The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, December 1879

by Various

There is another result of our present shallow "general" education which has a most depressing effect upon art. Every one now can read and write, and it would be considered an infringement of the right of private judgment to doubt the ability of every writer or reader to criticize any work of art whatsoever. In the case of buying a kitchen range or a carriage we should not trust to our own knowledge, but should apply to the experienced expert; but "every one can tell whether he likes a picture or not!"

Now, good criticism in art demands at least as long and severe an apprenticeship as that in ironmongery—the training of the eye by long experience, reading, historical, scientific, mechanical—real study of all the various subjects connected with it; and this can be acquired only by few. It has been said, with perfect truth, that it will not do to depend on the fiat of artists themselves for the value of a picture, statue, or building. With some, the admiration of the technical part of art is too great; the passionate likes and dislikes for particular styles or particular men warp the judgments of others; and this is, perhaps, inherent in the artist nature. But this is only saying that we must not go to the ironfounder for the character of his kitchen range; there are other skilled opinions to be had besides those of the authors of a work.

At the present time, the art of criticism has got so far beyond our powers of creation that it becomes more and more difficult to bring forth a great work of art. The hatching of eggs requires a certain genial warmth to bring them to perfection; creation is a vital act, but the reception which any new-fledged production is likely to meet with is either the scorching fire of fault-finding or the freezing cold of indifference.

It was not thus that great works of old were produced; Cimabue's picture of the Virgin was carried in a triumphal procession through Florence, from the artist's studio to the church which was to be honoured by its possession. It was a worthy religious offering to the goddess Mary, a subject of rejoicing to the whole city, and the quarter of the town where it was first seen, amid cries of delight, was called the "Borgo Allegri," a name which it has kept six hundred years. And the sympathy of the people reacted on the artist, and helped him to carry out his great conceptions. They were proud of him, and he worked at his picture as a labour of love to do his nation honour.

Now, when a man has spent perhaps years over a religious picture, working with all his heart and soul and strength, instead of its being taken into a church, and seen only with the associations for which it is adapted, it is hung up between a smirking lady, clad in the last abominations of the fashion, on one side, and a "horse and dog, the property of Blank, Esq.," on the other; while the artist is fortunate if the best of the critics, who has just glanced at it as he passes by, does not entirely ignore his meaning and mistake the expression of his idea, only discovering that "the drawing of the toe of the left foot is decidedly awkward." So it may be, and there are probably faults in it still more considerable; yet the picture, with all these faults, may be one of great merit.

Is it possible to conceive the Madonna di San Sisto painted under such conditions? The cold chill of the indifferent public would have reacted on the artist, and quenched the fire of his inspiration. The picture was intended to be the incarnation of the religious feeling of the whole Christian world, in the divine expression of the infant Christ gazing into futurity, with those rapt, far-seeing eyes,—in the holy mother, who carries him so reverently, yet with such power and purity in her look and bearing. It was honoured sympathetically by all who had the joy of seeing it borne as a banner through a great city as an act of the highest worship; not cut up into little morsels and set on a fork by every man who can write smart articles for a penny paper, bestowing a little supercilious praise and much wholesome advice on Holman Hunt and Tennyson, on Stevens[²] and Street alike.

But the result is that the world is poorer by the want of the work which only a sense of sympathy between the artist and his public inspires. "Action and reaction are equal," we are told, in science, and the artist cannot produce the best that is in him alone, any more than the most finished musician can play on a dumb piano. The receivers must do their share in the partnership. Mrs. Siddons once said that she lost all her power when annihilated by the coldness of the cream of the cream society of a salon, and preferred any marks of emotion of an unsophisticated if intelligent audience, to the chill of fashionable indifference; and when we complain of the poorness of our art, we must remember for how large a share of this we, the present public, are responsible. It may be all very well for the skylark to "pour his strains of unpremeditated art" for his own pleasure and that of the little skylarks; but Shelley must have had the hope that "the world will listen then, as I am listening now."

The poet and the painter require intelligent cordial belief and sympathy, which is just what we have not to give, and therefore the reign of the highest art is probably at an end: no Phidias or Michelangelo, no Homer or Shakspeare, are likely again to arise. This is pre-eminently a scientific age—a time for the collection and co-ordination of facts; and what imagination we possess we use in the discovery of the laws by which Nature works, and in the application of our knowledge to the ordinary wants and comforts and pleasures of the human race. Electric telegraphs, phonographs, photographs abound; every possible adaptation of steam in majestic engines (almost, it seems, as intelligent as man), to promote our means of communication and locomotion over the surface of the earth, and of production in every conceivable form; great ships and engines of destruction in war, and (curious antithesis) ingenious contrivances for the saving of pain in disease—everything, in short, connected with the comprehension and subjugation of the material world, is more and more carried to perfection. Yet in spite of these marvellous achievements, unless we can manage to secure a supply of good art, there can be no doubt that there will "have passed away a glory from the earth" which we can ill afford to lose.

There is no use in preaching what is called the common sense of the matter, and telling Keats (though he may have died of consumption, and not of the Edinburgh Review) that the critique on his poems was flippant and unintelligent; or one artist that the account of his picture was written by a man who did not understand painting, and the next by a writer who had no notion of the requisites of true poetry. The artist is by necessity of his nature a thin-skinned, impressionable being, with sensitive nerves and perceptions, without which the power of creation does not exist. He writes and paints and acts and sculpts—in short, composes, invents, creates—to make the world feel as he is feeling. Fame is a vulgar word for the sentiment which inspires him; the longing after sympathy is a much truer expression of what the true artist desires. That of his own family and friends is not sufficient; he wants the world at large to hear and understand and join in what he has to say, whether it be in marble or on canvas, in music or in words. To grow such a creature to perfection is very rare in the history of mankind, and when our aloe does flower, we should make the most of it, and feed it with food convenient. Our blame depresses him, even stupid,[³] unintelligent blame, more than our praise elevates him; "he is absurdly sensitive," says the hard-headed man of the world; but that is the very condition of the problem with which we have to deal; if he were not so, we should not have great works of art from him. He is an idealist by nature. If we declare that it is very absurd of our vines to require so much care and kindness, and that a little roughing and neglect will do them a great deal of good, we shall not get many grapes; and, after all, what we want is grapes—results, great artistic works.