinity, inexhaustible like Nature. He is to paint, as Turner said, only his impressions, and this precisely because they are not his, but stand outside of his will. To further this, to get the direct action of the artist's instinct, clear of the meddling and patching of forethought and afterthought, is no doubt the aim of the seemingly careless, formless handling now in vogue,—the dash which Harding says makes all the difference between what is good and what is intolerable in water-colors,—and the palette-knife-and-finger procedure of the French painters.
The sin of premeditated composition is that it is premeditated; the why and wherefore is of less consequence. If the motive be extraneous to the work, a theory, not an instinct, it does not matter much how high it is. It is fatal to beauty to see in the thing only its uses,—in the tree only the planks, in Niagara only the water-power; but a reverence for the facts themselves, or even for the moral meaning of them, so far as it is consciously present in the artist's mind, is just so far from the true intent of Art. This is the bane of the modern German school, both in landscape and history. They are laborious, learned, accurate, elevated in sentiment; Kaulbach's pictures, for instance, are complete treatises upon the theme, both as to the conception and the drawing, grouping, etc.; but it is mostly as treatises that they have interest. So the allegories in Albert Dürer's "Melancholia" are obstructive to it as a work of Art, and just in proportion to their value as thoughts.
The moral meaning in a picture, and its fidelity to fact, may each serve as measure of its merit after it is done. They must each be there, for its aim is to express after its own fashion the reality that lurks in every particle of matter. But it is for the spectator to see them, not the artist, and it is talking at cross-purposes to make either the motive,—to preach morality to Art, or to require from the artist an inventory of the landscape. That five or ten million pines grow in a Swiss valley is no reason why every one of them should be drawn. No doubt every one of them has its reason for being there, and it is conceivable that an exhaustive final statement might require them all to be shown. But there are no final statements in this world, least of all in Art. There are many things besides pines in the valley, and more important, and they can be drawn meanwhile. Besides, if all the pines, why not every pebble and blade of grass?
The earnestness that attracts us in mediæval Art, the devout fervor of the earlier time and the veracity of the later, the deference of the painter to his theme, is profoundly interesting as history, but it was conditioned also by the limitations of that age. The mediæval mind was oppressed by a sense of the foreignness and profaneness of Nature. The world is God's work, and ruled by Him; but it is not His dwelling-place, but only His foot-stool. The Divine spirit penetrates into the world of matter at certain points and to a certain depth, does not possess and inhabit it now and here, but only elsewhere and at a future time, in heaven, and at the final Judgment; and meantime the Church and the State are to maintain His jurisdiction over this outlying province as well as they can. The actual presence of God in the world would seem to drag Him down into questionable limitations, not to be assumed without express warrant, as exception, miracle, and in things consecrated and set apart. Hence the patchwork composition of the early painters; we see in it an extreme diversity of value ascribed to the things about them. It is a world partly divine and partly rubbish; not a universe, but a collection of fragments from various worlds. The figures in their landscapes do not tread the earth as if they belonged there, but like actors upon a stage, tricked up for the occasion. The earth is a desert upon which stones have been laid and herbs stuck into the crevices. The trees are put together out of separate leaves and twigs, and the rocks and mountains inserted like posts. In the earliest specimens the figures themselves have the same piecemeal look: their members are not born together, but put together. We see just how far the soul extends into them,—sometimes only to the eyes, then to the rest of the features, afterwards to the limbs and extremities. Evidently the artist's conception left much outside of it, to be added by way of label or explanation. In the trees, the care is to give the well-known fruit, the acorn or the apple, not the character of the tree; for what is wanted is only an indication what tree is meant. The only tie between man and the material world is the use he makes of it, elaborating and turning it into something it was not. Hence the trim orderliness of the mediæval landscape. Dante shows no love of the woods or the mountains, but only dread and dislike, and draws his tropes from engineering, from shipyards, moats, embankments.
The mediæval conception is higher than the antique; it recognizes a reality beyond the immediate, but not yet that it is the reality of the immediate and present also. But Art must dislodge this phantom of a lower, profane reality, and accept its own visions as authentic and sufficient. The modern mind is in this sense less religious than the mediæval, that the antithesis of phenomenal and real is less present to it. But the pungency of this antithesis comes from an imperfect realization of its meaning. Just so far as the subjection of the finite remains no longer a postulate or an aspiration, but is carried into effect,—its finiteness no longer resisted or deplored, but accepted,—just so far it ceases to be opaque and inert. The present seems trivial and squalid, because it is clutched and held fast,—the fugitive image petrified into an idol or a clod. But taken as it is, it becomes transparent, and reveals the fair lines of the ideal.
The complaints of want of earnestness, devoutness, in modern Art, are as short-sighted as Schiller's lament over the prosaic present, as a world bereft of the gods. It is a loss to which we can well resign ourselves, that we no longer see God throned on Olympus, or anywhere else outside of the world. It is no misfortune that the mind has recognized under these alien forms a spirit akin to itself, and therefore no longer gives bribes to Fate by setting up images to it. The deity it worships is thenceforth no longer powerless to exist, nor is there any existence out of him; it needs not, then, to provide a limbo for him in some sphere of abstraction. What has fled is not the divinity, but its false isolation, its delegation to a corner of the universe. Instead of the god with his whims, we have law universal, the rule of mind, to which matter is not hostile, but allied and affirmative. That the sun is no longer the chariot of Helios, but a gravitating fireball, is only the other side of the perception that it is mind embodied, not some unrelated entity for which a charioteer must be deputed.
We no longer worship groves and fountains, nor Madonnas and saints, and our Art accordingly can no longer have the fervency, since its objects have not the concreteness, that belonged to former times. But it is to be noticed that Art can be devout only in proportion as Religion is artistic,—that is, as matter, and not spirit, is the immediate object of worship. Art and Religion spring from the same root, but coincide only at the outset, as in fetichism, the worship of the Black Stone of the Caaba, or the wonder-working Madonnas of Italy. The fetich is at once image and god; the interest in the appearance is not distinct from the interest in the meaning. It needs neither to be beautiful nor to be understood. But as the sense springs up of a related mind in the idol, the two sides are separated. It is no longer this thing merely, but, on the one hand, spirit, above and beyond matter, and, on the other, the appearance, equally self-sufficing and supreme among earthly things, just because its reality is not here, but elsewhere,—appearance, therefore, as transcendent, or Beauty.
To every age the religion of the foregoing seems artificial, incumbered with forms, and its Art superstitious, over-scrupulous, biased by considerations that have nothing to do with Art. Hence religious reformers are mystics, enthusiasts: this is the look of Luther, even of the hard-headed Calvin, as seen from the Roman-Catholic side. Hence, also, every epoch of revolution in Art seems to the preceding like an irruption of frivolity and profanity. Christian Art would have seemed so to the ancients; the Realism of the fourteenth century must have seemed so to the Giotteschi and the Renaissance, to both. The term Pre-Raphaelitism, though it seems an odd collocation to bring together such men as Frà Angelico, Filippo Lippi, and Luca Signorelli, has so far an intelligible basis, that all this period, from Giotto to Raphael, amidst all diversities, is characterized throughout by a deference of Art to something extraneous. It is not beauty that Frà Angelico looks for, but holiness, or beauty as expressing this; it is not beauty that draws Filippo Lippi, but homely actuality. It is from this point of view that the Renaissance has been attacked as wanting in faith, earnestness, humility. The Renaissance had swallowed all formulas. Nothing was in itself sacred, but all other considerations were sacrificed to the appeal to the eye. But this, so far from proving any "faithlessness," shows, on the contrary, an entire faith in their Art, that it was able to accomplish what was required of it, and needed not to be bolstered up by anything external. Mr. Ruskin wants language to express his contempt for Claude, because, in a picture entitled "Moses at the Burning Bush," he paints only a graceful landscape, in which the Bush is rather inconspicuous. But Claude might well reply, that what he intended was not a history, nor a homily, but a picture; that the name was added for convenience' sake, as he might name his son, John, without meaning any comparisons with the Evangelist. It is no defect, but a merit, that it requires nothing else than itself to explain it.