The Revival of Art

IN a former paper in this magazine, on the relations between journalism and culture of the higher literary qualities, I had occasion to quote Emerson’s golden sentence on the relation of culture to worldly success, “ Whilst all the world is in pursuit, of power, and of wealth as a means of power, culture corrects the theory of success ; ” and another, less important as a lesson, but not, less true, “ I think sculpture and painting have an effect to teach us manners and abolish hurry,” as to which maxim much might be said if it would be listened to, and if there is in our national temperament the root of a veritable artistic development. Emerson has been called the American Plato by more than one critic, and there is, in fact, a curious parallel between the two minds, not in the general resemblance, but in the possession of certain fundamental truths, especially concerning the spiritual types which lie behind the mere physical phenomena. Both were insensible to the forms of art; both felt the verity and importance of the law of which art is only a form of manifestation. Plato felt the reality of the great spiritual harmonies, of which those of art are the faint reflections, so completely that the phenomena of them had no power over him. Emerson felt the intellectual correspondence of the same verities, and the possible value to general culture of the artistic form of them ; but to the distinctions which make art, as apart from the facts which it employs, he paid no attention. Plato had no place in his community for the artist. Emerson, in a time and state of society in which nature has brought art nearer to the daily life of men, through the invention of landscape-photography, etc., remained all his life insensible to the qualities of art in a remarkable degree. He felt nature as the ancient Greeks seem to have felt her, apart from the human subjective uses of her ; and this trait in the mental conformation of a man so typical of the race which seems to be evolving the type of civilization which threatens to characterize the next phase of human development is a phenomenon which invites study. We talk a great deal about art, and spend a great deal of time and money on it, but it is a serious question if art has any more hold on the American mind, or any more share in American culture, than alchemy or astrology. When I say that it is a serious question, I mean not only that it is one that may have serious import, but that it may be seriously held in the negative as well as positive, and seriously debated. But to debate it, to maintain either the negative or the positive, it is necessary to understand with precision what art means; and if, in the grave deliberations the subject may call up, it should be discovered that it is a necessary part of modern culture, this understanding must be applied to the system of education devoted to it.

I do not recognize the ignorant and substantially superstitious respect, often amounting to reverence, for the artist, and begetting an impulsive patronage of him, as implying or leading to a knowledge of art; it is a feeling strong in proportion to the ignorance of art in the individual, and is a phenomenon of the religious nature, a shadow of the lingering reverence for a creator, and, as given to art, is strongest in weak minds. It is that which impels so many to think they must “ do something for art; ” leads to some intelligent, but more unintelligent, patronage of it by individuals, schemes of art schools and art education by communities, in which the patronage of artists and fostering of art are confounded, — sometimes identified, sometimes mistaken the one for the other, to the injury of both. The general result is academies and similar institutions with exhibitions, and schools of art on the model of that of South Kensington : the latter, of all ever conceived by the mind of man, the most disastrous to the possible development of a true art; the former, the most powerful stimulant to the most superficial qualities of any art, — competitions in which the display of the most evident and shallow technique determines success, rather than the possession of the finer faculties of the artist, and from which the real artist shrinks with an aversion proportioned to the subtlety, refinement, and spirituality of his art. The artist is no more entitled to respect or charity, much less to reverence, than any other brain-worker. That he excites our wonder by feats of legerdemain, tours de force, tricks of the brush, or audacities of technique is due purely to our ignorance, and counts for the artisan, not for the artist. In true art, the means are so completely subordinated to the end that they are not, and ought not to be, noticed. Nor is fidelity to nature any more the standard to which we should bring our critical measures to be tried; the photograph is truer to nature than any art can be, and is yet the very antipodes of art. Yet these are the qualities which determine the exhibition success, the fame and fortune of the artist ; and by the theory of success determine the nature of the education of the artist so far as the public has anything to do with it. The dominant virtues in the general estimation and in the success of these collective exhibitions are, first, clever brush-work ; and second, fidelity to the facts of nature. With these ideals in view, the education in art of our public, and to a greater or less extent of our artist, is shaped. If the general public is content, it is an argument to strengthen the case of those who maintain that the uses of art are matters of the past, and that of its finer qualities, as of its true methods, we are in equal ignorance and indifference.

And yet we have under our eyes, and held up to our admiration, the products of the two great schools of the past, the Greek and the Italian Renaissance, which all thoughtful students of art recognize as beyond modern rivalries; these with the contemporary Japanese, in which, with an antipodal difference of motive and temperament, the fundamental system is the same, and the success due to the same processes of thought and work as those of the Greek and Italian schools.¹ These processes are absolutely antagonistic to those of the modern schools without exception, the difference between the latter being rather one of processes and handiwork than in conception of the purposes of art. The English school is, with very few but most notable exceptions, only an aggregation of more or less clever amateurs ; the German is a mistaken philosophical worship of the mass of matter we call the world, and humanity, without a trace of imagination or spirituality ; the French, of the moment, while technically at the head of modern art, is but the apotheosis of brush-work and the speculum of the surface of things, as devoid of vitality, as cold and sterile, as the surface of the moon ; and ours, so far as it goes, seems to be based on the French, and so predestined to superficiality, if not to power. It is useless to call up men like J. F. Millet, Théodore Rousseau, and two or three more : they are voted out of the scheme of to-day, and form no part of the French system, any more than Watts, Burne-Jones, and Rossetti of the English. These are survivals of a condition of the human intellect which, though once normal, has ceased to be so. The reason is to seek.

The steady degradation of art, almost without distinction of form, with only rare and isolated recurrences of the true spirit, from the sixteenth century to the day we live in, demands an explanation which shall indicate the remedy, if the study of art is to be healthily revived. As an evolutionary problem, it is one of the most interesting, and not the least important, in the history of culture. Its solution is indicated more or less clearly by the analogies of every branch of the history of thought, and is shown with absolute precision in the philosophy of the arts taken collectively, in their individual history in which the law of evolution is shown, and, if we would study it, in the development of the individual artist; it is visible in music, in poetry, in the dance, in sculpture, and in painting,—sister arts where true arts, and as such subject to the same laws, and in fact only various forms of the same passion, that of expressing our emotions in rhythmic forms, of manifesting in communicable and sympathetic modes and ideal types the absolute and individual self. If the arts, born of one motive, appear in diverse guise, it is because each of our faculties demands a distinct appeal, and, for the satisfaction of its peculiar emotion, a distinct language. In each and all the artist is a creator, borrowing the language of nature only when it serves his purpose ; but he is in no wise her clerk or mirror,—that is the mission of the scientist.

Poetry and music have their motives and methods so rooted in our spiritual natures that they can be degraded only by sensuality; but even then the art may keep its fineness, because, after all, the most intense sensuality has its roots in the spiritual nature, and it is only in its escape from the divine order and precedence that its vice lies. The dance we may consider a dependence of music; and these are immortal, in no peril of extinction. It is only to sculpture and painting that death can come ; that form of death that keeps a body and loses the soul. Materialism is the deadly enemy of all the arts ; but music and poetry cannot be materialized : they are born in human emotion, and will only die with it. Fainting and sculpture are materialized by slavery to the facts of nature. They draw their language, the prime elements of their creation, from a visible world, so full in its vocabulary that the artist cannot escape from the suggestion of its terms, if he would be understood. Color is, and in its highest expressions can only be, subjective, to be treated like music, orchestrally ; but the element of form is necessarily dependent on nature for the intelligibility of its terms and types, the artist having only the faculty of exalting and refining her forms into what we recognize as the ideal. The essential condition of all the arts of design becoming true art is in their being expression, not imitation ; that their statements and imagery shall be evolved from the mind of the artist, not copied from natural models, be creation, not repetition ; and in the degree that this condition is fulfilled does the work become more or less purely a work of art. The form of materialism which menaces the arts of design is therefore science. The antagonism is inexorable, but logical, and the position cannot be escaped from. Photography is the absolute negation of art; and if to-morrow it could succeed in reproducing all the tints of nature, it would only be the more antagonistic, if that were possible, to the true artistic qualities. " The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life ; ” and though artistic creation does not involve the creation of the prime material, no more does, so far as science teaches, the creation of the world ; the old material takes new forms, that is all. The idealist gets his materials from nature, but he recasts them in expression ; the realist, who is no artist, repeats them as he gets them. This is the fundamental distinction in all design ; the copyist is not an artist.

It is this, and not the choice of subject, or the more or less decided tendency of a painter or a school, which constitutes the distinction between “ high or true art and “ low ” or spurious art ; the test is not in fidelity to nature, but to one’s own self. Giotto and Turner, Orcagna and Blake, Phidias and Michelangelo, are alike types of the highest attainment; the modern realistic, or, more exactly, naturalistic painters, the incident and costume painters of whatever school, are at the other end of the scale, more or less redeemed by purely technical power, but by no measure of it to be raised to the higher rank. Not that the distinction can be drawn sharply, so that we can in every case say that painters shall fall in one or the other category ; but just in the proportion that an artist depends on his model or the actual material furnished by nature is he removed from pure art. Nature is a noble mistress, and there is nothing degrading in the most absolute subjection to her ; but let us not, for that, confound the distinctions the recognition of which lies at the bottom of sound criticism. The painter whose devotion to nature is such that he never leaves or varies from her may be, and is likely to be, a happier man than if he were a true artist ; but he is not an artist, any more than a photographer is one. Michelangelo studied the human figure profoundly, probably more intensely than any modern painter, and worked from the knowledge he had acquired ; but it is on record, and is shown by the internal evidence of his work, that he never worked directly from the model in his matured works. Giotto very certainly never used the model at all, and Turner never could paint from nature. To men of this type the external image disturbs the ideal, which is so complete that it admits no interference; as Turner is reported to have said, “Nature put him out,” and this is a true condition. In Blake it was so developed that it became a morbid vision.

If art is to be revived, we must understand the law of its evolution, and the element of our nature from which it draws its vitality, and not waste energy and existence in trying to make figs grow on thistles, or art at schools borrowed from South Kensington. Some one said, long ago, what is to the profound student of religions a fundamental truth, “ the nearer the church, the further from God ; ” and in strict analogy with this I may say, the nearer to nature, the further from art. This does not hinder that the church may become the guide to divine wisdom, us nature may lead to art, though never through slavery; but, to state it broadly, the subjection of reason to authority, or individual emotion to the hard-and-fast aspects of the physical world, is utterly antagonistic to the individuality which is the end of the development of the man or the artist. As religion was made for man, and not man for religion, so art was not made for nature, but nature for art, looking at the matter from the artist’s point of view. The modern conception of the arts of design is that they are intended as the mirror of nature; the ancient and true one, that they were the outcome of the emotions, aspirations, and imaginative or spiritual conceptions of the artist. To the old master the facts of nature were the vocabulary of his language, to the new they are the types of his achievement; the former employed her forms to define his visions, the latter only mimics them ; the former expressed an idea, the latter imitates a surface. Art has changed its public, forgotten its origin, and is no longer the teacher of humanity, the message of the gods, but the sycophant of vulgarity and ignorance, or, at its best, — and would it were never worse employed ! - the servant of science.

He who accepts nature as the supreme authority, from which no appeal can lie, may be a scientist, but never an artist. To the latter she offers suggestions, but lays down no law. When what she brings him suits his purposes, he builds it in ; when not, which is the general case, he hammers it into his own shape. Her facts are accidents, and what he wants is the very truth, the ideal.² If from the beginning his visions do not surpass the actualities be sees about him, if the passion of expression has not laid hold of him before the love of nature awakens in him, there is little or no probability of his having in him the material of success. The evolution of the individual follows the general law ; and that, in all art, is that invention precedes imitation. Pure decoration with arbitrary forms, generally geometrical, precedes the representation of natural objects. This passion for decoration and the harmonious arrangement of forms, sounds, colors, or movements is the essential element of all art. The love of nature is a distinct and completely subordinate element. Without the recognition of this law, the development of a true and progressive art, the foundation of a school, is impossible. In music, the absolute subjection of the objective to the subjective, to the complete concealment of the former where it exists, makes the law clear to the dullest mind ; in poetry, it is equally clear to those who have the ear for form, even if sometimes confused by those who confound the dignity of thought with the perfection of form, or, as in Whitman, mistake the material for the form, and ignore the essential distinction between prose and poetry; but in painting and sculpture, the modern doctrine ruinously, as earnestly and eloquently maintained by Ruskin, gives the objective the absolute supremacy, making fidelity to nature the standard of excellence in art, completely reversing the artistic law. Until this heresy is recognized for what it is, pure fallacy, the arts of design can never be cultivated on the true basis.

What, then, is to be done to bring about a healthy revival of art on a foundation of education which shall secure its continued vitality ? I am supposing, for the sake of my argument, that this is desirable, and that the modern mind has a need of this form of art. The first thing to be done is to banish from our criticism the false standard, and admit the possibility of a work of art being the better the less it is like nature (I do not say that divergence from nature is necessarily an approach to art, but that it may be so; in any case, the fidelity to nature has no relation whatever to the quality of the art), and to establish as the very foundation of the system of education that only the impression of nature is to be aimed at, even if it is in contradiction to the facts, and that memory and the record of impression are to be put in the first place in the acquisitions of the artist. We cannot go back to the childlike simplicity of all archaic art, with its dominant unsophisticated rendering of the central idea, and its slow normal and evolutionary attainment of perfection. We know too much of the fruit of the tree of knowledge to accept it in its greenness. Science has already too much forereached on art for the latter to begin again, as it began in the days of Greek myths and the Italian reawakening, and as all archaic art has in all the circumstances which excite the creative impulse; that is, with the simplest, most direct expression of a dominant idea, and without reference to any non-essential facts, time and ripening knowledge adding, step by step, the deficient traits. What is to be done must be done with the recognition that we have been on a false road, on which we cannot now return, but must find the best cross-path to regain it. The simple satisfaction with which the artist in the childhood of art, as the child in his art, saw grow under his eye the image of his thought is replaced by a mixed emotion in which the knowledge of the non-essential is too large a part to be slighted in the record.

In this process we must return to the springs of art, the many-channeled Castaly where the artist of whatever vein slakes his thirst. The law is the same for all: the young poet trains his rhythmical sense by the reading of the best verse; the young musician, in the music of his predecessors. The artist of form cannot escape from the law; he must begin by the study of art, not nature. If the emotion which inspires him is not supreme over all fact, remoulding, even suppressing or reversing it at need, casting it fused into the mould of his conception; if he does not accept the evolutionary law and absorb what went before him, his work will scarcely become art. The distinction is radical, and decides the very life of work or worker; it makes the difference between science and art, poetry and prose, music and talk, dance and locomotion; and the system of education which does not recognize and work from the distinction is doomed to eternal futility. From this there is no escape.

I appeal to the history of art. The earliest work of the great Greek school is scarcely distinguishable from the archaic work of all barbaric tribes ; rude attempts to make visible an ideal, mostly of its conceptions of Deity, in which it is impossible not to see the analogy with the first efforts of children to shape resemblance of the things they love. This was, and is, invariably the presentation of conceptions, not studies from an object. The ideal was slowly worked out by the universal process of evolution, generation after generation working out the same problem of the ideal; the pupil carrying the work of his master a little further, as he perceived the incompleteness of what had been done before, but always in the sense of more perfect expression; finally arriving at a perception of nature idealized, the perfect types of beauty which no later epoch has rediscovered. To the thorough student of Greek art it is brought home, by a thousand details of internal evidence, that this slow attainment of perfection was the result, not of any system of copying nature, but of the gradual evolution, through centuries, of the perception of the ideal of form, attained through the simultaneous development of technical refinement and the power of retaining passing impressions of nature, and through the reaction of these on each other.

The caviler will say that it matters not how the facts of nature came into the work, — it was nature, after all, which furnished the forms, — and that the most perfect of the Greek works are those which are most like nature. But, this is not true in fact, and is utterly false as generalization. Nature never furnishes a perfect form, and supplies us with no criterion by which we can distinguish the more from the less beautiful. Nature tends to perfect beauty when she is regarded as a whole, but some of the noblest Greek statues contain violations of anatomical truth which no modern French sculptor would dare be guilty of, but which were intentional and necessary to the beauty of form and expression. The artist found the lines and forms he wanted ; where the anatomy came right, it was because his memory was precise and tenacious, and the facts did not interfere with his ideal form. He saw the god in his imagination, and gave him the form of highest beauty as he conceived it; and when, in later days, he saw the athlete in action, his trained memory retained the forms that gave the figure its expression. He knew nothing of anatomy or the function of the muscles, which, in the science of his day, were only the cushions which protected the bones, in which all strength was supposed to lie. His vision of what was on the surface was undimmed by theories of what was underneath, and his powers of observation of every variation and characteristic of external form, and his retention of what he saw, were so highly developed that the use of the model was superfluous ; his vision of the ideal was truer than the actuality of flesh and blood. This might seem incredible did we not know that it was the case with Michelangelo, who worked on the marble without even a clay model to guide him.

Taking the entire course of Greek art from the most archaic period down to the Pergamean school, we see that the development of the perfection of form was so slow as to be recognized only as an evolution, and no internal evidence of the direct copying of nature is to be found in the whole field ; but when the intentional fidelity to nature becomes evident, as in the Dying Gladiator (although the pose plastique, which is the shadow of coming death to all art, is not yet apparent), universal criticism recognizes that art is in its decline ; fidelity to facts has begun to shoulder the perception of beauty, and the reign of the ideal has come to an end.

The same phenomenon appears in the history of the Italian Renaissance. Life had long lain fallow of art. The decay following the decline of all motives of art in Greece, Rome, and Byzantium, consequent, perhaps, on the moral and political debasement, had brought all the arts to one dead level of mechanical achievement. Byzantine art is the synonym of all that is most mechanical and prescriptive, but with the possessions of its technique much was prepared for a revival. Out of the sleep of centuries came the new birth, not, as the fables run, from the inspiration of a single man or from a recognition of nature, but from the general awakening of the intellectual and moral life of Italy. Cimabue was only one of its manifestations. Sienna, if we had her record, might come before Florence, and certainly in her Duccio was superior to the master of Giotto, — I am even inclined to believe, not inferior to Giotto himself. But in Giotto we have the sum of all the qualities which told in the revival. What we find in his art is what we find in the early Greek, with something beyond, due to the evolution of humanity at large to a fuller life and a wider range of faculties ; but it is an art of the ideal, not of the model ; pure expression, in which the faculty of imaginative vision appears in a startling power, and in which there is the clearest internal evidence that he never used the model. His ideal differed from that of the Greek as the mediæval Italian did from the fellow-citizen of Pericles ; and the ideal of the Renaissance was not that of physical perfection, but of spiritual glory and struggle, — not of the Apollo, but of the Christ. The intellectual processes are, however, the same. If in the work of Giotto the internal evidence of the purely ideal method be obscured, it is abundant in that of his pupils and immediate successors, whose absolutely subjective method is beyond dispute. From Giotto onward there is a steady development in the direction of a larger comprehension of the qualities of the art and a fuller grasp of its alphabet; though while in Giotto every detail is a part of his story, and in his successors they become more or less conventional symbols, the underlying idea is the same. The undivided purpose of the work was the expression of the idea which inspired the artist, never the representation of nature except as a part of the vocabulary.

The climax of this ecstatic art came in Fra Angelico, — not a great imagination, but a wonderful visionary, whose pictures are probably the most perfect expressions we have of the purely subjective art, produced under the exaltation of religious emotion, and drawn from what the artist believed to be revelations of the heavenly world, and actually seen by him. The work of William Blake was probably as purely subjective ; but there seems to me a taint of insanity in the vision, not the pure ecstasy, kept in Fra Angelico a consistent element by the intensity of his religious passion, but in Blake replaced by an abnormal obsession. In the work of Fra Angelico’s great pupil, Benozzo Gozzoli, I find for the first time the evidence of the direct and prosaic reference to nature for certain facts, forms, and the real semblance of the personages with whom the artist came in contact, and who became to a large extent the dramatis personœ of his pictures ; but Gozzoli only made drawings from the person, which he used as memoranda when working on the picture. After him the practice became general to draw from the figure, and in some cases from cast draperies ; but it is only in Fra Filippo that we find the study of types from the every-day world for the sacred personages, and not till long after that do we find the posing of the figure for dramatic action; while actual painting from life in the final work is not indicated till we reach the Carracci, in their socalled revival of art, which was really the death-blow to it. It is probable that Raphael and Titian drew their portraits directly from life on the canvas in the preparation, on which they afterward got their color without the model; and in the case of Titian we have not only the internal evidence, but that of tradition, to show that he did not paint from nature in the modern way, but on the basis of an accurate likeness, done in monochrome, followed by his general scheme of color in the conventional technical method, borrowed from Bellini and continued through the Venetian school till its close. All through the great period of the Renaissance the figures were evidently drawn from knowledge, in many cases acquired by the most severe drawing from nature ; but the design was made from that knowledge, not from the model, which served merely for the better understanding of the subject. What the Greeks did we do not know by direct tradition, but we know that the absurd legends of their composing figures from the various members of different individuals, a leg from one and an arm from another, can have had no foundation in fact. No one who knows the modus operandi of the artistic mind can be in doubt as to that; no ideal image, even of a landscape, can be constructed in that way. The true idealist is he who, having the most complete knowledge of nature, uses her materials freely for his own purposes. She has her laws, and the idealist learns and obeys them.

The mental operations of the copyist and those of the idealist are diametrically opposed, whether the former copies nature or the work of another artist. With the copyist there is a constant measuring, comparing, a process of balancing in the mind far more laborious than the process of expression of a conception found in the imagination or memory. A modern school of painting has assumed the title of “ impressionist,” apparently ignorant of the fact that all true art is impressionist in the proper sense of the term, as all naturalistic representation is science, and not, strictly speaking, art at all. The majority of people nowadays prefer the latter: they know, more or less, what resembles what they see and what they like. This world, familiar to them, may be worthier than that of the idealist and artist; that is a matter of taste, not of discussion. But let us not confound terms and definitions: if what we want is art, let us understand its character; if what we want is nature, let us recognize the fact and have done with it, but not wander in uncertainty as to what we are talking about.

Much of the confusion in the world of general thought on the subject of the ideal is due to the confusion between the two accepted meanings of the word. The broad and comprehensive, and therefore the primary, meaning is the designation of what is present to the imagination as opposed to the palpable and materialized, — the theory of the thing as opposed to the accomplishment of it ; the secondary meaning is something which is produced in conformity to that hypothetical perfection, because, as we recognize the imperfection of actual things, we admit that we must seek a perfect image in the regions of imagination, that is of ideas. But when we come to scientific discussion of the nature of art, we must recur to the primary use of the term, and recognize that whatever is the embodiment of a mental conception is ideal; and in any possible combination of the ideal and the actual, that part of the combination which makes it art is that which it owes to the mind of the artist, and not that which it derives from the material world. When, then, we propose to cultivate art by setting the would-be artist to painting from nature directly, we take a road which may in time permit him to become an artist, but which is not the true and direct way, and which may, indeed, divert him entirely from his aim, and is not therefore to be advised as the basis of an art education, though it may be that best adapted to an education in what I will designate as scientific graphics, and the only method for men who have no ideal faculties. The essential conditions of a true art education are, the cultivation above all other faculties of those of rapid observation and retention of the significant facts, and putting before the eye the essential truths of what was seen, memorizing the flitting panorama of nature, and training the power of conception and the imagination by exercising and depending on them. Hamerton has given some most interesting observations on the method of memorizing as a system of art-training, and the history of modern art is full of cases of the power to be so attained. To work from knowledge of the reality of things, rather than from information of their superficial aspects, is the end to be kept in view; to get rid of the model so far as possible is the first step to the right education, dependence on the model the obstacle to it. The shadow of science is the eclipse of art.

I do not know that the revival of art is of any importance to humanity. I admit the possibility of its utter inutility to the spiritual or intellectual evolution of the race ; of its having finished its work as an agent in that evolution, and having, in general, a purely historical value. I perceive in the study of its history that there have been epochs in which it served only to gratify vanity and ostentation, and it seems to me that we are now in such an epoch; but as in the past these morbid conditions have had reactions of healthy life, it is not permitted from an historical parallel to conclude that the future does not contain an art as genuine as any in the past. But two things must be noted by the philosophical student, namely: that the great evolutions of true art have always had their origin in some general passion supervening on the love of decoration, no fiat of ruler or official forcing-process ever having succeeded in initiating one; and that they have invariably been followed, and been stifled, by naturalistic tendencies. Nature has in every case killed art. The devotion to naturalism has, in all the past schools, been recognized by thoughtful criticism as the “decline of art.” The reason is evident.

The servile study of nature supersedes the exercise of those faculties on which I have shown the successful pursuit of art to depend ; the vulgar taste applauds what it can understand, — the superficial aspect of things, imitation, illusion, etc. ; and the Academies, Royal and National, the various societies, in their exhibitions and search of popularity, follow and confirm the vulgar opinion, which can never be otherwise than grossly ignorant; and only the artistic genius of inflexible fibre resists the current, and is generally ignored. The annual exhibitions are the grave of all that is best in art: individuality of the finer kind, refinement simplicity which is a form of religion, and pure intellectual purpose, — these are trampled out by the eager feet of those who give a morning to the study of the work of a year, are unrecognized in the competition of brilliant technical surfaces, and are finally buried in the ignorant comment of the hurried daily press, compelled to pronounce judgment without consideration, and generally without the most elementary knowledge of the subject. No labor of any human worker is ever subjected to such degradation as is art to-day under the criticism of the daily paper. Now and then a true artist fights his way to his proper place by sheer intellectual power and patient endurance ; but others, as true in aim, if of minor force, are never recognized.

Under the hypothesis, then, that art is to be revived and cultivated, the study of the works and methods of the genuine schools of art in past times is of the highest and primary importance, — is, in fact, the foundation of our schools to be. The mimicry of ancient forms, the adoption of antique or mediæval themes, the affectation of a manner that was spontaneous to a mind that came to activity under influences utterly diverse from those under which we live, have nothing to do with art, and in no wise aid us. Whether the Greeks believed in the gods whose images they carved, or the Cinquecentists in the holy men and women they painted, is to us utterly immaterial. What they have given us is the method by which they attained excellence in art, and the law at the root of it. That their faith had anything to do with that excellence I do not believe, or that any revival of such faith is necessary for a new art. The history of art does not indicate it, and the biographies of the artists deny it. What the old art teaches, in whatever form it took, is that the art is in the artist, and not in nature ; and from Archermos to Praxiteles, as from Cimabue to Raphael, the development is one of accumulating knowledge going hand in hand with an increasing skill and technical resources, in which the evidence is unmistakable to those who can read it that the study of nature was indirect, and that scientific knowledge of things never came to disturb the order of ideal creation. The Greek sculptor was not cursed by a knowledge of anatomy, and after Michelangelo had introduced it the sculpture of Italy became a mere muscular inanity. We cannot now go so far as to ignore anatomy, but we can cease to study it, and recognize no more of it than the Greek could see and show, — no more of it than is necessary to express the idea that animates us; remembering always that fidelity to the conception is the first obligation of art, fidelity to nature a secondary matter, and sometimes counter-indicated by the primary law, and out of the question.

But when all this is admitted, there remains the grave question which no individual can answer, but a race and an epoch, — Does the world want art any longer ? Has it, in the present state of human progress, any place which will justify the devotion to it of the class of minds which once found in it the enthusiasm of their youth and the content of their ripe years? Is it with the race, as with the individual, that

And must we be content, like the apostle of nature, the passion and exaltation of the youth of humanity being outgrown, to look back at what the bloom time has left us, and

No one can admit that the human intellect is weaker than it was five or twenty centuries ago ; but it is certain that if we take the pains to study what was done five centuries ago in painting, or twenty centuries ago in sculpture, and compare it with the best work of to-day, we shall find the latter trivial and ’prentice work compared with the ordinary work of men whose names are lost in the lustre of a school. The distinction is not one of mental calibre, for now and then we see arise an individual of as strong and marked an artistic mind as any but the two or three supreme men of the past; but their best work (and none are more willing than they to admit it) is but amateurs’ accomplishment beside the certainty and comprehensiveness, both in vision and execution, of even minor masters of the great times. We come continually across pictures that have for generations been attributed to Raphael, to Titian, or to Michelangelo, and find that they are but the work of men of whose existence we have barely a record. A shallow critic would say that this proves the master was overrated ; the truth is, there was, in the time when that work was done, a great current of artistic tendency which swept smaller men into the inspiration of the greater, and exalted their powers. Now the current is in another direction, and the greater men, who in Titian’s day would have been his equals, are left in the shallows and quicksands, stranded for want of a pilot or a favorable current.

Then, little men, inspired by the Zeitgeist, painted greatly; now, our great men fail to reach the technical achievemeat of those little men. There is not one living painter who can paint a portrait as a Venetian painter of A. D. 1550 would have done it; only one, in my knowledge, who has the same feeling for it. If we go to the work of wider range, the Campo Santo of Pisa, the Stanze, the Sistine Chapel, the distance becomes an abyss; the simplest fragment of a Greek statue of B. C. 450 shows us that the best sculpture of this century, even the French, is only a happy child-work, not even to be put in sight of Donatello or Michelangelo. The reason is simple. The early men grew up in a system in which the power of expression was taught from childhood ; they acquired method as the musician does now, and the tendency of the opinion of their time was to keep them in the good method. Beginning as apprentices, they grew to be masters ; art was not a diversion, but a serious occupation, to which fathers sent their sons at eight and ten years of age, and they learned to express ideas as soon as ideas began to form, and before they had begun to notice the surfaces of things ; and having acquired the power to express thought, power grew as the thought enlarged. We begin late as amateurs ; we see surfaces, and contemporary taste likes surfaces, but nothing serious; we lean on the model, and cannot escape it because we dare not risk to be caught out of drawing; the conception is never clear because we never trust it, and we must compare our work, touch by touch, with the model; we are never free, and we end in pose plastique, the caricature of art. The purely mechanical habit of reproducing the thing set before us, deferring to scientific exactitude as if it were authority in art, has little by little extinguished in the modern mind the sense of the ideal, just as an absorption in the material life, in its insatiable and ever-increasing claims, stifles, and finally entirely eliminates, the spiritual faculties. If there be no vital relation between the two, there is at least an analogy. I shall not discuss the question whether religion — by which I mean the spiritual life, not a creed or a church — is necessary to human progress or happiness, any more than I should maintain that art, in its highest acceptation, is so ; but I have the clearest perception of the truth that, in the one case as in the other, the devotion to the material stifles the ideal. The natural sciences, the model, Fact, — which is accident, fidelity to nature, to use the common term, — are the negation of the ideal and the extinction of the perception of the beautiful, which are in turn the highest witnesses of the spiritual life. Few men love nature more than I do, and few have spent time in more patient and reverential record of her material features by the most scrupulous copying of landscape; but I recognize that if I had ever possessed the higher gifts of the artist, this devotion to the shell of nature would have been the most efficient method for their extinction.

I know of nothing more melancholy, to one who has gone through the university of art, the silent schools of the long-past centuries, — Greece, Tuscany, Venice, Holland of the Van Eycks, and Germany of Dürer, — than to walk through a modern art exhibition and hear the comments of a public which, if not wise, is the only one art has to look to; the enthusiasm for the superficialities and unintelligent reproduction of a world of accidents, spending its admiration on tricks of the brush and curiosities of texture, while the genuine expressions of artistic feeling, rari nantes in gurgite vasto, soon to be forgotten as well, are passed with a joke or a sneer of incomprehension as affectations or absurd archaisms, or, what is almost as fatal in education in art, respected not because they are the result of the real art motive, but on account of some incidental characteristic of the artist, an eccentricity which is attributed to a peculiarity of vision or the discovery of a new process of painting. But this is the condition of public appreciation not only in England and America, but even in France, where the national temperament is most favorable to the development of æsthetic feeling.

As I have said, no individual can answer the question I have asked, — Do we want art any longer ? But if I were called on to answer my own question, I should say, No! We want portraiture, because the leading motive in the majority is vanity, and the highest virtue domestic affection. For the awakening of the highest artistic faculties we have neither the desire nor the ability. We understand vaguely what is like nature, and we confound the representation of nature with art. People who take to art in the feeling that it is a better amusement than any other are too far advanced in life to acquire a really noble execution, just as they would be in music ; and they always depend on nature because it is the easiest way to get along. The establishment of schools, in the old and true sense of the word, where the training should begin with the development of the intellect, and correct habits of working should be acquired before the critical faculties are at work, in which a regular apprenticeship should be gone through, the process by which alone a master can be made, is, in the present state of things, impossible. If in some more or less remote future a reaction should follow the present temper, and art find a new world, we may have prepared the way for it by the recognition of its true principles, and, above all, the clear understanding that its fundamental law is that in its sphere art is supreme, and nature only its bricks and mortar. So long as we confound fidelity to nature with excellence in art we ignore that law.

I had written thus far when I showed my paper to Mr. G. F. Watts, R. A., who wrote the following comment, which he permits me to print. I do so gladly, for his views have an intrinsic value, as the conclusions of one whom I am compelled to regard as the profoundest thinker on art with whose opinions I am conversant.

“ I agree so much with the general tenor of your article that it is what I am always saying. There are two or three points I might wish to discuss upon the question of art education. Certainly I do not think modern art education a good one, but I think education in art necessary. The language of art is not quite a natural one, since it is not possessed by all. The great artist, like the great poet, may forget his means as he forgets himself in his work ; but to do this his means must be entirely sufficient. When Wordsworth wrote the Intimations of Immortality, he never had to think of his grammar or his spelling : such a necessity must have crippled his utterances. The soldier fighting for his life does not think about the rules of fence, but, for the perfect handling of his weapons, he has had to learn to use them. The greatest art must deal with the human figure; the strongest appeal to humanity can be made only through humanity. Michelangelo was not a better artist for giving twelve years to the study of anatomy, — perhaps the worse; but a very considerable knowledge of and acquaintance with the structure of the human frame are absolutely necessary, — an acquaintance difficult for him to acquire in northern climates and in modern times. The artist acquainted with the human structure through the medium of his restricted observation alone will find himself in the position of the musician who composes by ear. This may suffice for his melody, but without knowledge of counterpoint he will not be able to set down in writing the complications of his harmony. Painting from the model is a thing I entirely disapprove of, — I never do it and have never done it, never setting up the model in a fixed position, though referring to it occasionally when knowledge or memory may be at fault; but there should be no hesitation for want of knowledge, and the more elevated the intention, the more necessary that there should be no obvious violations of grammar in art. Also, I think that you should make it understood that you admit that even painting from still life, and subjects where dexterous imitation and beautiful workmanship are interesting and pleasing, is still art in a degree and worthy of praise, as all things done conscientiously are : this, while you rightly insist that reality is fatal to the dignity of higher endeavor.... I should not like my method of study to be misunderstood; though not painting from the model, I do not depend upon knowledge, still less memory, alone, but, for example, get any one who may be about to lend me a wrist or an elbow, not merely in the position required, but turning the joint about, not to copy, but to refresh my knowledge. This is probably what Phidias did with greater opportunities. I do the same thing, — that is to say, study more than I have immediate occasion to represent when painting a portrait. For example, if I am painting a full-face, I endeavor to learn the profile, that I may not depend on the light and shadow alone for the form of the features. I do not hesitate to repeat that I consider the painting from the model in a set position a pernicious practice, but the study of nature is another thing, and cannot be dispensed with. ... I think you may have remarked that I purposely avoid display of anatomical knowledge in my figures, and all reference to creeds in my subjects.”

These views of the great artist are in no wise in conflict with those I have tried to expound, though, as he writes in the nature of a general approval, he dwells on the points on which he desires to qualify my statements ; but I do not exclude a lower form of art, which I have noted as “ law, or spurious art,” and the excellence of which is in the perfection of its means, not in the nobility of its ends, and to be respected, as we should respect a versifier whose grammar and diction were faultless, but who was quite devoid of poetic inspiration. Nature is noble, and the most scrupulous rendering of her, in every attainable aspect, is worthy commendation as handicraft ; but even here we are in a way which leads to the antipodes of the true and supreme art, — that of the ideal, the creative. There is one honor of the hand and another of the brain, and they rarely go to the same work.

W. J. Stillman.