CHAPTER ITRUTH IN PAINTING

Thosepeople who go out into the highways of art crying, Haro! Haro! in the name of realism, would certainly gain their cause could numbers give them a verdict. They have always been in evidence; they have always made themselves heard. There never was a time when the mob was not hungry for realities, when artists were not harping upon “truth to nature,” when critics were not concerned about “the realistic tendencies of the age.” The interest in things as things and the art that hinges upon facts as facts were from the beginning. For did not Apelles paint horses so realistically that other horses neighed at the sight of the picture? And did not Zeuxis deceive the birds with his painted grapes, and was not he himself deceived in turn by the painted curtain of Parrhasios? Admitting the stories to be greatly exaggerated, does not their very existence prove the liking for the realistic motive?

Indeed, the Greeks were accounted very good realists in the days of their late power. The Pergamon frieze, the “Samothracian Victory,” the “Dying Gaul” give the proof. And in earlier times they modelled and chiselled the Parthenon marbles so true to life that William Hazlitt based a theory of art upon them, maintaining that the aim of art was the imitation of nature and the finest art was simply the imitation of the finest nature. It was the realistic Roman marbles, founded upon those of Greece, that gave the first breath of inspiration to the painters of Italy. The Renaissance nature-study that went hand in hand with the study of the Greek was largely to enable the painters to reveal the model more completely, to draw a leg or arm or face more exactly, to place figures in an atmospheric envelope, to reproduce a likeness of the landscape background. If we examine the works of Fra Filippo, Botticelli, or Mantegna, we shall find that there was more of the earthly in their painting than the mystic face of the Madonna or the religious pathos of saints would disclose. They were intent upon the reality before them and evidently for the reality’s sake. They delighted in drawing a foot and placing it firmly upon the ground, in giving bulk, body, and weight to the figure, in painting flowers, leaves, and fruits with precision, in adjusting the exact relations of light-and-shade, in catching the right tone of color. It wasall a close following of the model—a representation of nature itself or as near to it as they could attain.

But the Dutch painters of the seventeenth century were far more rigid sticklers for the fact than the Italians. Their work was essentially a portrait of Holland and its people, as Fromentin has said, wherein faithfulness to the model was a primary consideration. From Hals and Rembrandt down to Van Mieris and Schalken every Dutchman considered an object as a plastic fact—a something not to be juggled with, but to be rendered as truthfully as possible. Indeed, it was the Dutchmen who set the pace for all the moderns in what is called realism. It was the five days upon a lady’s hand—a day to each finger—of Gerard Dou that suggested the ten days to a shoe-buckle of Meissonier. All the modern contingent ofgenrepainters and students of still-life who paint things that “stand out” are but a growth from the Dutch. The tradition has been handed down unimpaired, losing none of its ancient positiveness, but rather gaining some latter-day exactness in the process of transmission.

For just now realism in art seems more of adesideratumthan ever. And from the way the word “truth” is bandied about studio and gallery, one might think it the only thing worth having in artistic equipment. But we need not necessarily become either brow-beaten or bewildered by all this volumeof talk about the real. For, bluntly stated, there is no such thing as absolute realism in art. The “real” is nature itself, and “truth” is merely the report of nature made by man. Some cattle and horses standing under a tree in a meadow are a reality, and your description or report of the scene, either in words, lines, or colors, would be the truth of the scene—that is, provided your description was accurate. Under no circumstances is the report made by producing the real things in evidence. It is practically impossible to do that in art. Any close attempt at doing it, or misleading one into thinking he sees reality, generally results in absurdity or repulsiveness. What, for instance, could be more hideous than the wax figure in the museum? Or what more dull than the modern battle-panorama where dummy-figures and painted figures mingle to make up the scene?

Art is far removed from such attempts. Instead of producing the real it merely implies or suggests the real by certain signs and symbols which we have agreed among ourselves to recognize as its equivalent. If, for instance, we attempt to bring to the mind of another the thought of water we do not get a glassful of it and place it upon the table to show what we mean. We simply say or write “water”—a word of five letters which bears no likeness or resemblance whatever to the original, yet brings the original tomind at once. This is the linguistic sign for water. The chemical sign for it, H2O, is quite as arbitrary, but to the chemist it means water again. And only a little less arbitrary are the artistic signs for it. The old Egyptian conveyed his meaning by drawing a zigzag up or down the wall; Turner in England often made the few horizontal scratches of a lead pencil do duty for it; and in modern painting we have some blue paint touched with high lights to represent the same thing. None of these signs attempts to produce the original or has any other meaning than to suggest the original. They are signs which have meanings for us only because we agree to understand their meanings beforehand.

Now this agreement to understand the sign is what might be called the recognition of the convention. All art is in a measure conventional, arbitrary—unreal if you please. Everyone knows that Hamlet in real life would not talk blank verse with his latest breath. The drama (and all poetry for that matter) is an absurdity if you insist upon asking: Is it natural? It is not natural; it is very artificial. And unless you accept the artificial as symbolizing the natural, unless you recognize the convention of metre and rhyme, you are not in a position to appreciate verse. The name of those who “do not care for poetry” is legion, because they have not the proper angle of vision, because they are out of focus. And this isequally true of music. Tristan and Isolde singing their loves at each other is sheer insanity from a realistic standpoint. Everyone knows that love in real life may do a good deal of sighing and sobbing, but it does not burst forth into song. The opera is a most palpable convention, and the flow of music, which so beautifully suggests the depths of passion and the heights of romance, is but an arbitrary symbol of reality. Recognize this and you have taken the first step toward the understanding of art; fail to recognize it and art must always be a closed book to you. You will not perceive the artist’s intention.

As a matter of fact we all do accept the convention in one form or another. If a child standing at the blackboard should draw a horse with four chalk-lined legs and a chalk-lined body and head we should have no trouble in making it out as a horse. And should we know it as a horse because of its truth to nature? Is a horse flat, hairless, colorless, shadowless? And has he a chalk line about him? Not at all. The representation is but a sign or symbol which we have agreed to recognize as a horse. It is a child’s representation, and it differs from a painter’s representation of the same animal largely in the matter of trained skill and imaginative conception. The fine portraits of Holbein—than which there is nothing finer in painting—have that same rim about them (Plate1). We call it Holbein’s “clear outline,”but it is substantially the same thing. And the etched landscapes of Rembrandt—what could you have more arbitrary? Merely a few lines drawn with a swift hand, a few scratches in a copper plate to represent sunlight, and some cross-hatchings to represent shadow; but how quickly we recognize their meanings! If you will look closely at the wood engravings of Timothy Cole you will see the modelling of the faces brought out sometimes by long, waving, diagonal lines, sometimes by dots and sometimes by checks and squares. Again could anything be more conventional? But we have no trouble in making out the artist’s intention. We accept the convention from the start.

So it is that we do not necessarily grasp the intention by the fulness or elaborateness of the sign. The painter, from long experience, from being more expert of hand, is perhaps better able to exploit the sign than is the child; but we do not fail in understanding the meaning of the childish outline. There is a difference in sign making, to be sure, and that may make a great difference in art; but there is little or no difference in the intention—the meaning of the sign. The flat figures upon the Greek vases are not quite like the outlined figures of Raphael and Ingres, and still less like the figures of Manet; but they are all signs nevertheless. Manet used the patch of color instead of the rim or outline, whichis supposed to be a very fetching piece of realism; but none of the representations is to be mistaken for reality. The real is one thing; the sign or symbol for it, quite another thing.

What then is realism in art—this drawing of eyes that follow you about the room, lips that seem parted as if to speak, and hands that you could shake? What is this painting of pots and pans to be picked up, and cows that walk out of the canvas? Can we not define it as merely the adding-to, the rounding, the perfecting of the sign? Is it anything more than the telling of all the truths, both great and small, so that the veriest dunce in conventions shall not fail to recognize them?

I.—HOLBEIN, Portrait of a Man. Belvedere, Vienna.

To revert to our former illustrations, perhaps Ingres’s rigid outline contains less truth—less important truths—than Manet’s color patch. Why? Because the figure in full light really has no rim about it. It looks more like a patch of color relieved against other colors. The rim or outline is childish, primitive, and originally came, not from a direct study of the model but from studying the model’s shadow or silhouette. People of childish intelligence, like the Egyptian fellaheen, for instance, understand it very readily because of its simplicity and its arbitrary utterance; but the more complex sign that deals with sunshine rather than the flattened shadow contains the greater truth. Therefore as regards thewhole truth there is more of it in Manet’s figure than in Ingres’s. Additions to the sign, such as effects of light-and-shade, of color, of surface texture, of contour, may tell us more about the object and add to the sum of truth and the perfection of the sign; and yet these may not change in any way the significance of the sign. The most elaborate human being that a Meissonier could paint would still be only the individual symbol of a man, and in that respect would not be different from the incised outline of Rameses the Great upon a Theban wall.

You will understand, of course, that there are painters who use the sign to convey a meaning—use it as one might words and sentences. Millet, in writing to a friend, said: “All art is a language and language is made to express thoughts.” Of that I shall have something to say later; but just now I wish to call your attention to the fact that the realist does not agree with Millet, that he is not concerned with ulterior meanings, that in fact he rather despises them. For realism, broadly speaking, means a pot for a pot’s sake, or a cow for a cow’s sake, which is to say a sign for a sign’s sake. The Gerard Dous and the Meissoniers rather plume themselves upon being expert sign-makers. Their art usually goes no farther than excellent craftsmanship. They draw and paint skilfully, decoratively, telling everything about the model before them, from an eyelash to a boot-strap;and there they stop. They give forth an official report which may be true enough from their point of view and yet contain not an idea worth the contemplating, not a thought worth the thinking. But that does not in any way disturb the poise of the realist. He is ready to answer you that “beauty is truth and truth beauty”—an aphorism that sounds like argument and yet is only assumption. But let us look into the matter a little farther and ask: What is the truth which they claim to have? Is it the vital truth or the only truth, and are there not varieties, grades, and degrees of truth in painting as in the other departments of art and life? I have no wish to deny that realism, so-called, makes up one kind of art; but let us push our inquiry farther afield and find out if possible what is the basis of the realistic picture.

“Truth,” we have already affirmed, “is the report of nature made by man.” We may cast out the child’s report about the horse because it is incomplete, immature. It is made up of all the errors of the untrained hand and eye, and though it has a certain personality about it, and gives us a child’s idea of a horse, yet it cannot be considered as an entirely truthful record. The report of the camera, if it be true or false we do not know. Light flashes and the horse’s silhouette is instantly caught and fixed upon the plate; but I need not tell you thatlight does not flash into the human eye, and the silhouette is not instantly fixed upon the human retina in the same way. Nor need I tell you that eyes vary more widely in the way they see than do cameras. Which then tells the truth? That the camera always records the same does not prove that it always records truly. It may always record falsely. At least the human eye sees differently from the camera, and the ultimate decision as to truth must be referred back to the eye. It may not be an infallible register, but it is the best we have. For all human knowledge must base itself upon human sensation.

The horse of the child being incomplete and that of the camera misleading, we return to the work of the painter and ask: What of the horse of Apelles? Can that stand as the final truth? The story of its deceiving other horses we may put aside as pure romance, but undoubtedly the picture was emphasized in its modelling—pushed hard in its high lights—to make the horse “stand out.” Granted a truth of relief and perhaps a truth of surface, are these the only truths about the horse? And do they make the standard to which art and artists must bow? Not necessarily. We have had hundreds of painters since Apelles’s time who have painted hundreds of horses, perhaps quite as true to nature as his, but never a one of them saw or painted a horse in just the way Apelles did.

And now we are confronted with the fact that if there are many men of many minds in this world of ours there are also many men with many eyes. No two pairs of eyes see alike. Are we to infer then that any one pair of eyes or any one race or its school of painters sees truth and all the others see only error? Is truth on one side of the Alps and falsehood on the other? Titian in Italy made a different report of nature from Rembrandt in Holland—which told the truth? Does truth abide exclusively in the Orient or the Occident? A landscape in Japan by Hokousai, how very different from a Seine landscape by Daubigny! But is either of them false? And after all does not something of truth—I do not say the whole of it—consist in the fidelity with which the point of view is maintained? We must cultivate liberality in this matter. For Creation ordained that there should be a Babel of eyes, all seeing differently, and consequently there must be a standard of truth peculiar to each individual.

II.—BENOZZO GOZZOLI, Adoration of Kings (detail). Riccardi Palace, Florence.

Does “truth to nature” then mean to each man what his eyes tell him and to each painter what the sincerity of his make-up enables him to record? Yes, certainly; but, mind you, it may be a very limited truth, not necessarily an absolute truth, not a world-embracing truth applicable to all classes and conditions of men. The child with his chalk-lined horse may be maintaining his childish point of view withthe utmost fidelity, but it is apparent from his drawing that he does not fully comprehend his subject, does not see the object in its entirety. The horses by Spinello Aretino, shown in his Campo Santo pictures at Pisa, are not very different from the child’s conception. They contain more truths without by any means being exhaustive. They are still crude, but true enough as regards the maintenance of the point of view. The fine horses of Benozzo Gozzoli, in the Riccardi palace fresco (Plate2), are an improvement upon those of Spinello without being complete, and the Gattamelata horse of Donatello, the Colleoni of Verrocchio, may make us enthusiastic about the special truth of their pushing power, and again not make a full report of the horse. Perhaps when we reach the height of realism and come to a horse as seen by Gérôme or Rosa Bonheur we are not so pleased with it as with Benozzo’s square-framed beast; but that may be for a cause which we shall discuss hereafter. The completeness of the truth, the fulness of the report, may not be denied, however wearisome it may be as art.

Now we must add to this individuality, which everyone possesses in measure and which must warp the vision somewhat, a further influence or bias which the individual takes from his race and his country. I have already asked Pascal’s question about truth being on one side of the Alps and erroron the other side. Applied to the arts it is pertinent to inquire: Is a Siena landscape by Pintoricchio false because it does not look like a Vosges landscape by Courbet? Not at all. They are both true—that is, not only true to locality but true to that native flavor which makes a pine-tree in Japanese art look “Japanesey” and a pine-tree in Norwegian art look Norwegian.[1]Moreover, each landscape is true in exhibiting its time, its country, and its race. The Pintoricchio shows the attenuated purist landscape of the Tuscan country—the landscape admirably suited to serve as a background for the sensitive, sentimental saints he depicted. It speaks truly enough for a portion of Italy during the Early Renaissance, that portion which lies in the Tuscan country; but it goes no farther. Giovanni Bellini at Venice was Italian, too; but he was at this very time producing quite a different landscape—one that spoke for the mountainous country lying to the north of Venice, but not for Tuscany. The landscape by Courbet isnot so limited. It is nineteenth-century work and has the advantage of the great advance made in landscape work since the Renaissance; and yet no one could fail to see that it was French, that it depicted a French country in a French way. With all its large truth of appearance it shows its localized Parisian point of view. To be sure Paris in Courbet’s day was very cosmopolitan. His vision was broader, his grasp of truths greater than the sculptor who carved, in bas-relief, Sargon feasting with his wives; but nevertheless the local truths of France and of Assyria are each apparent in each.

1.“If we will take the trouble to look at the wood-cuts illustrative of some given celebrity as they appear in the illustrated newspapers of various nations, we shall see that, though copied very mechanically from the same photograph, Mr. Gladstone becomes a Frenchman in France, a Spaniard in Spain, and, though less visible to us, in the same way the Continental, the Spaniard, or the Frenchman becomes English in the engraving of an English magazine. Even in the handling of the tool called the graver which cuts the wood there is, then, a nationality.”—John La Farge, inInternational Monthly, Nov., 1900.

Is every artist then biassed in his conception of truth by his race and age; and is every art significant of its environment? Certainly. Thus far in the world’s history all art has been provincial—expressive at least of a nationality if not of a locality. The art of Holland in the sixteenth century never travelled beyond the dikes and dunes except in the case of a genius like Rembrandt. As a truth for universal application a roystering party by Jan Steen would go no farther to-day than a garden party under the cherry blossoms by Hiroshighe. Both are peculiarly provincial and belong in their own lands with their own peoples. Outside of their own countries they meet with appreciative understanding only from the artistic few. A century ago no one in the Anglo-Saxon or Teutonic world cared very much for Dutchart, and not fifty years ago Japanese art was regarded as little more than an interesting absurdity because of its unfamiliar perspective. Neither of them at this day has any world-wide reach. They have not travelled to us, but the cosmopolitan art-lover has gone out and discovered them. Transportation may eventually make us all cosmopolitan—make all art kin; but it has not done so as yet.

Of course all painting is not so strictly local as the pictures of Jan Steen and Hiroshighe would suggest. A work of art, in subject and in method, appeals more strongly perhaps to its own people than to any other—an Osiris to an Egyptian, a Zeus to a Greek, and a Madonna to a Christian. But the carved Buddha, seated with crossed legs, open palms, and a vacant stare into space appeals only to a Buddhist. It will not travel elsewhere except as a curio. Nor will the Osiris or the Madonna go very far. But what of a Zeus! what of a Hermes by Praxiteles! what of the Greek ideal! Have they not a universal quality about them—a grasp of universal truths—that carry them beyond the frontier lines of Hellas? Think for a moment of the “Venus of Milo.” Has it not something supremely true about it that a person of any nationality cannot choose but see? And think for a moment of the “Ariadne” of Tintoretto. Again is there not something here that compels the admiration of the Asiatic as well as the Europeanand the American? There is individual and local and racial truth in all these works, but there is also universal truth—truth applicable to all humanity.

III.—VAN DYCK, Cornelius van der Geest. National Gallery, London.

And now, if we stop to consider the great men in the arts, we shall invariably find that each one of them is marked by some quality of universal significance. There is something about them all that overleaps the provincial, the accidental, the small, and the trifling. They disregard in a measure the local truths and aim at the general truths—at things essentially true for all humanity. Our Shakespeares and Platos and St. Pauls survey the world from mountain tops. From these vantage points their perspective is far-reaching, their view of the world expansive. They see and grasp the essentials, the basic elements, the foundations of things. It is this, for one thing, that makes the art of Titian so superlatively great. What wonderful men and women people his pantheon! What types they are of manhood and womanhood! What embodiments of loftiness, dignity, and nobility! And are they not universally admired? No matter what a man’s nationality, he cannot choose but be interested in “The Man with a Glove” or the “Charles V.” at Madrid. There is something in them of that truth seen from mountain heights which every one will recognize as the nobler part of his little valley-world.

Just so with the art of Rembrandt. His typeis essentially of the Low Countries; his costumes, landscapes, light-and-shade, and methods are all localized in Holland. But a sadder painter you cannot find in all the reach of painting. His emotional nature had been wrung by trial and suffering and his sympathies were with the down-trodden and the grief-stricken. There never was a painter who painted so much of sorrow in the faces of his people as Rembrandt. The “Christ at Emmaus” is, in form and figure, only a poor emaciated Amsterdam Jew; but in emotional truth it is the one Christ of all painting. That face appeals to Christian, Mahometan, Jew, and infidel alike, not because of its divinity but because of its intense humanity. Should we bring up the names of the other great masters of painting we should find that each one of them is remarkable for some quality of universal significance—Michael Angelo for his great command of form, Rubens for his great splendor of effect, Velasquez for his sense of vitality in the physical presence (Plate13), Raphael for his unity and his harmony.

The great men are remarkable for their breadth—the wide angle of their vision. They see, not differently from others, but they see more. Yet it is only a point of view, a limited outlook, and not by any means the total sum of truth. The report of nature made by man, which we have defined as “truth,” isalways a report of some sort whoever makes it. The difference between the great minds and the small ones consists in what is seen and reported. A Rousseau who sees and tells of the solidity of the earth, the volume of the forest, the great luminous expanse of the sky, does not think to tell everything that may be in the landscape. He sees the great truths, those truths that are of universal permanence in all landscape, and emphasizes them at the expense of the smaller details. A man of narrower vision would perhaps overlook the sky and earth, and fail to see the forest for the trees. He might centre all his interest in blades of grass, in dew-drops and spider-webs and opening buttercups—the infinitely little things in the landscape.

In portraiture men like Gerard Dou and Denner emphasize the small skin-facts of a man’s face with such minute workmanship that you may study them with a magnifying-glass. You will never see anything like this in the portraits by Titian, Rembrandt, Velasquez, Van Dyck (Plates3,13,18). They waste no time on small truths. They are intent upon giving the large physical presence, not the petty deformities of the epidermis.

Again in drawing a hand and arm you will observe that men like Gérôme give every curve and break of light along the arm, every accidental contortion of muscle, every wrinkle and twist of flesh; but somehow,when all these features are put down, the arm fails to live, fails to move. It is a petrified arm. For an opposite statement of truth look at the arm of Millet’s “Sower.” There is nothing absolute or minute about the drawing. The arm is generalized, summarized, synthetized as it were. The wrinkles in it are not apparent, the covering of it is vague, the hand is not articulated in the muscles or even definite in the drawing of the fingers. In short the whole arm and hand are cut down to a few elementary lines, so that they appear to the uninitiated somewhat sketchy and peremptory. But looked at for those qualities which Millet thought more important than surface texture, looked at for bulk, mass, weight, motion—particularly motion—and there is a larger view apparent. The arm and hand certainly have motion and life. And these are precisely what Gérôme’s arm and hand have not. Can it not be claimed then that the truth of life and motion is a greater truth than the truth of momentary rigidity? Is it not a fact that Millet has seized upon a general and universal truth characteristic of all arms and hands—that is, the truth of life and movement—whereas Gérôme has seized upon an accidental truth of light-and-shade which may be something local and peculiar to that one hand and arm?

IV.—MILLET, The Gleaners. Louvre, Paris.

If one shows us a snap-photograph of breaking waves, what do we see if not the highest and mostbrittle wave the camera man could catch? Does this give us a general or a particular truth of the sea? Do waves stand rigidly in air, petrified from base to crest, as we see in the photograph, or do they roll and keep on rolling indefinitely and ceaselessly? Does not the very essence of truth about a wave lie in its restless heave and toss, its breaking and reforming, its eternal indefiniteness of form? How many sea pictures have we seen with every wave in place—pounded into place like hammered steel—with every facet shining like a mirror, and not a possibility of motion in anything? Perhaps we have rather enjoyed them and fancied, in crossing the ocean, that the waves looked like that. Perhaps they did; perhaps we were content to see only the small truths of the ocean; but a study of the marines by Courbet, Manet, and Monet may convince us that there are larger truths of the ocean than those relating to its mirror-like sparkles—larger truths in the ocean’s depth, power, and its restless, ceaseless motion. These painters have discarded small things on the surface of the water, as Frans Hals the small spots on a man’s face, in order to give the sense of form back of it (Plate22).

In the same way you will often find painters discarding the exact drawing of objects such as wood or cloth or stone or metal in order that they may give the weight, the elasticity, or the density of theseobjects. A feather or a leaf may be an epitome of floating, dancing lightness, but if you draw its complete anatomy and paint all its surface texture you will have something that is as heavy as wrought iron. It does not follow either, because Desgoffes gives us the sheen and flash of brasses, china, and satins, that he has told all or the most vital truths about those articles. Vollon may paint the same things in a fuller manner, showing us something of structural character which is just as important and just as true as surface appearance. Moreover, the broader method leaves something to implication and suggestion, where the other method buries under an accumulation of fact.

Please note the word “suggestion,” for it is by suggestion that the greatest truths of art are brought home to us. The realist, whom we have been hastily considering, does not care for this method of approach. He is bent upon realization. He is analytical in his statement of each and every fact and makes a full report. All painters do this in some degree during the early stages of their career, but as they advance in years and experience there is a tendency to a broader treatment, a return to the simple line of the child, to the synthesis of a Millet, as shown in the arms, hands, and backs of the women in “The Gleaners” (Plate4), to the implication and suggestion of a Corot, as shown in the sky of the “Biblis.” Factsare summarized. A mere charcoal outline drawn by Degas gives us the reliefs, proportions, weight, and bulk of a human figure; a shadow with Giorgione or Rembrandt sums up the series of facts beneath it, and becomes suggestive by its very mystery and uncertainty; a blended blur of color by Whistler may bring to mind a heaving wave in mid-ocean better than all the drawn and tinted and “realized” waves of all the realists.

It is not the heaping of fact upon fact that flashes the truth upon us—at least not in art, though it may in logic or in law. Indeed, the accumulation of evidence often confuses. It is common studio experience that a sketch of a picture is frequently better than the picture itself. The attempt to “finish” (that is, to put in all the details and minutiæ) makes it dull and unsuggestive. The unfinished marbles of Michael Angelo, do they really suffer much by being unfinished? I have sometimes thought that the figure of “Day” in the Medici Chapel gained by its incompleteness—that it was better than the “Night” upon the opposite side of the tomb because the sculptor’s intention is perfectly obvious and yet the spectator’s imagination is not stifled. There, like a fallen god, he lies, half embedded in his matrix of stone with a suggestion of mighty power, never so strongly felt in any other marble in this world. The lack of finish, the mystery,the uncertainty, help on the imagination. One may fancy, as many have done, that the figure symbolizes the loss of Florentine freedom, and that the grand captive, with his massive brow and sunken eyes, half-rises wearily to view the morning light shining for him in vain. And again one may imagine he is a new Prometheus bound to the rock; one of the Gigantes; or perhaps a conquered Titan lying along the hills of Tartarus in the drear twilight, brooding in melancholy silence over the loss of Olympus. To whatever the mind may conjure up regarding the figure, the element of reserved strength will lend assistance. Cut the captive from his bed of stone and the strength falls short, lacking the foil of resistance; finish the marble and an existent fact precludes the possibility of wide imagination.

The great English master of art, how well he knew what to leave out! The lovers Lorenzo and Jessica are in the still, evening air, and with what consummate skill Shakespeare paints the landscape with that one suggestive line:

“How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank.”

Not a word about the trees or grasses or ponds or meadows; not a word about the stillness of the night, the hushed winds, and the shining stars; but do you not see them all? Do they not rise up before your eyes as by magic? Your realist would have put usto sleep with dreary descriptions of grass and groves and glittering dew-drops instead of the moonlight. And Shakespeare himself might have written a volume of description and still not roused us to his meaning so quickly as with that one suggestive line. The value of the sign in art, whether it be pictorial, sculptural, or literary, lies in its suggestive quality; and the “Sower” of Millet, the “Day” of Michael Angelo, and the moonlight of Shakespeare are merely so many suggestive signs.

V.—PAOLO VERONESE, Marriage in Cana. Louvre, Paris.

Thus far our inquiry has extended no farther than the truth of nature—the truth of appearance as shown in realistic art. But there are other truths with which the picture has to do that perhaps call for a moment’s consideration. The truth of history for which the public contends so valiantly need not detain us long. That Paolo Veronese and his contemporaries chose to garb the sacred characters of the “Marriage in Cana” (Plate5) or “Moses saved from the Nile” (Plate23), in Venetian costume, is matter of small importance. And it is of still less importance whether Christ and the Apostles show the Semitic cast of countenance or not. The intense reverence for local and ethnographical truth possessed by the Holman Hunts and Alma-Tademas of the art world would seem somewhat misplaced. No matter what care is bestowed upon the archæology, there is always something not quite true to the fact. And moreover, all art in alltimes has pictured its own race, costume, and country. It would not be worth much unless it did. The marble gods of Greece are all Greek, the painted Madonnas of Italy are all Italian. How otherwise would you have it? Marlowe’s Mephistopheles talks English, and Goethe’s Mephistopheles talks German. What language should they talk? When art deals with the past it translates it into the present. It could not possibly do otherwise. No Anglo-Saxon could feel, think, or work like a Greek, simply because he is an Anglo-Saxon.

There is another truth of far more consequence than historical accuracy, and that is the truth of art. This comes in here opportunely enough, for art-truth is produced by the suggestive method of dealing with facts which I have just been illustrating. The method is absolutely essential to all strong work in all departments. It is usually known in painting as the “law of sacrifice”; and you will find it in literature under the name of “dramatic force.” We should never have had such characters as Faust and Macbeth had all the other characters in the plays been treated with an importance equal to that of the heroes. Hamlet is an elevated Hamlet simply because the other characters are subordinate characters, just as Corot’s light is light, because everything else in the picture is sacrificed to it. There is no quarrel with truth to nature in this truth to art. Great art seldom falsifies,but it always selects, emphasizing some features and subordinating other features. It usually gives the large truths and merely implies the small ones. Millet in his “Sower” has no notion of telling you more than a few prominent facts about the man and his work. He shows a peasant, working under the shadow of a hill, working late in the evening, swinging and sowing with rhythmic motion of foot, hand, arm and body. It is matter of no importance whether he wears linen or woollen or cotton, whether his blouse has buttons upon it or not, whether his face is clean or not. The all-pervading truth of the picture lies in the swinging form of the sower, and to keep your attention upon that he omits everything else. The figure is but a suggestion, a something that stands as an equivalent for that man whom Millet thought should be recognized for his patience and fortitude of spirit, his nobility and dignity in the hard labor of life, his fine pictorial qualities as seen against the background of his native heath. That is the ulterior meaning which he would show us. The sign is true to the great truth of a sower, the meaning is true within the limits of pictorial creation, and finally the recording of it is true to the truth of art.

This method of procedure, wherein suggestion becomes such an important factor, implies two people in the work of art rather than one. The spectator must do his part as well as the artist. The lattersuggests, the former takes up the suggestion and builds upon it. When Velasquez painted Christ on the cross, hanging there alone in the night, the head bowed forward on the breast, and the long dark hair tailing over the face and half covering it, he did not think to obliterate the face—to take it out of the picture completely. He knew very well that the imagination of the spectator would go behind the veil and picture that face more vividly than he could paint it. What painter ever yet produced a wholly satisfactory face of Christ? Velasquez was wise in leaving it to the imagination of the spectator. How wise he was you can perhaps gather by contrasting his “Christ on the Cross” with the same subject by Léon Bonnat—one of the noblest of the latter-day realists. Bonnat simply took a dead body from the morgue and hung it upon a cross in the court-yard of theÉcole de Médecine, and painted it exactly as he saw it. But it is not Christ; it is the dead body he took from the morgue. There is strain of arm and leg and torso, the anatomy is wrenched, the muscles are contorted, the veins are swollen. But there is no suggestion of anything that had been noble or exalted in the living. In fact there is not a suggestion of any kind. Everything is told and the spectator’s imagination is not called upon. Realism has been pushed into the last ditch, and yet has produced only a sign standing for Christ on the cross, and notthe real thing—a sign which, in gaining an elaborate truth to fact, has lost its truth to art and its power of suggestion.

VI.—CARPACCIO, St. Ursula and Prince of England (detail). Academy, Venice.

We may as well conclude then, without further illustration, that the exact portrayal of nature known as realism falls somewhat short of its mark. It may report and report, but it cannot realize. Light, air, hills, mountains, human beings and their habitations cannot be reproduced, but they may be translated through the medium of pigment and thus rendered intelligible to us. You may translate them “realistically” or you may translate them suggestively, but in either case it is the translation that you will have, and not the original. Each art—music, poetry, painting—has its peculiar method of translation, and we have called the result in each case a sign—a convention which we have agreed to recognize as meaning thus and so; but of course the signs in painting are not quite so arbitrary as in language or chemistry. The painting of a wave certainly looks more like a wave than the word “water,” or the symbol H2O. The sign has a certain resemblance to the original which gives a reason for the existence of realism and also adds to the confusion of those who would spin a theory of art; but the resemblance should not mislead us. The sign is still a sign, though in the one case it is representative and in the other case symbolic. Its meaning has not changedin any way. The all-seeing eye of Osiris is not like those speaking eyes in Van Dyck’s portrait of “Cornelius Van der Geest” (Plate3). One is more conventional than the other, but both are conventions.

It is not necessary that we should deny value to this realistic art, even though we do not wholly accept it. The very endeavor to make the work faithful to the original in every detail, though it may hurt its deeper sentiment, cannot but result in good workmanship; and that in itself is always acceptable and pleasurable. Indeed, bald realism, with nothing else back of it, is seldom seen in art. The man, the material, and the method are inextricably mixed together, so that the product always has more or less individuality about it, or is decorative in form or color, or expresses some thought or feeling of the painter, or stands for something in subject. In any event the well-made sign—even as a sign—is not to be scorned. We shall see hereafter how it is distorted by the personal element, how it is twisted by the imagination, how it is warped by the decorative instinct; but we are not to forget at any time that it is but a symbol, merely a means of suggesting reality, and not reality itself.

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