CHAPTER XXXVII
ENGLAND
ToEnglish painting the acquisitions of the French could now give little that was radically novel, for the epoch-making labours of the pre-Raphaelites were already in existence. Apart from certain cases of direct borrowing, it has either completely preserved its autonomy, or recast everything assimilated from France in a specifically English fashion. It is in art, indeed, as it is with men themselves. The English travel more than any other people, for travel is a part of their education. They are to be met in every quarter of the globe—in Africa, Asia, America, or the European Continent; and they scarcely need to open their mouths, even from a distance, to betray that they are English. In the same way there is no need of a catalogue at exhibitions to recognise all English pictures at the first glance. English painting is too English not to be fond of travel. The painter delights in reconnoitring all other schools and studying all styles; he is as much at home in the past as in the present. But as the English tourist, let him go to the world’s end, retains everywhere his own customs, tastes, and habits, so English painting, even on its most adventurous journeys, remains unwaveringly true to its national spirit, and returns from all its wanderings more English than before; it adapts what is alien with the same delicious abnegation of all scruple with which the English tongue brings foreign words into harmony with its own sense of convenience. A certain softness of feeling and tenderness of spirit induce the English even in these days to avoid hard contact with reality. Their art rejects everything in nature which is harsh, rude, and brutal; it is an art which polishes and renders the reality poetic at the risk of debilitating its power. It considers matters from the standpoint of what is pretty, touching, or intelligible, and by no means holds that everything true is necessarily beautiful. And just as little does the English eye—so much occupied with detail—see light in its most exquisite subtleties. Indeed, it rather sees the isolated fact than the total harmony, and is clearer than it is fine.
For this reasonplein-airpainting has very few adepts, and the atmospheric influences which blunt the lines of objects, efface colours, and bring them nearer to each other, meet with little consideration. Things are given all the sharpness of their outlines, and the harmony, which in the French follows naturally from the observation of light and air saturating form and colour,is the more artificially attained by everything being brought into concord in a bright and delicate tone, which is almost too fine. The audacities of Impressionism are excluded, because painting which starts from a masterly seizure of total effect would seem too sketchy to English taste, which has been formed by Ruskin. Painting must be highly finished and highly elaborated; that is aconditio sine qua nonwhich English taste refuses to renounce in oil-painting as little as in water-colour, and in England they are more closely related than elsewhere, and have mutually influenced each other in the matter of technique. In fact, English water-colours seek to rival oil-painting in force and precision, and have therefore forfeited the charm of improvisation, theverveof the first sketch, and the freshness and ease which they should have by their very character. Through a curious change of parts oil-painting has a fancy for borrowing from water-colours their effects and their processes. English pictures have no longer anything heavy or oily, but they likewise show nothing of the manipulation of the brush, rather resembling large water-colours, perhaps even pastels or wax-painting. The colours are chosen with reserve, and everything is subdued and softened like the quiet step of the footman in the mansion of a nobleman. The special quality in all English pictures—putting aside a preference for bright yellow and vivid red in the older period—consists in a bluish or greenish luminous general tone, to which every English painter seems to conform as though it were a binding social convention, and it even recurs in English landscapes. In fact, English painting differs from French as England from France.
France is a great city, and the name of this city is Paris. Here, and not in the provinces, lives that fashionable, thinking world which has become the guide of the nation and the censor of beauty, by the refinement of its taste and its preeminent intellect. The ideas which fly throughout the land upon invisible wires are born in Paris. Painting, likewise, receives them at first hand. It stands amid the seething whirlpool of the age, the heart’s-blood of the present streams through all its veins, and there is nothing human that is alien to it, neither the filth nor the splendour of life, its laughter nor its misery. All the nerves of the great city are vibrating in it. Paris has made her people refined and, at the same time, insatiate in enjoyment. Every day they have need of new impressions and new theories to ward off tedium. And thus is explained the universally comprehensive sphere of subject in French painting, and its feverish versatility in technique.
But London has, in no sense, the importance for England which Paris has for France. It is a centre of attraction for business; but the more refined classes of society live in the country. As soon as one is off in the Dover express country houses fly past on either side of the train. They are all over England—upon the shores of the lakes, upon the strand of the sea, upon the tops of the hills. And how pleasant they are, how well appointed, how delightful to look at, with their gabled roofs and their gleaming brickwork overgrown with ivy! Around them stretches a fresh lawn which is rolled every morning, assoft as velvet. Fat oxen, and sheep as white as if they had been just washed, lie upon the grass. Thus all rustic England is like a great summer resort, where there is heard no sound of the ringing and throbbing strokes of life. Nor is painting allowed to disturb this idyllic harmony. No one wishes that anything should remind him of the prose of life when his work is done and the town has vanished. Schiller’s assertion, “Life is earnest, blithe is art,” is here the first law of æesthetics.
English painting is exclusively an art based on luxury, optimism, and aristocracy; in its neatness, cleanliness, and good-breeding it is exclusively designed to ingratiate itself with English ideas of comfort. Yet the pictures have to satisfy very different tastes—the taste of a wealthy middle class which wishes to have substantial nourishment, and the æesthetic taste of anéliteclass, which will only tolerate the quintessence of art, the most subtle art that can be given. But all these works are not created for galleries, but for the drawing-room of a private house, and in subject and treatment they have all to reckon with the ascendant view that a picture ought, in the first place, to be an attractive article of furniture for the sitting-room. The traveller, the lover of antiquity, is pleased by imitation of the ancient style; the sportsman, the lover of country life, has a delight in little rustic scenes; and the women are enchanted with feminine types. And everything must be kept within the bounds of what is charming, temperate, and prosperous, without in any degree suggesting the struggle for existence. The pictures have themselves the grace of that mundane refinement from the midst of which they are beheld.
England is the country of the sculptures of the Parthenon, the country where Bulwer Lytton wrote hisLast Days of Pompeii, and where the most Grecian female figures in the world may be seen to move. Thus painters of antique subjects still play an important part in the pursuit of English art—probablythe pursuit of art rather than its development. For they have never enriched the treasury of modern sentiment. Trained, all of them, in Paris or Belgium, they are equipped with finer taste, and have acquired abroad a more solid ability than James Barry, Haydon, and Hinton, the half-barbaric English Classicists of the beginning of the century. But at bottom—like Cabanel and Bouguereau—they represent rigid conservatism in opposition to progress, and the way in which they set about the reconstruction of an august or domestic antiquity is only distinguished by an Englishnuanceof race from that of Couture and Gérôme.
Lord Leighton, the late highly cultured President of the Royal Academy, was the most dignified representative of this tendency. He was a Classicist through and through—in the balance of composition, the rhythmical flow of lines, and the confession of faith that the highest aim of art is the representation of men and women of immaculate build. In the picture galleries of Paris, Rome, Dresden, and Berlin he received his youthful impressions; his artistic discipline he received under Zanetti in Florence, under Wiertz and Gallait in Brussels, under Steinle in Frankfort, and under Ingres and Ary Scheffer in Paris. Back in England once more, he translated Couture into English as Anselm Feuerbach translated him into German with greater independence. Undoubtedly there has never been anything upon his canvas which could be supposed ungentlemanlike. And as a nation is usually apt to prize most the very thing which has been denied it, and for which it has no talent, Leighton was soon an object of admiration to the refined world. As early as 1864 he became an associate, and in November 1879 President of the Royal Academy. For sixteen years he sat like a Jupiter upon his throne in London. An accomplished man of the world and a good speaker, a scholar who spoke many languages and had seen many countries, he possessed every quality which the president of an academy needs to have; he had an exceedingly imposing presence in his red gown, and did the honours of his house with admirable tact.
But one stands before his works with a certain feeling of indifference. There are few artists with so little temperament as Lord Leighton, few in the same degree wanting in the magic of individuality. The purest academical art, as the phrase is understood of Ingres, together with academical severity of form, is united with a softness of feeling recalling Hofmann of Dresden; and the result is a placid classicality adaptedad usum Delphini, a classicality foregoing the applause of artists, but all the more in accordance with the taste of a refined circle of ladies. His chief works, “The Star of Bethlehem,” “Orpheus and Eurydice,” “Jonathan’s Token to David,” “Electra at the Tomb of Agamemnon,” “The Daphnephoria,” “Venus disrobing for the Bath,” and the like, are amongst the most refined although the most frigid creations of contemporary English art.
Perhaps the “Captive Andromache” of 1888 is the quintessence of what he aimed at. The background is the court of an ancient palace, where female slaves are gathered together fetching water. In the centre of the stage, as the leading actress, stands Andromache, who has placed her pitcher on the ground before her, and waits with dignity until the slaves have finished their work. This business of water-drawing has given Leighton an opportunity for combining an assemblage of beautiful poses. The widow of Hector expresses a queenly sorrow with decorum, while the amphora-bearers are standing or walking hither and thither, in the manner demanded by the pictures upon Grecian vases, but without that sureness of line which comes of the real observation of life. In its dignity of style, in the noble composition and purity of the lines which circumscribe the forms with so much distinction and in so impersonal a manner, the picture is an arid and measured work, cold as marble and smooth as porcelain. “Hercules wrestling with Death for the Body of Alcestis” might be a Grecian relief upon a sarcophagus, so carefully balanced are the masses and the lines. The pose of Alcestis is that of the nymphs of the Parthenon; only, it would not have been so fine were these not in existence. His “Music Lesson” of 1877 is charming, and his “Elijah in the Wilderness” is a work of style. And in his frescoes in the South Kensington Museum there is a perfect compendium of beautiful motives of gesture. The eye delights to linger over these feminine forms, half nude, half enveloped with drapery, yet it notes, too, that these creations are composed out of the painter’s knowledge and artistic reminiscences; there is a want of life in them, because the master has surrendered himself to feeling with the organs of a dead Greek. Leighton’s colour is always carefully considered, scrupulously polished, and endowed with the utmost finish, but it never has the magical charm by which one recognises the work of a true colourist. It is rather the result of painstaking study and cultivated taste than of personal feeling. The grace of form is always carefully prepared—a thing which has the consciousness of its own existence. Beautiful and spontaneous as the movements undoubtedly are, one has always a sensethat the artist is present, anxiously watching lest any of his actors offend against a law of art.
Lord Leighton’s pupils, Poynter and Prinsep, followed him with a good deal of determination.Val Prinsepshares with Leighton the smooth forms of a polished painting, whereasEdward Poynterby his more earnest severity and metallic precision verges more on that union of aridness and style characteristic of Ingres. His masterpiece, “A Visit to Æsculapius,” is in point of technique one of the best products of English Classicism. To the left Æsculapius is sitting beneath a pillared porch overgrown with foliage, while, like Raphael’s Jupiter in the Farnesina, he supports his bearded chin thoughtfully with his left hand. A nymph who has hurt her foot appears, accompanied by three companions, before the throne of the god, begging him for a remedy. To say nothing of many other nude or nobly draped female figures, numerous decorative paintings in the Houses of Parliament, St. Paul’s, and St. Stephen’s Church in Dulwich owe their existence to this most industrious artist.
Alma Tadema, the famous Dutchman who has called to life amid the London fog the sacrifices of Pompeii and Herculaneum, stands to this grave academical group as Gérôme to Couture. As Bulwer Lytton, in the field of literature, created a picture of ancient civilisation so successful that it has not been surpassed by his followers, Alma Tadema has solved the problem of the picture of antique manners in the most authentic fashion in the province of painting. He has peopled the past, rebuilt its towns and refurnished its houses, rekindled the flame upon the sacrificial altars and awakened the echo of the dithyrambs to new life. Poynter tells old fables, while Alma Tadema takes us in hiscompany, and, like the best-informed cicerone, leads us through the streets of old Athens, reconstructing the temples, altars, and dwellings, the shops of the butchers, bakers, and fishmongers, just as they once were.
This power of making himself believed Alma Tadema owes in the first place to his great archæological learning. By Leys in Brussels this side of his talent was first awakened, and in 1863, when he went to Italy for the first time, he discovered his archæological mission. How the old Romans dressed, how their army was equipped and attired, became as well known to him as the appearance of the citizens’ houses, the artizans’ workshops, the market and the bath. He explored the ruins of temples, and he grew familiar with the privileges of the priests, the method of worship, of the sacrifices, and of the festal processions. There was no monument of brass or marble, no wall-painting, no pictured vase nor mosaic, no sample of ancient arts, of pottery, stone-cutting, or work in gold, that he did not study. His brain soon became a complete encyclopædia of antiquity. He knew the forms of architecture as well as he knew the old myths, and all the domestic appointments and robes as exactly as the usages of ritual. In Brussels, as early as the sixties, this complete power of living in the period he chose to represent gave Alma Tadema’s pictures from antiquity their remarkablecachetof striking truthfulness to life. And London, whither he migrated in 1870, offered even a more favourable soil for his art. Whereas the French painters of the antique picture of manners often fell into adiluted idealism and a lifeless traffic with old curiosities, with Alma Tadema one stands in the presence of a veritable fragment of life; he simply paints the people amongst whom he lives and their world. The Pompeian house which he has built in London, with its dreamy vividarium, its great golden hall, its Egyptian decorations, its Ionic pillars, its mosaic floor, and its Oriental carpets, contains everything one needs to conjure up the times of Nero and the Byzantine emperors. It is surrounded by a garden in the old Roman style, and a large conservatory adjoining is planted with plane-trees and cypresses. All the celebrated marble benches and basins, the figures of stone and bronze, the tiger-skins and antique vessels and garments of his pictures, may be found in this notable house in the midst of London. Whether he paints the baths, the amphitheatre, or the atrium, the scenes of his pictures are no other than parts of his own house which he has faithfully painted.
And the figures moving in them are Englishwomen. Among all the beautiful things in the world there are few so beautiful as English girls. Those tall, slender, vigorous figures that one sees upon the beach at Brighton are really like Greek women, and even the garb which they wear in playing tennis is as free and graceful as that of the Grecian people. Alma Tadema was able to introduce into his works these women of lofty and noble figure with golden hair, these forms made for sculpture—to use the phrase of Winckelmann—without any kind of beautifying idealism. In their still-life his pictures are the fruit of enormous archæological learning which has become intuitive vision, but his figures are the result of a healthy rendering of life. In this way the unrivalled classical local colour of his interiors is to be explained, as well as the lifelike character of his figures. By his works a remarkable problem is solved: an intense feeling for modern reality has called the ancient world into being in a credible fashion, whilst it has remained barricaded against all others who have approached it by the road of idealism.
It is only in this method of execution that he still stands upon the same ground as Gérôme, with whom he shares a taste for anecdote, and a pedantic, neat, and correct style of painting. His ancient comedies played by English actors are an excellent archæological lecture; they rise above the older picture of antique manners by a more striking fidelity to nature, very different from the generalisation of the Classicists’ ideal; yet as a painter he is wanting in every quality. His marble shines, his bronze gleams, and everything is harmonised with the green of the cypresses and delicate rose-colour of the oleander blossoms in a cool marble tone; but there is also something marble in the figures themselves. He draws and stipples, works like a copper engraver, and goes over his work again and again with a fine and feeble brush. His pictures have the effect of porcelain, his colours are hard and lifeless. One remembers the anecdotes, but one cannot speak of any idea of colour.
Albert Mooreis to be noted as the solitary “painter” of the group: a very delicate artist, with a style peculiar to himself; one who is not so well known upon the Continent as he deserves to be. His province, also, is ancient Greece, yet he never attempted to reconstruct classical antiquity as a learned archæologist. Merely as a painter did he love to dream amid the imperishable world of beauty known to ancient times. His figures are ethereal visions, and move in dreamland. He was influenced, indeed, by the sculptures of the Parthenon, but the Japanese have also penetrated his spirit. From the Greeks he learnt the combination of noble lines, the charm of dignity and quietude, while the Japanese gave him the feeling for harmonies of colour, for soft, delicate, blended tones. By a capricious union of both these elementshe formed his refined and exquisite style. The world which he has called into being is made up of white marble pillars; in its gardens are cool fountains and marble pavements; but it is also full of white birds, soft colours, and rosy blossoms from Kioto, and peopled with graceful and mysterious maidens, clothed in ideal draperies, who love rest, enjoy an eternal youth, and are altogether contented with themselves and with one another. It might be said that the old figures of Tanagra had received new life, were it not felt, at the same time, that these beings must have drunk a good deal of tea. Not that they are entirely modern, for their figures are more plastic and symmetrical than those of the actual daughters of Albion; but in all their movements they have a certainchic, and in all their shades of expression a weary modernity, through which they deviate from the conventional woman of Classicism. Otherwise the pictures of Albert Moore are indescribable. Frail, ethereal beings, blond as corn, lounge in æesthetically graduated grey and blue, salmon-coloured, or pale purple draperies upon bright-hued couches decorated by Japanese artists with most æsthetic materials; or are standing in violet robes with white mantles embroidered with gold, by a grey-blue sea which has a play of greenish tones where it breaks upon the shore. They stand out with their rosy garments from the light grey background and the delicate arabesques of a gleaming silvery gobelin, or in a graceful pose occupy themselves with their rich draperies. They do as little as they possibly can, but they are living and seductive, and the stuffs which they wear and have around them are delicately and charmingly painted. It is harmonies of tone and colour that exclusively form the subject of every work. Thefigures, accessories, and detail first take shape when the scheme of colour has been found; and then Albert Moore takes a delight in naming his pictures “Apricots,” “Oranges,” “Shells,” etc., according as the robes are apricot or orange colour or adorned with light ornaments of shell. Everything which comes from his hands is delightful in the charm of delicate simplicity, and for any one who loves painting as painting it has something soothing in the midst of the surrounding art, which still confuses painting with poetry more than is fitting.
Such a painter-poet of the specifically English type isBriton-Rivière. He is a painter of animals, and as such one of the greatest of the century. Lions and geese, royal tigers and golden eagles, stags, dogs, foxes, Highland cattle, he has painted them all, and with a mastery which has nothing like it except in Landseer. Amongst the painters of animals he stands alone through his power of conception and his fine poetic vein, while in all his pictures he unites the greatest simplicity with enormous dramatic force. Accessory work is everywhere kept within the narrowest limits, and everywhere the character of the animals is magnificently grasped. He does not alone paint great tragic scenes as Barye chiselled them, for he knows that beasts of prey are usually quiet and peaceable, and only now and then obey their savage nature. Moreover, he never attempts to represent animals performing a masquerade of humanity in their gestures and expression, as Landseer did, nor does he transform them into comic actors. He paints them as what they are, a symbol of what humanity was once itself, with its elemental passions and its natural virtues and failings. Amongst all animal painters he is almost alone in resisting the temptation to give the lion a consciousness of his own dignity, the tiger a consciousness of his own savageness, the dog a consciousness of his own understanding. They neither pose nor think about themselves. In addition to this he has a powerful and impressive method, and a deep and earnest scheme of colour. In the beginning of his career he learnt most from James Ward. Later he felt the influence of the refined, chivalrous, and piquant Scotchmen Orchardson and Pettie. But the point in which Briton-Rivière is altogether peculiar is that in which he joins issue with the painters influenced by Greece: he introduces his animals into a scene where there are men of the ancient world.
Briton-Rivière is descended from a French family which found its way into England after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and he is one of those painters—sofrequent in English art—whose nature has developed early: when he was fourteen he left school, exhibited in the Academy when he was eighteen, painted as a pre-Raphaelite between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two, and graduated at Oxford at seven-and-twenty. In his youth he divided his time between art and scholarship—painting pictures and studying Greek and Latin literature. Thus he became a painter of animals, having also an enthusiasm for the Greek poets, and he has stood for a generation as an uncontested lord and master on his own peculiar ground. In his first important picture, of 1871, the comrades of Ulysses, changed into swine, troop grunting round the enchantress Circe. In the masterpiece of 1872 the Prophet Daniel stands unmoved and submissive to the will of God amid the lions roaring and showing their teeth, ready to spring upon him in their hunger, yet regarding him with a mysterious fear, spellbound by the power of his eye; while his great picture “Persepolis” makes the appeal of a page from the philosophy of history, with its lions roaming majestically amid the ruins of human grandeur and human civilisation, which are flooded with moonlight. The picture “In Manus Tuas, Domine,” showed St. George riding solitary through the lonely and silent recesses of a primitive forest upon a pale white horse. He is armed in mail and has a mighty sword; a deep seriousness is imprinted on his features, for he has gone forth to slay the dragon. In yet another picture, “An Old-World Wanderer,” a man of the early ages has come ashore upon an untrodden island, and is encompassed by flocks of great white birds, fluttering round him with curiosity and confidence, as yet ignorant of the fear of human beings. The picture of 1891, “A Mighty Hunter before the Lord,” is one of his most poetic night-pieces: Nimrod is returning home, and beneath the silvery silence of the moon the dead and dying creatures which he has laid low upon the wide Assyrian plain are tended and bemoaned by their mates.
Between whiles he painted subjects which were not borrowed from ancient history, illustrating the friendship between man and dog, as Landseer had done before him. For instance, in “His Only Friend” there is a poor lad who has broken down at the last milestone before the town and is guarded by his dog. In “Old Playfellows,” again, one of the playmates is a child, who is sick and leans back quietly in an armchair covered with cushions. His friend the great dog has one paw resting on the child’s lap, and looks up with a pensive expression, such as Landseer alone had previously painted. But in this style he reached his highest point in “Sympathy.” No work of Briton-Rivière’s has become more popular than this picture of the little maiden who has forgotten her key and is sitting helpless before the house-door, consoled by the dog who has laid his head upon her shoulder.
Since the days of Reynolds English art has shown a most vivid originality in such representations of children. English picture-books for children are in these days the most beautiful in the world, and the marvellous fairy-tales and fireside stories ofRandolph CaldecottandKate Greenawayhave made their way throughout the whole Continent. How well these English draughtsmen know the secret of combining truth with the most exquisite grace! How touching are these pretty babies, how angelically innocent these little maidens! Frank eyes, blue as the flowers of the periwinkle, gaze at you with no thought of their being looked at in return. The naïve astonishment of the little ones, their frightened mien, their earnest look absently fixed upon the sky, the first tottering steps of a tiny child and the mobile grace of a schoolgirl, all are rendered in these prints with the most tender intimacy of feeling. And united with this there is a delicate and entirely modern sentiment for scenery, for the fascination of bare autumn landscapes robbed of their foliage, for sunbeams and the budding fragrance of spring. Everything is idyllic, poetic, and touched by a congenial breath of tender melancholy.
And this aerial quality, this delicacy and innocent grace and tenderness,is not confined alone to such representations of children, but is peculiar to English painting. Even when perfectly ordinary subjects from modern life are in question the basis of this art is, as in the first half of the century, by no means the sense for what is purely pictorial, by no means that naturalistic pantheism which inspires the modern French, but rather a sense for what is moral or ethical. The painter seldom paints merely for the joy of painting, and the numberless technical questions which play such an important part in French art are here only of secondary importance. It accords with the character and taste of the people that their artists have rather a poetic design than one which is properly pictorial. The conception is sometimes allegorical and subtle to the most exquisite fineness of point, sometimes it is vitiated by sentimentality, but it is never purely naturalistic; and this qualified realism, this realism with a poetic strain to keep it ladylike, set English art, especially in the years when Bastien-Lepage and Roll were at their zenith, in sharp opposition to the art of France. In those days the life-size artisan picture, the prose of life, and the struggle for existence reigned almost exclusively in the Parisian Salon, whereas in the Royal Academy everything was quiet and cordial; an intimate, inoffensive, and heartfelt cheerfulness was to be found in the pictures upon its walls, as if none of these painters knew of the existence of such a place as Whitechapel. A connection between pictures and poems is still popular, and some touching trait, some tender episode, some expression of softness, is given to subjects drawn from the ordinary life of the people. Painters seek in every direction after pretty rustic scenes, moving incidents, or pure emotions. Instead of being harsh and rugged in their sense of truth and passion, they glide lightly away from anything ugly, bringing together the loveliestand most beautiful things in nature, and creating elegies, pastorals, and idylls from the passing events of life. Their method of expression is fastidious and finished to a nicety; their vision of life is smiling and kindly, though it must not be supposed that their optimism has now anything in common with thegenrepicture of 1850. Thegenrepainters from Wilkie to Collins epitomised the actual manners of the present in prosaic compositions. But here the most splendid poetry breaks out, as indeed it actually does in the midst of ordinary life. If in that earlier period English painting was awkward in narration, vulgar, and didactic, it is now tasteful, refined, beautiful, and of distinction. The philistinism of the pictures of those days has been finally stripped away, and the humorously anecdoticgenreentirely overcome. The generation of tiresome narrative artists has been followed by painter-poets of delicacy and exquisite tenderness of feeling.
Two masters who died young and have a peculiarly captivating individuality, George Mason and Fred Walker, stand at the head of this, the most novel phase of English painting. Alike in the misfortune of premature death, they are also united by a bond of sympathy in their taste and sentiment. If there be truth in what Théophile Gautier once said in a beautiful poem, “Tout passe, l’art robuste seul a l’éternité,” neither of them will enter the kingdom of immortality. That might be applied to them which Heine said of Leopold Robert: they have purified the peasant in the purgatory of their art, so that nothing but a glorified body remains. As the pre-Raphaelites wished to give exquisite precision to the world of dream, Walker and Mason have taken this precision from the world of reality, endowing it with a refined subtlety which in truth it does not possess. Their pictures breathe only of the bloom and essence of things, and in them nature is deprived of her strengthand marrow, and painting of her peculiar qualities, which are changed into coloured breath and tinted dream. They may be reproached with an excess of nervous sensibility, an effort after style by which modern truth is recast, a morbid tendency towards suave mysticism. Nevertheless their works are the most original products of English painting during the last thirty years, and by a strange union of realism and poetic feeling they have exercised a deeply penetrative influence upon Continental art.
“Æquam semper in rebus arduis servare mentem” might be chosen as a motto forGeorge Mason’sbiography. Brought up in prosperous circumstances, he first became a doctor, but when he was seven-and-twenty he went to Italy to devote himself to painting; here he received the news that he was ruined. His father had lost everything, and he found himself entirely deprived of means, so that his life became a long struggle against hunger. He bound himself to dealers, and provided animal pieces by the dozen for the smallest sums. In a freezing room he sat with his pockets empty, worked until it was dark, and crept into bed when Rome went to feast. After two years, however, he had at last saved the money necessary for taking him back to England, and he settled with his young wife in Wetley Abbey. This little village, where he lived his simple life in the deepest seclusion, became for him what Barbizon had been for Millet. He wandered by himself amongst the fields, and painted the valleys of Wetley with the tenderness of feeling with which Corot painted the outskirts of Fontainebleau. He saw the ghostly mists lying upon the moors, saw the peasants returning from the plough and the reapers from the field, noted the children, in their life so closely connected with the change of nature. And yet his peasant pictures more resemble the works of Perugino than those of Bastien-Lepage. The character of their landscape is to some extent responsible for this. For the region he paints, in its lyrical charm, has kinship with the hills in the pictures of Perugino. Here there grow the same slender trees upon a delicate, undulating soil. But the silent, peaceful, and resigned human beings who move across it have also the tender melancholy of Umbrian Madonnas. Mason’s realism is merely specious; it consists in the external point of costume. There are really no peasants of such slender growth, no English village maidens with such rosy faces and such coquettish Holland caps. Mason divests them of all the heaviness of earth, takes, as it were, only the flower-dust from reality. The poetic grace of Jules Breton might be recalled, were it not that Mason works with more refinement and subtlety, for his idealism was unconscious, and never resulted in an empty, professional painting of beauty.
When he painted his finest pictures he suffered from very bad health, and his works have themselves the witchery of disease, the fascinating beauty of consumption. He painted with such delicacy and refinement, because sickness had made him weak and delicate; he divested his peasant men and women of everything fleshly, so that nothing but a shadow of them remained, a spirit vibrating in fine, elusive, dying chords. In his “Evening Hymn” girls are singing in the meadow; to judge from their dresses, they should be the daughters of the peasantry, but one fancies them religious enthusiasts, brought together upon this mysterious and sequestered corner of the earth by a melancholy world-weariness, by a yearning after the mystical. Fragile as glass, sensitive to the ends of their fingers, and, one might say, morbidly spiritual, they breathe out their souls in song, encompassed by the soft shadows of the evening twilight, and uttering all the exquisite tenderness of their subtle temperament in the hymn they chant. Another of his pastoral symphonies is “The Harvest Moon.” Farm labourers are plodding homewards after their day’s work. The moon is rising, and casts its soft, subdued light upon the dark hills and the slender trees, in the silvery leaves of which the evening wind is playing. “The Gander,” “The Young Anglers,” and “The Cast Shoe” are captivating through the same delicacy and the same mood of peaceful resignation. George Mason is an astonishing artist, almost always guilty of exaggeration, but always seductive. Life passes in his pictures like a beautiful summer’s day, and with the accompaniment of soft music. A peaceful, delicate feeling, something mystical, bitter-sweet, and suffering, lives beneath the light and tender veil of his pictures. They affect the nerves like a harmonica, and lull one with low and softly veiled harmonies. Many of the melancholy works of Israels have a similar effect, only Israels is less refined, has less of distinction and—more of truth.
This suavity of feeling is characteristic in an almost higher degree ofFred Walker, a sensitive artist never satisfied with himself. Every one of his pictures gives the impression of deep and quiet reverie; everywhere a kind of mood, like that in a fairy tale, colours the ordinary events of life in his works, an effect produced by his refined composition of forms and colours. In his classically simple art Mason was influenced by the Italians, and especially the Umbrians. Walker drew a similar inspiration from the works of Millet. Both the Englishman and the Frenchman died in the same year, the former on 20th January 1875, in Barbizon, the latter on 5th June,in Scotland; and yet in a certain sense they stand at the very opposite poles of art. Walker is graceful, delicate, and tender; Millet forceful, healthy, and powerful. “To draw sublimity from what is trivial” was the aim of both, and they both reached it by the same path. All their predecessors had held truth as the foe of beauty, and had qualified shepherds and shepherdesses, ploughmen and labourers, for artistic treatment by forcing upon them the smiling grace and the strained humour ofgenrepainting. Millet and Fred Walker broke with the frivolity of this elder school of painting, which had seen matter for jesting, and only that, in the life of the rustic; they asserted that in the life of the toiler nothing was more deserving of artistic representation than his toil. They always began by reproducing life as they saw it, and by disdaining, in their effort after truth, all artificial embellishment; they came to recognise, both of them at the same time, a dignity in the human frame, and grandiose forms and classic lines in human movement, which no one had discovered before. With the most pious reverence for the exact facts of life, there was united that greatness of conception which is known as style.
Fred Walker, the Tennyson of painting, was born in London in 1840, and had scarcely left school before the galleries of ancient art in the British Museum became his favourite place of resort. Drawings for wood-engraving were his first works, and with Millet in France he has the chief merit of having put fresh life into the traditional style of English wood engraving, so that he is honoured by the young school of wood-engravers as their lord and master. His first, and as yet unimportant, drawings appeared in 1860 in a periodical calledOnce a Week, for which Leech, Millais, and others also made drawings. Shortly after thisdébuthe was introduced to Thackeray, then the editor ofCornhill, and he undertook the illustrations with Millais. In these plates he is already seen in his charm, grace, and simplicity. His favourite season is the tender spring, when the earth is clothed with young verdure,and the sunlight glances over the naked branches, and the children pluck the first flowers which have shot up beneath their covering of snow.
His pictures give pleasure by virtue of the same qualities—delicacy of drawing, bloom of colouring, and a grace which is not affected in spite of its Grecian rhythm.
Walker was the first to introduce that delicate rosy red which has since been popular in English painting. His method of vision is as widely removed from that of Manet as from Couture’s brown sauce. The surface of every one of his pictures resembles a rare jewel in its delicate finish: it is soft, and gives the sense of colour and of refined and soothing harmony. His first important work, “Bathers,” was exhibited in 1867 at the Royal Academy, where works of his appeared regularly during the next five years. About a score of young people are standing on the verge of a deep and quiet English river, and are just about to refresh themselves in the tide after a hot August day. Some, indeed, are already in the water, while others are sitting upon the grass and others undressing. The frieze of the Parthenon is recalled, so plastic is the grace of these young frames, and the style and repose of the treatment of lines, which are such as may only be found in Puvis de Chavannes. In his next picture, “The Vagrants,” he represented a group of gipsies camping round a fire in the midst of an English landscape. A mother is nursing her child, while to the left a woman is standing plunged in thought, and to the right a lad is throwing wood upon the faintly blazing fire. Here, too, the figures are all drawn severely after nature and yet have the air of Greek statues. There is no modern artist who has united in so unforced a manner actuality and fidelity to nature with “the noble simplicity and quiet grandeur” of the antique. In a succeeding picture of 1870, “The Plough,” a labourer is striding over the ground behind the plough. The long day is approaching its end, and the moon stands silvery in the sky. Far into the distance the field stretches away, and the heavy tread of the horses mingles in the stillness of evening with the murmur of the stream which flows round the grassy ridge, making its soft complaint.“Man goeth forth to his work and to his labour until the evening” is its thoroughly English motto. The same still mournfulness of sunset he painted in that work of marvellous tenderness, “The Old Gate.” The peace of dusk is resting upon a soft and gentle landscape. A lady who is the owner of a country mansion and is dressed like a widow has just stepped out from the garden gate, accompanied by her maid, who is in the act of shutting it; children are playing on the steps, and a couple of labourers are going past in front and look towards the lady of the house. It is nothing except the meeting of certain persons, a scene such as takes place every day, and yet even here there is a subtlety and tenderness which raise the event from the prose of ordinary life into a mysterious world of poetry.
In his later period he deviated more and more towards a fragrant lyricism. In his great picture of 1872, “The Harbour of Refuge,” the background is formed by one of those peaceful buildings where the aged poor pass the remainder of their days in meditative rest. The sun is sinking, and there is a rising moon. The red-tiled roof stands out clear against the quiet evening sky, while upon the terrace in front, over which the tremulous yellow rays of the setting sun are shed, an old woman with a bowed figure is walking, guided by a graceful girl who steps lightly forward. It is the old contrast between day and night, youth and age, strength and decay. Yet in Walker there is no opposition after all. For as light mingles with the shadows in the twilight, this young and vigorous woman who paces in the evening, holding the arm of the aged in mysterious silence, has at the moment no sense of her youth, but is rather filled with that melancholy thought underlying Goethe’s “Warte nur balde,” “Wait awhile and thou shalt rest too.” Her eyes have a strange gaze, as though she were looking into vacancy in mere absence of mind. And upon the other side of the picture this theme of the transient life of humanity is still further developed. Upon a bench in the midst of a verdant lawn covered with daisies a group of old men are sitting meditatively near a hedge of hawthorn luxuriant in blossom. Above the bench there stands an old statue casting aclearly defined shadow upon the gravel path, as if to point to the contrast between imperishable stone and the unstable race of men, fading away like the autumn leaves. Well in the foreground a labourer is mowing down the tender spring grass with a scythe—a strange, wild, and rugged figure, a reaper whose name is Death.
It was not long before evening drew on for the painter, and Death, the mighty reaper, laid him low.
Of a nervous and sensitive temperament, Walker had one of those natures which find their way with difficulty through this rude world of fact. Those little things which he had the art of painting so beautifully, and which occupy such an important place in his work, had, in another sense, more influence upon his life than ought to have been the case. While Mason faced all unpleasantnesses with stoical indifference, Walker allowed himself to be disturbed and hindered in his work by every failure and every sharp wind of criticism. In addition to that he was, like Mason, a victim of consumption. A residence in Algiers merely banished the insidious disease for a short time. Amongst the last works, which he exhibited in 1875, a considerable stir was made by a drawing called “The Unknown Land”: a vessel with naked men is drawing near the shores of a wide and peaceful island bathed in a magical light. Soon afterwards Walker had himself departed to that unknown land: he diedin Scotland when he was five-and-thirty. His body was brought to the little churchyard at Cookham on the banks of the Thames. In this village Fred Walker is buried amid the fair river landscape which he so loved and so often painted.
After the pre-Raphaelite revolution, the foundation of the school of Walker indicated the last stage of English art. His influence was far greater than might be supposed from the small number of his works, and fifty per cent. of the English pictures in every exhibition would perhaps never have been painted if he had not been born. A national element long renounced, that old English sentiment which once inspired the landscapes of Gainsborough and the scenes of Morland, and was lost in the hands of Wilkie and thegenrepainters, lives once more in Fred Walker. He adapted it to the age by adding something of Tennyson’s passion for nature. There is a touch of symbolism in that old gate which he painted in the beautiful picture of 1870. He and Mason opened it so that English art might pass into this new domain, where musical sentiment is everything, where one is buried in sweet reveries at the sight of a flock of geese driven by a young girl, or a labourer stepping behind his plough, or a child playing, free from care, with pebbles at the water’s edge. Their disciples are perhaps healthier, or, should one say, “less refined,”—in other words, not quite so sensitive and hyper-æsthetic as those who opened the old gate. They seem physically morerobust, and can better face the sharp air of reality. They no longer dissolve painting altogether into music and poetry; they live more in the world at every hour, not merely when the sun is setting, but also when the prosaic daylight exposes objects in their material heaviness. But the tender ground-tone, the effort to seize nature in soft phases, is the same in all. Like bees, they suck from reality only its sweets. The earnest, tender, and deeply heartfelt art of Walker has influenced them all.
Evening when work is over, the end of summer, twilight, autumn, the pale and golden sky, and the dead leaves are the things which have probably made the most profound impression on the English spirit. The hour when toil is laid aside, and rest begins and people seek their homes, and the season when fires are first lighted are the hour and the season most beloved by this people, which, with all its rude energy, is yet so tender and full of feeling. Repose to the point of enervation and the stage where it passes into gentle melancholy is the theme of their pictures—this, and not toil.
How many have been painted in the last forty years in which people are returning from their work of an evening across the country! The people in the big towns look upon the country with the eyes of a lover, especially those parts of it which lie near the town; not the scenes painted by Raffaelli, but the parks and public gardens. Soft, undulating valleys and gently swelling hills are spread around, the flowers are in bloom, and the leaves glance in the sunshine. And over this country, with its trim gravel paths and its green, luxuriant lawns, there comes a well-to-do people. Even the labourers seem in good case as they go home across the flowery meadows.
George H. Boughtonwas one of the most graceful and refined amongst Walker’s followers. By birth and descent a countryman of Crome and Cotman, he passed his youth in America, worked several years in Paris from 1853, and in 1863 settled in London, where he was exceedingly active as a draughtsman,a writer, and a painter. His charming illustrations forHarper’s Magazine, where he also published his delicate storyThe Return of the Mayflower, are well known. As a painter, too, his brush was only occupied by pleasant things, whether belonging to the past or the present. There is something in him both of the delicacy of Gainsborough and of the poetry of Memlinc. He delights in the murmur of brooks and the rustle of leaves, in fresh children and pretty young women in æesthetically fantastic costume; he loves everything delicate, quiet, and fragrant. And for this reason he also takes delight in old legends entwined with blossoms, and attains a most harmonious effect when he places shepherds and kings’ daughters of story, and steel-clad knights and squires in his charming and entirely modern landscapes. Almost always it is autumn, winter, or at most the early spring in his pictures. The boughs of the trees are generally bare, though sometimes a tender pointed yellowish verdure is budding upon them. At times the mist of November hovers over the country like a delicate veil; at times the snowflakes fall softly, or the October sun gleams through the leafless branches.
Moreover, a feeling for the articulation of lines, for a balance of composition, unforced, and yet giving a character of distinction, is peculiar to him in a high degree. In 1877 he had in the Royal Academy the charming picture “A Breath of Wind.” Amid a soft landscape with slender trees move the thoroughly Grecian figures of the shapely English peasants, whilst the tender evening light is shed over the gently rising hills. His picture of 1878 he named “Green Leaves among the Sere”: a group of children, in the midst of whom the young mother herself looks like a child, are seated amid an autumn landscape, where the leaves fall, and the sky is shrouded in wintry grey. In the picture “Snow in Spring” may be seen a party of charming girls—little modern Tanagra figures—whom the sun has tempted into the air to search for the earliest woodland snowdrops under the guidance of a damsel still in her ’teens. Having just reached a secret corner of the wood, they are standing with their flowers in their hands surrounded by tremulous boughs, when a sudden snowstorm overtakes them. Thick white flakes alight upon the slender boughs, and combine with the light green leaves and pale reddish dresses of the children in making a delicate harmony of colour. Among his legendary pictures the poetic “Love Conquers allThings,” in particular is known in Germany: a wild shepherd’s daughter sits near her flock, and the son of a king gazes into her eyes lost in dream.
Boughton is not the only painter of budding girlhood. All English literature has a tender feminine trait. Tennyson is the poet most widely read, and he has won all hearts chiefly through his portraits of women: Adeline, Eleänore, Lilian, and the May Queen—that delightful gallery of pure and noble figures. In English painting, too, it is seldom men who are represented, but more frequently women and children, especially little maidens in their fresh pure witchery.
Belonging still to the older period there isPhilip H. Calderon, an exceedingly fertile although lukewarm and academical artist, in whose blood is a good deal of effeminate Classicism. When his name appears in a catalogue it means that the spectator will be led into an artificial region peopled with pretty girls—beings who are neither sad nor gay, and who belong neither to the present nor to ancient times, to no age in particular and to no clime. Whenever such ethereal girlish figures wear the costume of the Directoire period,Marcus Stoneis their father. He is likewise one of the older men whose first appearance was made before the time of Walker. His young ladies part broken-hearted from a beloved suitor, turned away by their father,and save the honour of their family by giving their hand to a wealthy but unloved aspirant, or else they are solitary and lost in tender reveries. In his earliest period Marcus Stone had a preference for interiors; rich Directoire furniture and objects of art indicate with exactness the year in which the narrative takes place. Later, he took a delight in placing hisrococoladies and gentlemen in the open air, upon the terraces of old gardens or in sheltered alleys. All his pictures are pretty, the faces, the figures, and the accessories; in relation to them one may use the adjective “pretty” in its positive, comparative, or superlative degree. In England Marcus Stone is the favourite painter of “sweethearts,” and it cannot be easy to go so near the boundaries of candiedgenrepainting and yet always to preserve a certainnoblesse.
Amongst later artistsG. D. Leslie, the son of Charles Leslie, has specially the secret of interpreting innocent feminine beauty, that somewhat predetermined but charming grace derived from Gainsborough and the eighteenth century. A young lady who has lately been married is paying a visit to her earlier school friends, and is gazed upon as though she were an angel by these charming girls. Or his pretty maidens have ensconced themselves beneath the trees, or stand on the shore watching a boat at sunset, or amuse themselves from a bridge in a park by throwing flowers into the water and looking dreamily after them as they float away. Leslie’s pictures, too, are very pretty and poetic, and have much silk in them and much sun, while the soft pale method of painting, so highly æsthetic in its delicate attenuation of colour, corresponds with the delicacy of their purport.
P. G. Morris, not less delicate in feeling and execution, became specially known by a “Communion in Dieppe.” Directly facing the spectator a train of pretty communicants move upon the seashore, assuming an air of dignified superiority, like young ladies from Brighton or Folkestone. A bluish light plays over the white dresses of the girls and over the blue jackets of the sailors lounging about the quay; it fills the pale blue sky with a misty vibration and glances sportively upon the green waves of the sea. “The Reaper and the Flowers” was a thoroughly English picture, a graceful allegory after the fashion of Fred Walker. On their way from school a party of children meet at the verge of a meadow an old peasant going home from his day’s work with a scythe upon his shoulder. In the dancing step of the little ones may be seen the influence of Greek statues; they float along as if borne by the zephyr, with a rhythmical motion which is seldom found in real school-children. But the old peasant coming towards them is intended to recall the contrast between youth and age as in Fred Walker’s “Harbour of Refuge”; while the scythe glittering in the last rays of the setting sun signifies the scythe of Fate, the scythe of death which does not even spare the child.
And thus the limits of English painting are defined. It always reveals a certain conflict between fact and poetry, reverie and life. For whenever the scene does not admit of a directly ethical interpretation, refuge is invariably taken in lyricism. The wide field which lies between, where powerful works are nourished, works which have their roots in reality, and derive their life from it alone, has not been definitely conquered by English art. England is the greatest producer and consumer in the world, and her people press the marrow out of things as no other have ever done: and yet this land of industry knows nothing of pictures in whichwork is being accomplished; this country, which is a network of railway lines, has never seen a railway painted. Even horses are less and less frequently represented in English art, and sport finds no expression there whatever. Much as the Englishman loves it from a sense of its wholesomeness, he does not consider it sufficiently æsthetic to be painted, a matter upon which Wilkie Collins enlarges in an amusing way in his bookMan and Wife.
And in English pictures there are no poor, or, at any rate, none who are wretched in the extreme. For although the Chelsea Pensioners were a favoured theme in painting, there were none of them miserable and heavy-laden; they were rather types of the happy poor who were carefully tended. If English painters are otherwise induced to represent the poor, they depict a room kept in exemplary order, and endeavour to display some touching or admirable trait in honest and admirable people. In fact, people seem to be good and honourable wherever they are found. Everywhere there is content and humility, even in misfortune. Even where actual need is represented, it is only done in the effort to give expression to what is moving in certain dispensations of fate, and to create a lofty and conciliating effect by the contrast between misfortune and man’s noble trust in God.
John R. Reid, a Scotchman by birth, but residing in London, has treated scenes from life upon the seacoast in this manner. How different his works are from the tragedies of Joseph Israels, or the grim naturalism of Michael Ancher! He occupies himself only with the bright side of life with its colour and sunshine, not with the dark side with its toils. He paints the inhabitants of the country in their Sunday best, as they sit telling stories, or as they go a-hunting, or regale themselves in the garden of an inn. The old rustics who sit happy with their pipes and beer in his “Cricket Match” are typical of everything that he has painted.
And even when, once in a way, a more gloomy trait appears in his pictures, it is there only that the light may shine the more brightly. The poor old flute-player who sits homeless upon a bench near the house is placed there merely to show how well off are the children who are hurrying merrily home after school. His picture of 1890, indeed, treated a scene of shipwreck, but a passage from a poet stood beneath; there was not a lost sailor to be seen, and all the tenderness of the artist is devoted to the pretty children and the young women gazing with anxiety and compassion across the sea.
Frank Hollwas in the habit of giving his pictures a more lachrymose touch, together with a more sombre and ascetic harmony of colour. He borrowed his subjects from the life of the humble classes, always searching, moreover, for melancholy features; he took delight in representing human virtue in misfortune, and for the sake of greater effect he frequently chose a verse from the Bible as the title. Thus the work with which he first won the English public was a picture exhibited in 1869: “The Lord gave, the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” A family offive brothers and sisters, who have just lost their mother, are assembled round the breakfast-table in a poorly furnished room. One sister is crying, another is sadly looking straight before her, whilst a third is praying with folded hands. The younger brother, a sailor, has just reached home from a voyage, to close his dying mother’s eyes, and the eldest of all, a young and earnest curate, is endeavouring to console his brothers and sisters with the words of Job.
The next picture, exhibited in 1871, he called “No Tidings from the Sea,” and represented in it a fisherman’s family—grandmother, mother, and child—who in a cheerless room are anxiously expecting the return of a sailor. “Leaving Home” showed four people sitting on a bench outside a waiting-room at a railway station. To awaken the spectator’s pity “Third Class” is written in large letters upon the window just above their heads. The principal figure is a lady dressed in black, who is counting, in a somewhat obtrusive manner, the little money which she still has left.