CONCERNING PICTURES
I HOLD with Story and others whose talents and accomplishments so brilliantly illustrate their faith, that the great artist is almost necessarily a man of high attainments in general knowledge and in more than one branch of art. He who knows but one art knows none. The Muses do not singly disclose themselves; for the favor of one you must sue to all. Consider the great Italian painters, from Angelo and Rafael down the line of merit to the modern masters. As a rule they were men of wisdom, accomplished in all the learning of their time. They were statesmen, scientists, engineers—men of affairs. They knew literature, architecture, sculpture and music, as well as painting. With here and there a notable exception—more notable as an exception than as a painter—the same is true in many a country besides Italy, and many an age besides that in which the genius of her sons kindled the imperishablesplendor that burns about her name.
Perception is not the same as discernment, and he who sees with his eyes only will paint with nothing but his hand. Ruskin says the artist is the man who knows “what is going on.” To him the primrose is a primrose and something more—a primrose plus what it is doing, saying, thinking, and what is being done, said, thought by its whole environment. The great artist makes everything live; he gives to death itself and desolation a personality and a breathing soul. The rooted rock could move if it wished; trees understand one another; the river is prescient of the sea. Not a pebble, not a grass-blade but is alert with a significant life to further the general conspiracy.
Understand me. This activity is entirely distinct from muscular action, locomotion, motion of any kind or any of the coarser sorts of energy flagrantly depicted. The portrait of a corpse may be full of it, the picture of a bounding horse altogether destitute.
Everything in nature—every single object, every group, every landscape, has a visible expression, as a face has. This can generally be denoted in terms of human emotion. Weall know what is meant by an “angry” sky or a “threatening” billow, for we have observed what follows. But we are not all equally sensitive to the joyous aspect of a tree, the sulking of a rock, the menace or the benediction that may speak from a hillside, the reticence of one building and the garrulity of another, the pathos of a blank window, the tendernesses and the terrors that smile and glower everywhere about us. These are no fancies. True, they are but the outward and visible signs of an inner mood; but the objects that bear them beget the mood. No true artist but feels it, and all feel it nearly alike. To discern, to feel, to seize upon this dominant expression and make it predominant in his picture—this, as Taine rightly says, is the painter’s function.
I stood once upon the slope of a deep gulch; with me a friend, the quick certainty of whose artistic insight was always to me a source of surprise and delight. Across the gulch, a quarter-mile away, stood two trees, a giant oak, whose great roots corded the rocks like the tentacles of a devil-fish, and a slender pine, springing from clear ground nearby. The oak reached out a long, muscular arm toward the other tree, which, leaning sharplyaway from the contact, had all its branches on the opposite side. I studied the group for some minutes while my friend had her eyes and thoughts elsewhere. I was endeavoring to interpret the sentiment, which finally I succeeded in doing to my satisfaction; it remained only to test the validity of my conclusion. I said to myself: “Menace and terror”; to my companion: “What is the matter over yonder?” She glanced at the group and replied, without an instant’s hesitation, in the first words that came to call: “The little tree is trying to get away from the old scoundrel among the rocks.”
The terrible story is told of how the late W. H. Vanderbilt came near being cheated out of three hundred thousand dollars by purchasing a painting that was no better than it looked! From that imminent peril he was rescued by death. The painting, it seems, was discovered (where it had not been lost) by a person—nay, a parson—named Nicole, who gave his personal assurance that it was a Rafael. It must have looked a good deal like a Rafael, for although it was for a longtime an object of adoration for artist pilgrims from all over Europe, none detected its spurious character. That is clear from the facts that it was later that Mr. Vanderbilt agreed to take it, and that while negotiations were going on Herr Nicole borrowed twelve thousand dollars on it from a banker who has it yet. That could hardly have been true if the pilgrims to its shrine at Lausanne had had their transports moderated by a suspicion that it was not so good as it looked.
The reader will kindly repress his hilarity. This is no joke. If a picture can not be better than it looks how does it happen that this one is not so valuable after the exposure as it was before? The notion that a picturecanbe better or worse than it looks does seem absurd when one stops to think about it. It is not original with me; the late Bill Nye once set the country smiling by solemnly explaining that he had been told that Wagner’s music was better than it sounded.
But why did we laugh? We do not laugh when a wealthy “patron of art,” or a paternal government pays an enormous price for a paintingbecauseit is pronounced by experts to be a genuine work of a famous “old master.” And we do not laugh—not all of us—when,as in the present instance, the value drops to nearly nothing because the painting proves to be a copy only, or the work of an unknown hand.
I am no artist—Heaven forbid!—nor even a connoisseur. If I were I should doubtless understand why a copy that is as beautiful as an original is not so desirable a possession—why it does not give so great pleasure to the eye and the mind and the heart. I should understand why the work of an obscure or unknown artist is not so valuable as the work of a famous artist if it happens to be as good.
One would suppose—that is, one unacquainted with art might be conceived as supposing—that the value of a painting would be appraised without reference to the question: Who made it? It seems (to the unenlightened) as if it would make no difference what name was borne by the person that painted it—just as theIliador theOdysseywould be equally pleasing whether written by Homer or by “another man of the same name,” or another name. I have the hardihood to declare that it is—and here I am on my own ground. I affirm—nay, “swear tiptoed with lifted hand”—that the pleasure of any reasonable man in reading “Ossian” isnot abated by knowledge that the author was Macpherson; that to a sane judgment the “Rowley” poems are altogether as delightful as if the secret of their composition had been carried into the next world by little Chatterton when “he perished in his pride.” What is it to me, or to you, if the Shakspeare plays were written by Bacon? We have the plays; let us read and be thankful. Shakspeare and Bacon may fight it out in Elysium, with Ignatius Donnelly as umpire; of the decision, “it boots not to inquire.”
If that is the mental attitude of the true lover of letters, and it is, why is the true lover of art differently constituted, if he is? Why are “the still vexed Bermoothes” of his soul still vexed? Why can not he make up his mind that a work of art is good, or is bad, and let it go at that, serenely unconcerned about the “irrelevant, incompetent and immaterial” babble of the experts in authenticity?
Being ignorant, I thank Heaven for the existence of artists obscure by fortune or by choice, skilful enough to imitate in line or style the work of the great and famous painters. For gratification of my own eye I would as lief see and possess their work as the work that they imitate. So would anybody—forgratification of his own eye. For pigly satisfaction of owning something denied to one’s neighbor; something rare because death has stopped the supply; something to be triumphantly shown to one’s visitors in the hope of exciting some of the baser passions of the human heart, such as covetousness, envy and the like—for such “satisfaction and refined delight” one would of course prefer an original “old master” and be willing to pay a pretty penny for gratification of the preference.
Some wicked man has said that an artist has sensibility, but no sense. I fancy that is not so, but finding artists pretty generally concerned with questions of the “genuineness” of “canvases”—that is to say, pretty generally assenting to the proposition that a picture can be better or worse than it looks—I am sometimes tormented by doubt.