STATE HOKt I*OS jRISlGEIjES, CJlli. UNIVERSITY of CALIFORNIA LOS / ^S LIEKAiiY CONSIDERATIONS ON PAINTING CONSIDERATIONS ON PAINTING LECTURES GIVEN IN THE YEAS 1893 AT THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF NEW YORK BY JOHN LA FARGE THE MACMILLAN COMPANY LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD. 1901 All rights reserved ft OomiORT, 1806, BT MACMILLAN AND CO. St up and lectrotypd July, 1895. Reprinted January, 1896; January, 1901. 3. 8. Cuihini ft Co. - Berwick ft Smith. Norwood Man. U.S. A. PREFACE I FEEL that the printing of my lectures brings with it a certain difficulty. Lectures intended to be read within the Museum, with a continual reference, implied and often expressed, to the place, the objects gathered within it and their associations, must have had a certain fitness which will be more or less diminished when they come to be read under different conditions. Moreover, they were written and spoken with an idea always present in my mind : that I had a class of students whom I was addressing, and that my other auditors stood in a more remote relation to me. Certain appeals to my teaching, certain allusions to the practice of the students and to their position of relative de- pendence and inferiority of age or acquaintance with the world, of little or no significance to my readers, are thus explained. I have not seen any way of so modifying these lectures as to suit my feelings and wishes in the present; nor could I have found the time to do so had I seen my way clearly to that end. Even the time that I gave to their prepara- tion for the Museum course had to be taken out of the v PREF boon of personal teaching; and they bear the mark of a more temporary consideration on my part than would suit me had I from the first thought of publishing them. At the same time, there is always something in work done for a special practical purpose which through its very contexture gives a practical answer to many questions; and I have hoped that with some slight modifications and explanations I may manage to make my readers feel that these lectures are for them. I need not add, I think, that there is little in these pages that pretends to be novel. Indeed, I should like to appeal to the memories stored in the consciousness of my readers, and ask if their own observation does not bear me out in mine. J. L. F. PARIS, 1895- LECTURE I ESSENTIAL DIVISIONS OF THE WORK OF ART B SYNOPSIS OF LECTURE I Proposed plan of the lectures. Consideration of what museums of art offer for study. Classification of the kinds of lessons to be derived from their contents. Difference between such a course of study and the usual practical studies which must have preceded. Why more specially painting and sculpture are called art. The artist expresses what is in reality himself. Personality impossible to con- ceal in the work of art. The thought that makes the work of art not reflection or reflective thought. Deficiencies of the thought which analyzes ; genius as the power of co-ordinating innumerable memories. The record of memories even in the superficial appear- ance of the work of art. Many essential characteristics inseparable from the work of art must be lost to us in certain cases. Style is living form. Certain forms consequently impossible to imitate. Ruysdael and Millet. What happens when methods are separated from sentiment. What happens to imitators. Loss of the mean- ing and influence of the work of art when it has been made to appeal especially to momentary interests. Rules exist for art, not art for rules. But art is a language and has a grammar which varies only as language varies. Preparation of the artist for the free world that he creates. We help him to make it : and taste may be a form of genius. Possibility of living in the work of others. In what true originality consists. What we learn to know is men. 2 LECTURE I /*S?& ESSENTIAL DIVISIONS OF THE WORK OF ART IT is my intention, in the lectures which I begin to-day, to supplement and to accentuate, in a more fixed and reasoned form, the teach- ings which I give to my students in a practical way. Whether they be written out in literary shape, or abandoned to the chance form of an K ordinary talk, they will be meant to explain the * philosophy of usual teaching. Sometimes what ^,j ^ I shall have to say may seem rather formal, _ somewhat abstract, perhaps thereby a little tire- some. At other times I shall be forced into details which are best given in the least con- ventional manner; and thereby I may seem to be stepping down from a higher plane. But these difficulties are inherent in the nature of the case, and in the unaccustomed position which the 4 LECTURE artist takes when he attempts to give explana- tions in words of what he thinks without words. I shall begin by some reference to the differ- ences between such a course of study as this one which we have undertaken in connection with the collections of a museum, and the usual prac- tical studies which must have preceded ours. I should then like to consider what museums of art offer for study, and to analyze and classify the kinds of lessons to be derived from their contents ; Also to consider how the artist has expressed his view of the world, how he has seen it, with what body and senses, what hereditary memo- ries, what memories of acquired liking, what . development of memory through study, and what ''* personal combination of all these factors ; To consider next how museums are collections of works by such men of all periods, who fully made use of all these means; how they contain, moreover, things left by imitators of such works, who only used part of these means of memory. In such an analysis I should try to explain DIVISIONS OF THE WORK OF AET 5 what the principles of these studies might be. These various considerations I shall repeat in different ways, from different points of view ; more especially in these lectures at the beginning. I also propose to inquire as to the way in which things that interest us through sight are seen, and what is our sight, and how we use it in the art of painting. And perhaps, if there be time, I may call the attention of my students to what painters and other artists have said about their arts, and connect these statements with our studies. The difficulty for the artist who works in things to put his thoughts into words is a natural difficulty, and much of what we shall study together will make the causes of it evi- dent. Efforts made in any one direction are made at the expense of our being able equally well to carry out others of a different kind ; the artist's nature has warned him of the loss, and his usual willingness to be satisfied without words is not misplaced. What I shall have to say to you will be ad- dressed more especially to my students, whether 6 LECTURE I or not I may have repeated these points, their derivations and conclusions, to them, during the course of lessons, or whether I have merely im- plied them. I have come into addressing you upon these matters through having been chosen by the Mu- seum to help in securing, by organized study, an extension and a more certain result of the advantages offered to every one hi its collec- tions. This choice might as well have fallen upon one of many other artists, and all that I can hope is that I may be able to do as well as any of the others of whom I think. The methods of teaching used in schools, which, taking a pupil as he may be found, begin with him, if necessary, at the beginning, place unknown tools in his hands, teach him quite as much the use of his body (of his hands, I mean, and his eyes) as of his mind, prepare him gradu- ally to know that there is a language that he can speak, teach him its average alphabet, its average spelling, its average grammar, these methods which are meant for the child have limitations DIVISIONS OF THE WORK OF ART 7 unsuitable to an older and better informed stage of mind. In the first place, any form of obedience is good for the pupil. When he has learnt to obey, it is well, both for him and for others, to learn if the path that he has chosen is one that is suited to him. First instructions, then, take in those who are to go on, and those who are to remain by the wayside, or who may turn into other paths. Meanwhile a lower aver- age of instruction must necessarily be kept to, where so many are included. It is also certain that the better the earlier training, the more certain and easy will be the later culture. There must be good grammar schools, there must be good preparatory educa- tion for those who, looking to the less fixed culture to be gained through the university, will need at first some definite discipline, even though it may be rigid or narrow, that they may be steadied for the greater liberty that shall open before them, when, as in the teach- ings of universities, they are shown the contra- dictions of systems of knowledge, and, for the 8 LECTtTBE I advantage of their present and their future, are made acquainted with the diversity of the past. The schools, therefore, which exist for the ad- vantage of the beginner, and which are based upon an exclusive adherence to a single teach- ing, are necessary. Such considerations as our present course will open to us could not be approached, and certainly could not be under- stood, without a fair practical acquaintance with the ordinary grammar of the art of painting. What we wish to consider together is this : what freedom there may be in the application of the tools which we have learnt to use. In- stead of an alphabet of letters, instead of a knowledge of the meaning of words taken sepa- rately, we wish to see how we can assemble these different parts that constitute our speech, and use them for that form of communication which is best suited to individual capacities. In the study of literature, in the study of the use of written words, we should be shown how men whose success had been more or less established by time, managed the mechanism of language. DIVISIONS OF THE WORK OF ART 9 Examples of well-used language would be laid before us, and we should be called upon to take lessons from them, and to admire the felicity of a success whose means we could now begin to understand. From all this acquaintance with the past we should gather a knowledge of the limitations attending any particular develop- ment, and of the extent and powers of such uses of the ordinary means that are common to all of us. Each individual mind would find some particular food best suited to its essential constitution ; nor should we fear that an intimate knowledge of what had before been done by man would hamper us; except in the sense that all knowledge is a weight to carry, as is all baggage, as is all food, as are all means of protection and all engines of survey and of industry. Not only do we obtain, then, a useful material, but our minds are enlarged by having to fit into spaces larger than those we knew before ; and the fact that these works of men which we study or ad- mire contain, in some mysterious way, the inform- ing principle which shaped them, brings us into a 10 LECTURE I warm and living contact with the being of their makers. We gain some of their life ; we are carried forward by their desires. Nor does it matter that these things done are the work of men of whom we speak as no longer living. They are always the work of the ma- jority of men ; for the dead outnumber the living. And we are as close to human nature when with them, as we are to the human nature that moves for this brief moment around us. Some of these men live in books. In places like this Museum, we know them in painting or in sculpture, in the forms of art more especially called art, be- cause, perhaps, in painting and in sculpture, we see more distinctly with the results the many means employed by that desire of man which causes him to make what we call the beautiful. In our art of painting, above all others, that desire of the beautiful is expressed and appeased by representation of what is exterior what is perceived by the sense of sight. Through these representations, more or less complete, more or less the result of acquired ideas, or, on the other DIVISIONS OF THE WORK OF ART 11 hand, of personal impressions, the artist has ex- pressed what is in reality himself. If we were gifted with the imaginary perception that we attribute to supernatural beings, we could see written out at length, in these works of art, not only the character of their authors, but their momentary feelings, often contradictory to the apparent intention; and even their physical fail- ings the make and habit of their bodies. Our form of art appears the most impersonal of all to the perceptions of those who look upon its results; and yet they and we usually satisfy our feelings by applying to the work and its methods adjectives implying moral or intellect- ual merits or demerits. Hence we speak of the nobility of a man's style ; hence we speak of the sincerity of a work of art. In reality, as I was saying, the art of painting is perhaps less discreet than any other. It gives most indubitable testimony of the moral state of the painter at the very moment that he used his brush. He has done what he wished to do. If he has wished in a weak way, it is 12 LECTURE I possible to know it through various forms of in- decision. All the more, that which he has not really desired is absent from his work, what- ever he may say, whatever he may claim, what- ever he may think, and whatever other people may say about him. Any distraction, any man- ner of forgetfulness, a less warm impression, a less deep and reaching application of sight, any lessening of industry, any lessening of his love for that which he is studying, the fatigue of painting- and the passion of painting, all these shades of his nature, even to the intermittent action of his sensitiveness all that is spread out manifestly, whether we recognize it or not, in the works of a painter, as sharply if he had taken us into his confidence. 1 For the thought that makes the work of art, the thought which in its highest expression we call genius, is not reflection or reflective thought. The thought which analyzes has the same defi- ciencies as our eye. It can only fix one point at a time. It is necessary for it to examine each 1 Paraphrased from Fromentln. DIVISIONS OF THE WORK OF ART 13 element of consideration, and unite it to others, to make a whole. But the process of free life, which is the logic of art, is like that process of our using the eye, in which we make most won- derful combinations of momentary adaptation, by co-ordinating innumerable memories, by rejecting those that are useless or antagonistic; and all without being aware of it, so that those espe- cially who most use the eye, as for instance the painter, or the hunter, are unaware of more than one single, instantaneous action. The exercise of reasoning alone, which is our usual way of defining thought, is, as I have just been saying in regard to the eye, a limitation; a limitation distinctly perceptible when we un- derstand with difficulty what others understand at once. And it may be that in the higher uses of certain processes of reasoning, where a very high life has acted in the way that I should like to call genius, the effort has been so simple and so natural that the memory of the multi- tudinous memories implied has passed away Take, for instance, that charming story told by 14 LECTURE I Biot, the astronomer, in his account of his studies with Laplace. The great man had confided to him his manuscripts of the "Me'canique Ce'leste," and for a long time the young student had puzzled over some passage which began, "It is easy to see that, etc." To him it was not easy to see. After long study he had the courage to explain his inability to his great patron. La- place looked over the old notes and memoranda, and said, " Well, I don't understand it either, but there was a moment, while I was at work, when it seemed so simple as not to be worth analyzing." Still more so in a work of art, executed through the body and appealing to the mind through the senses, the entire make-up of its creator addresses the entire constitution of the man for whom it is meant. Thus in any museum we can see certain great differences in things ; which are so evident, so much on the surface, as almost to be our first impressions. They are the marks of the places where the works of art were born. Climate; intensity of heat and of light ; the nature of the DIVISIONS OF THE WORK OF ART 15 earth ; whether there was much or little water in proportion to land; plants, animals, surround- ing beings, have helped to make these differences; as well as manners, laws, religious and national ideals. If you recall the mere general physical impression of a gallery of Flemish paintings and of a gallery of Italian masters, you will have carried off in yourself two distinct impressions, each one the sum of all the impressions received during their lives by the men of these two races. The fact that they used their eyes more or less is only a small factor in this enormous aggre- gation of influences received by them and trans- mitted to us. Outside of those qualities of our minds which place us in sympathy with what these things mean, which make us admire them, which make us feel that we like them, which lead us to forget these foreign accents, lies a large domain of relations more or less accessible, very often almost impossible for us to appreciate. There must always be some sides in the work of a Greek more natural to a Greek than they are to us; even when the thoughts and modes 16 LECTURE I of life of his race have become, by study and acquired memories, an intimate part of our own existence. How much more must it be so when we look at the works of art of another great civilization such as that of China and Japan ! We are cut off from the vast amount of associa- tions that have informed the lives of their makers. It is as if we read Shakespeare for the first time, in a language little understood of us. On that side, then, it is evident even through our not being able to understand thoroughly that there is something intangible in this physical object, something infinitely mysterious. And if we have lost so many things, which in some cases are lost forever, of what seemed to the makers of works of art in the past the very essence of their difference from other people, what other things do we not lose when, for example, in poetry, the exact quality of a single vowel, its shading in the scale of sound, has so much expres- sion, so much importance to us ? Think of all the combinations of these simple elements in the style of a great poet. Each syllable has a personality DIVISIONS OF THE WORK OF ART 17 of its own, yet exists only through the word which contains it. Each word has an enormous value, and yet has none by itself, but only as inserted in the statement which itself is part of the sentence, for the sentence is a whole, in the manner of the organism of a living body. Style might be called a living form which the live spirit wraps around itself. The art of writing contains, then, a certain science which as yet it has not been fully conscious of; but what notions for our own art are hinted at by this mere glance at the mechanism of another art still more unconscious than our own ! In our art of painting the forms of the language are more universal; more easily, therefore, can we under- stand this statement of Fromentin the painter : " Should you take away from the paintings of Rubens the spirit, the variety, the peculiar fitness of any touch of the brush, you would take away a statement that carries weight some necessary accentuation. Perhaps you might be taking away the one element which spiritualizes all this heavy matter, and transfigures so many and so frequent 18 LECTURE I uglinesses ; and that would be because you would suppress all his real sensitiveness, and, retracing effects to their first cause, you would kill the very life of the picture you would make over a pic- ture that had no soul. I could almost say that with each vanishing touch would disappear a personal feature of the artist." If, then, the very surface of the paint does, in the work of a great and skilful painter, literally embody his feeling, even more than the arrange- ment and cadence of words carry out a poet's feeling, he becomes impossible to imitate hi his personality, unless through a similar sentiment as every one who has copied knows. Of course the acquirements that he has memorized in com- mon with others the principles from which he works these not being subject to fluctuation, to moral and spiritual tides these can be common property. Hence it is that the search in common for cer- tain truths, for certain qualities, constitutes a real school, as distinct from a set of imitators. The Dutchmen tried together for the same things, DIVISIONS OF THE WORK OF ART 19 for what has been called a portraiture of na- ture; for accuracy and subtlety of painting upon an accuracy and subtlety of drawing which serves as a base. Yet Ruysdael is as different from Cuyp as shadow is from sunshine; and his grave and solemn mind gives to the simplest and most commonplace of landscapes a look of sad im- portance, which is almost like a reproach of light- mindedness, addressed to any other man's work which happens to hang alongside. He is said to be almost impossible to copy and yet his touch is not elegant nor facile ; his very dry ness would seem so slow that its motions could be followed by any patient hand. Certainly Jean FranQois Millet was no unerring and absolute painter like the great Dutchmen; yet his name is recalled to me by the severity of the mind of Ruysdael. The varying completeness of his pictorial work, its frequent arbitrary deci- sions, its exposing of the most interior mechanism of his methods, might lead us to think that he could be imitated with some success ; but no one who has attempted to do so has been able to repeat 20 LECTURE I the trial. The man in Millet the painter is too distinctly behind the work. According to his own view also, perhaps an excessive and a Spartan one, this was as it should be. When a friend of mine, who painted as well as any man of his school in the Paris of that day, came to Millet, to lay all this accomplishment at his feet and ask for direc- tion, " It is well," said Jean Fra^ois, " and you can paint. But what have you to say?" ("Qu' avez-vous a dire?") What Millet had to say was based on the simplest of foundations. Enemies often, and doubtful friends sometimes, made of him a preacher of social change, a person who used painting as a manner of preaching some newer doctrine. In reality Millet could meet again in mature life the good village priest who had first taught him, and in answer to questioning, assure him that he still read in his Christian Bible habit- ually, and in his Virgil sometimes. And perhaps he could remember the old priest's quoting, in an old-fashioned way, the sentences of the great French bishop, who was also the great French preacher. They run something like this. He is DIVISIONS OF THE WORK OF ART 21 describing the time that saw the end of Roman liberty, and the establishment of universal empire, and he says, "Jesus Christ was born, and God gave to the Romans the empire of this world, as a gift of little price." In the thought behind these words you will see the acceptance of suffering and of effort in patience, as part of the ordering of the world. Should we read habitually our Christian Bible in that meaning, not unmindful of the Ser- mon on the Mount, not untouched by the sad sweetness of Virgil, we should be nearer to being able to work in the spirit represented by Millet. It is hard to leave off speaking of men to praise whom is a benediction to the speaker, and to pass, as we have engaged to do, into a consider- ation of works behind which the man is covered up or in hiding. Museums are also receptacles for a class of works, examples difficult to define by analysis, as they are difficult to define in their reality, unless we speak of them as not belonging personally to their makers. To make such a clas- sification in the forms of art that deal with words is almost hopeless, and we can see the reason of 22 LECTURE I it more distinctly after we have considered the question in our own art, wherein analysis and separation of the intention and the method is apparently easier. And still the question I wish you now to consider is not an easy one to solve, and when it is sought out in individual examples it never can be absolutely disentangled from the personal equation of the artist, so true is the view that we have been considering, which makes' a work of art an expression -of the man. This difficulty has been beautifully expressed by the painter whom I quoted before (and who is rep- resented as a painter on the walls of 'our Museum), Fromentin : "Any work of art which has been deeply felt by its maker is also naturally well-painted. And any work of art in which the hand reveals itself in felicity or in splendour is through that alone a work belonging to the brain, or has its origin in it." To many people, art is a trade merely- more difficult than others. The artist to them is a person who plays with certain tools, delighting DIVISIONS OP THE WORK OF ART 23 in the skill which he can display in using them. But that is to confuse art with the processes of art. It is true that the artist, more especially the sculptor and the painter, is a workman; and that view of himself is a healthy one for him, the more literally he holds it. It might save him, if he really believed in it, from fre- quenting the houses of the rich and fashionable, and losing therein his personal dignity. It would keep him from being accessible to the influences of the moment, of changing fashion, all the more felt in idle life, and destructive of higher taste and style. 1 Anything which will help his remaining humble will keep his work fresh as coming from himself alone. In reality, confu- sion may occur in his mind, and in ours too; because his workmanship is inseparable from his inclination to his work. The child, for in- stance, stutters before it speaks. Its intentions and desires, little by little, form its language. And art is a language a language made on 1 Cf. Viollet le Due's explanation of the difficulty of the artist's preserving style to-day, unless through isolation. 24 LECTURE I purpose for the thought it tries to express. The statement of Fromentin is fully sufficient. It is not that the methods, the workmanship, can be detached from thought, but that the methods are so intimately connected with it, are such a neces- sary instrument of it, that they make one thing. We can see what really happens when processes methods are separated from sentiment. How often have we heard, how often have we read : such and such a painting is in the first, the second, the third style of the artist. It is fre- quently possible to divide the periods of artistic production, and in its lower forms the life of -the artist very often runs in this way: In his first period he learns his methods, re-creating them for his own special use. In the second more or less a master of them through them he expresses himself, his life, his creation of the world in his mind. In the third through some decadence of internal life, some loss of that vital faculty which exists in all men, and which, in its highest sense, we call genius, but which is simply the power of organizing ideas, images, signs, with- DIVISIONS OF THE WORK OF ART 25 out employing the slow processes of apparently consecutive thought : by some beginning of death, then, he no longer expresses himself, but repeats the methods which he has invented ; or which, in certain cases, he has partly assimilated from others. And these methods, having once been intimately connected with ulterior life, recall, through the ordinary action of memory, the impression of a vitality once connected with them ; so that he is often unconscious of the fact that all that he gives is these methods belonging to his own past, which no longer express him as he is to-day. He is then dead, emptied. The exterior vase remains ; the contents have run out. Many a man has died on making the discovery. 1 The Baron Gros after a brilliant career, which largely affected French art, and whose last and greater echoes died out in one of the greatest of painters, Delacroix drowned himself. Lemoine, a fashionable and successful painter of the middle of the eighteenth century, suspecting a decay which no one else had yet 1 Seailles. 26 LECTURE I recognized, ran himself through with his sword. With the works produced at these moments of an artist's life the galleries and collections of the world are full. Sometimes they puzzle us ; usually we pass them by. And the history of art shows us, again, num- bers of artists who, grouped around some greater men, imitate their processes, as in the full belief that all that there is of art is process, or what is sometimes called technique. The greater man has made the dress he wears as the birds make their plumage. The imitator imitates the dress. Often, for a short time, fame, success, fortune, attend the imitator ; he is some- times, for a time, more famous than the original he imitates. At length, with time, we cannot understand how this success was ever possible. Have any of you seen and I suppose you have the works of the painters who formed the end of the school of David ? What do you think you would feel if you could be transported back to that date, and saw the Salon of, let us say, the year 1819 ? And yet the artists whose works DIVISIONS OF THE WORK 01 ART 27 would seem so uninteresting to you were intel- ligent men, full of knowledge of the methods they employed; and nobody around them gave them an idea that a time would come when the very existence of their names would be a bore. And many of us who laugh at them are no better men than they. They belonged to their time ; they applied current formulas, the methods of work of that day ; but these processes were not the result of powerful conviction, the expres- sion of their own sentiment, a co-ordination of the memories of sight in a personal equation. They were mostly the records of the memories of the likings of certain processes. If processes still look fresh and interesting in the masters, it is because these processes are ultimately con- nected with personal sentiment. It is not so with the imitators. Once upon a time, the fash- ionable form which they employed was asso- ciated, in the minds of those about them, with the memories of certain ideas, certain views, cer- tain feelings. Whenever, at that time, these forms and methods were used by them, these 28 LECTURE I associated memories were recalled ; now, to-day, they can no longer make our memories act. We still, however, can feel a certain pleasure, a certain curiosity, in these forms by themselves, abstracted, if I may so say, from the more im- portant parts of the work of art. I suppose that we recognize a certain logic, a certain fitness of the structure which holds together, perhaps somewhat as we like the balance of adjustment of the costumes of certain old periods. We can't wear them, and we wouldn't wear them ; but they hold together in a certain way. This, of course, I suppose to be quite apart from the charm we receive from memories of the past memories which already must be records of the memories of others. There are examples of works of art, which again fill spaces in museums, where there is no pleasure in looking upon the process, where the process has been a poor one originally, and where we can hardly realize, so poor it is, that it is an imitation. In fact, we only realize that it is an imitation because of the apparent impossibility DIVISIONS OF THE WORK OF ART 29 that any strong feeling should not show, even in a contradictory way, to such a weak use of mate- rial. Of course I am now speaking of the testi- mony of the work itself. In judging of the works of painters, or of the schools, we help ourselves by comparison and by a knowledge of what has been done at the time. Though it is extremely difficult to make out their origin, the failures, the works of art that have missed their point, may allow us to dis- tinguish more clearly what there may be of laws in art that should not be infringed. Before them we are no longer under the spell of the undefinable, and that side of criticism which is the easiest, be- cause it remains only a matter of judgment and a cold-blooded investigation, can be used without dis- turbance, under the pressure of a certain indigna- tion or disappointment. It may happen that works which the slow development of artistic judgment has gradually condemned have been for a time just those which would please the ordinary mind ; or have been made to suit the commonplace critics, who wish 30 LECTURE I to have all rules carried out of which they knoio, and who are fond of settling for good and for all what shall be done. By the ordinary mind I mean a certain manner of looking at things, on the part of people who consider a work of art as made o suit something that they wish noted, something that they care for" at the time. When that time is over, and they themselves, or their children, have changed their views, the interesting work of art meant expressly to suit them and their ideas is liable, having contained little else, to be passed over as stupid and meaningless. Most of the work done to embody the feelings of the moment, according to the fashion of feeling at the moment, loses its meaning later. If the moment be a grand one, with little fashion or momentary manner, the meaning remains pro- portionately grand. Many of the so-called his- torical pictures which embody official enthusiasm, the marriages of kings and queens, the proclama- tions of certain edicts, the winning of certain bat- tles, have little artistic interest for us to-day, as far as their main character is concerned ; and it DIVISIONS OF THE WOEK OF AET 31 is only when some fact of archaeology, some typi- cal portraiture, can be rescued from them, that we think of them at all in the sequence of the history of art. And so it has been for an enormous mass of works of art destined for the use of religion ; more properly, perhaps, for the use of the clergy, or for personal satisfaction of certain types of the religious mind, in which works Art has been so completely the Handmaid of Religion, that to-day a day of other wishes and requests looks upon them as void of religious feeling. And so they are, as far as art is concerned ; because art alone can carry from age to age the personal feel- ing of the artist, through which alone he can express religious feeling. Of course at the time many such things I mean such points to be observed by the artist, to suit his patron were matters of great consequence ; that is to say, they were matters of great consequence in the general world, which is a world of momentary views and necessities ; not in the world of art. If the artist felt these things himself, and saw in them 32 LECTURE I elements for the building and formation of his work, then, however much we may have lost the intention of the patron or of the public which the artist tried to please, there still remains the evidence of his likings ; there still remain the other less transient truths which appealed to him as an artist. To-day, far removed as we are from the external agitation that troubled the theologies of the seventeenth century, we cannot be moved, as many a devout person then was, by the figure of the crucified Christ, represented as hanging rigidly from His uplifted arms, thereby, to a person who looked upon art as merely a handmaid of religion, appearing to have died for the few and not for all ; because the latter idea required outstretched arms. You will see that this special verity, if I may so call it out of respect for others, which the theologian cared for, is not the sort of verity which art can best embody. It needs explanation and support outside of the statement concerning it made by the artist. As I spoke, a moment ago, of the so-called his- torical pictures of official importance, I remem- DIVISIONS OF THE WORK OF ART 33 bered a name connected with official honours, with official academic honours, with official military honours, with the voluntary admiration of the men of his time. I can see myself long ago, a young fellow, sensitive about my admiration, and yet with all due respect for authority, spending some of the first hours of my Parisian life in a Parisian studio frequented by well-known men, and one influenced by the great French power known as 1'Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Visitors and artists were discussing the impertinence of a critic who had dared to attack the great Horace Verne t, formerly President of the French Academy, consequently a living part of the great French government school, and a man liked by all, even by those to whom he was unjust, and whose names, being to-day more famous than his own, you all know by heart. The question of per- sonal satisfaction for such insults to such a man in such a school, ran through the day. This painter, so much liked, so much admired at that time and long before, represented one 34 LECTURE I of those forms of art which we are now consider- ing, those forms whose charm is gone, presum- ably forever, and over which, if we have patience, we can talk in cold blood. To younger men this fame of the great military painter is only a hearsay. It has not been contin- ued with them ; yet its testimony is written out in the gigantic paintings which cover acres of surface in the French galleries and museums. It is not possible to characterize them in a few words. They escape any very exact definition, within a short compass. Their methods their technique are simply the current processes of the day, neither better nor worse ; what is more or less taught in the schools, with certain mildly ambi- tious attempts made long after the great attempts of the century had been made by others by men not of the school, in feeling at least. As to the feeling, the poetry of these works of art, some of you may have seen it in innumerable pictures by all sorts of people. There is one well- known painting of Vernet, perfectly expressing the type, the dead body of a lancer, lying so DIVISIONS OF THE WORK OF ART 35 flat that we are supposed to be on his level ; and above him his horse, of the approved cavalry type, who waves one leg over him, and puts down his head towards him in affection and personal regret. Somewhere else, as a less important member of a theatrical troupe, . a little dog barks. This, and similar pictures by him or by others, have natu- rally inundated the world. The great battle pict- ures I should prefer to have you go and see yourself, rather than attempt to think them over again. But I think that you would enjoy with me the small work, the illustrations made for books by this important man, at night, at moments of leisure, during the progress of large works, which show what he really was, how he had kept from boyhood all such good- natured likings as a boy might have a delight in animals, a delight in soldiers. These likings, being those of a boy, were best expressed and ren- dered in his little drawings and sketches and lithographs, which are as full as his big and illustrious paintings are empty. His error, then, had been to consider that he 36 LECTURE I was obliged to do great things ; and we might speak of him as a man who had mistaken his scale. Of course this is only an intellectual mis- take, perhaps a little of a moral one ; looked at from another point of view, the companion of kings and emperors, and great people of all kinds, the head of one of the greatest schools in the world, a man known to everybody, from the great- est painters to the last school-boy or the sweep who gazed at pictures in shop-windows, that man might be called a great success. And it seems, or ought to seem, very sad that probably few of you young people have heard of him. Nor has the attempt to make a successful work of art, by carrying out rules taken from the outside taken from academies or professors of the beautiful, given to the work of art any longer life. No genius for painting has ever been given by a knowledge of perspective or a theory of colour. The usual belief, the proverbial one, is the belief that we all come to, that rules exist for art, not art for rules. To study any organism we take it to pieces, DIVISIONS OF THE WORK OF ART 37 and usually discover its machinery more dis- tinctly in death. A readjustment and juxtaposi- tion of the elements that constituted life does not give life again and make a living unity. The work made by the reflective and analytic ca- pacity is entirely comprehended by that same capacity, but before the work of genius, the living work, as before life itself, we are not able to express adequately our sensations, nor can our reason feel sure of a complete analysis. We feel that the charm that took hold of our soul has not been sufficiently conveyed through our words. And yet that charm has made us believe that we understood it. We have never been conscious of any effort. That effort, which some minds might take for admiration, is what we feel in presence of works of exterior importance in regard to technique, or processes unallied to feeling. But the effort ends in a feeling of offence, whose cause is that sort of coldness which irritates us in the dilettante. His manner is calculated for its effects upon us ; what we see in him and he wishes us to see, is not himself I fosr Tfe 38 LECTURE I as he is, but the clever man he wishes to appear. He is afraid to give himself away, forgetting, as I said before, that he cannot help it. If he arranges himself, if he thinks of himself, though we do not discern him clearly in reality, we see that he is trying to impose upon us. If he is skilful in his technique and methods, we observe, in a variety of purely intellectual pleasure, what he was after, and how he has done it. It is as if we followed the reasonings and excuses that he has made out for himself, and which we approve of or otherwise as we do of the carrying out of a school exercise. But all the time we are fully aware of the fact that there may be more art that there is more art in the play of a child than in the careful structure of many a learned verse-maker. Let there be no misunderstanding: Art is not a lawless game : even want of power in the artist puts up unwillingly with incorrection, unless he be deceived by vanity. In his work the real man forgets himself and any small pride clearly or obscurely feeling that to try DIVISIONS OF THE WORK OP ART 39 to find originality is a sure way of losing one's path. In all of the greatest artists there is a humble workman who knows his trade and likes it. Art is a language and has a grammar that varies only as languages vary and for its practice there must be an acquired facility, a certain combination of observed laws. Upon many of its departments the cooler reason can pronounce. There are questions even in such complex mat- ters as composition, in such delicate matters as unity and sequence of thought, where reasoning finds its place. But tendency and enthusiasm precede work. " Genius," says the French phrase, "is a protracted patience." (Le geiiie est une longue patience.) It can only keep up its life by continuous effort, often by work so exclusive as to make all other ideas of life disappear. But we must remember that we are so enslaved by the idea of time which we measure in small instalments, according to other necessities, that we do not perceive that these efforts are really one single act the act of life. The artist has 40 LECTURE I this consciousness more exactly than we have, however obscurely, and feels not so distinctly the succession of his efforts as their general tendency. And so for the work that he carries out, he rarely sympathizes with the surprise still less with the admiration of the outside world, which speaks of the length of time that such a work of art has cost. Be it a short moment or a term of years, it has cost the same thing, i.e. the whole man. 1 When he steps into the outside world he can see the matter gauged by other measure- ments. As a good citizen, as a family man, as working for a patron, he can divide what he has done into some succession of efforts. . . . In the progress of his life at first there is the instinct, the inherited disposition ; then the accumulated memories of images, which give him a language for his sentiment. The tend- 1 Cf. Mr. Whistler's well known answer in court. "Question: * The labour of two days, then, is that for which you ask two hundred guineas ? ' Answer (Mr. Whistler) : ' No. I ask it for the knowledge of a life-time. 1 " Also the answer of Kiosai, the Japanese artist. When exception was taken to the price he bad put upon his painting of a crow, he replied : " This is not a price for a painting of a crow, but a price for my hard study for several tens of years. 1 ' DIVISIONS OF THE WORK OF ART 41 ency to translate these by the hand decides the destiny of the painter. But his instinct is not like that of lower forms of life, ap- parently fixed in a structure definitely adjusted. For each new work he has to readjust him- self. Through long work he tends more and more to fix the tendencies of heredity or in- dividual chance. He prepares the instrument which shall answer, by an impressive sign, the motion of his mind. Thus will the musician study harmony, composition, the masters of the past, so as not to have to think separately of them ; so as to create a world of memories which dispense him from reflective action, and become as a habit, that he may be fully free when the time comes for action. This free world that he creates escapes the chances of the exterior world in which he lives. And it is that world of his into which we enter, really taking part in its making over again. For the pleasure given by art is not a passive one. We give it to ourselves. It has been well said that what we call taste is a 42 LECTURE I real art. The work of art may remain silent to many; even to those who understand it more or less. It is an appeal to another mind, and it cannot draw out more than that mind contains. But to enjoy is as it were to create ; to understand is a form of equality, and the full use of taste may be an act of genius. We each see in the work of the artist a worl? more or less different according to our natures. Nor can we enjoy equally all works of art. We cannot at will take up all the postures of the mind of another. But we are not under an illusion when we feel pride in the enjoy- ment of beauty; and they are excusable who feel as if they had made the work which they admire. They become, for an instant, the man who made it and who is at his best very often ; and they feel that they are better than themselves. The artist whom we admire cannot be indifferent to us; witness the way in which we take his part, often with more zeal than he would have had himself; because for the moment it is in us and owing to us that his DIVISIONS OP THE WORK OF ART 43 work lives. During these moments we, the spectators, live a serene and complete existence. And so, by melting one's self into the methods and the reasons for the methods of masters, one would feel less inclined to have one's own way; which is very different from going in one's own way. And we students, we who study together, may see that originality does not consist in look- ing like no one else, but merely in causing to pass into our own work some personal view of the world and of life. If you have understood me, you will see that all these are men whom you learn to know; and there is little else that counts. Yet as they are part of nature, which may be defined for you to be what lies outside of yourself, and not your own consciousness so what they have done is a part of nature. And in fact, most of that nature seen by their eyes would not have been seen by you had it not been for them. Each of the greater ones, each of the greater schools, has chosen some part of the world of sight to insist upon and delight in. The even blue sky not fully lit, in 44 LECrURE I which float masses of grey and golden cloud, recalls to us painters the name of Veronese. "To bathe all, even light itself, in a bath of shadow, from which it might emerge more wet and more glimmering; to make these waves of obscurity sweep around the lit surfaces ; to vary, to deepen and to thicken the flood, and yet to make obscurity visible and shadow easy to see through" such was the method of Rembrandt, in which he worked with a perfection so complete that even nature's use of similar mystery bears his name. LECTURE II PEKSONALITY AND CHOICE SYNOPSIS OF LECTURE H Examples of original artistic life beginning from study of works of art. The memories and practice of the studio necessarily carried out of doors. Danger of confusion of practices with principles. Methods are but tools. There is no absolute way of painting. The artist is judged by the appreciation of the way he looks upon the world. There is no absolute nature : there can be no absolute view of nature. Practically there is no such thing as Realism. How differently painters might look at the same subject. For each variation some special translation by the hand : for each variation by the hand some modification in the use of materials. LECTURE H PERSONALITY AND CHOICE IN my first lecture I said that the various con- siderations announced in our beginning, should be repeated in various ways, from different points of view, as they will lead us gradually to all the points of study which you can require, and may even help us to the furthest and finest details of processes or of what is sometimes called technique. You will remember that we divided works of art into two large classes, making the division by their essential constitutions. In the one we placed works in which the artist had used the personal combination of all possible factors ; showing us how he expressed his view of the world, how he had seen, with what body and senses, what hereditary tendencies, what memories 47 48 LECTURE II of acquired liking, what development of memory through study, and what personal colouring. In the other division we had placed those who had used part of these means, and noticed that this division would contain tilings by imitators of such works as those just classed, who only used a part of these means of memory. We saw how in the former works the artist had expressed himself. We noticed that the search in common for certain truths, for certain qualities, constituted a real school, as distinct from a set of imitators. As an example of great value I cited the Dutch school : and in that school, bound together by very strict interpretation of nature by what has been called a portraiture of nature, I reminded you how different Cuyp was from Ruysdael, and how distinct and individual was Ruysdael's character within the methods of the school. I also cited Millet in connection with Ruysdael, and pointed out the former as a type of a most distinct expression of personality seen through and behind methods. We then passed from ex- PERSONALITY AND CHOICE 49 amples of the full life of the artist to examples of deficient representation, such as are shown in the works of imitators, such as are shown in the works of those who work for the public, and to meet the desires of others, which are not fully their own. I cited certain types of official painting, of his- torical pictures and so-called religious pictures; and among historical painters, so-called, I referred to the former fame of Horace Vernet, and to the particular error represented by him, that of mis- application of scale, he having been a charming designer in small, an excellent book-illustrator and caricaturist, while his big and once famous paintings have come to be considered empty fail- ures. 1 The cause of the error of works of art I 1 took the famous Horace only as a type which happened to be handy not as an especial or necessary example. You will remember how I referred to the theatrical quality of some of his work. This theatrical element enters somewhat into many works of art, and must always have been an element. We see it, for example, in the works of Hokusai, the Japanese, where it distorts the expression of his love of nature. But it may be worth noting in the direction of our reflections of last week, that the fashion of the theatre changes, and that to-day the opera expression of fifty years ago, reflected in pictures, looks rather a 60 LECTURE II based upon academic formulas was then consid- ered, the cause being the impossibility of building together the elements of a work of art which had been obtained through cold-blooded dissection of former living masterpieces. Certain insufficiencies of mere technique were considered in various ways, to be summed up in the usual belief that rules and methods exist for art not art for rules. An analysis was given of the growth of the painter, from his earliest tendencies to the studies which allow him to be himself. In this work created by him as a mere mode of life, we are able to live in the world that he has made, and to enjoy it, and in a certain way to make it over ourselves ; because enjoyment is another form of creation, and taste is a form, perhaps, of genius. In this existence in common with the painter there is a form of study which could be completed by absurd to us, who are accustomed to more complex and studied staging. So later the Wagnerian influence will seem as absurd, and theatrical solemnities of to-day reflected in painting will appear as they are in reality, stage arrangements made to suit a very average taste for which we are all a little responsible. PERSONALITY AND CHOICE 51 effort, so as to bid good-bye to such a narrow view as having one's own way ; and to obtain the real originality of walking in one's own path ; and to express what art is meant for : the representation of the artist's view of the world. And the works of the past, having been made by man, who is a part of nature, and nature being what is outside of yourself, these works of art are parts of nature. And indeed, each great artist and each great school has chosen some part of nature which is subject to sight, as a matter of study and delight; so that without them it might be said that we should not have learned to see nature in those details : as, for instance, the light in which Veronese painted, which we artists recognize in the sky of certain days ; and the methods of the chiaroscuro of Rem- brandt, so completely stated by him in his paint- ings, that his name is attached to this expression of nature herself. In such admiration of certain men, in some realization of how they have seen certain sides of nature, we see nature better we see it limited, if I may so say, prepared for us, so that we 52 LECTURE II can take hold of it grasp it enjoy it without confusion. At the same time, we can rejoice in their ren- dering, and in an artistic development continue it ; if we do so sincerely, not as imitators but as en- joyers, we can find for ourselves some corner of these great pasturelands which will or may become our own. In any such study, any such delight, it is pos- sible to extend one's self in a personal develop- ment which might almost make us those of us who are not the makers disbelieve in the fact of such a new and true life having been begun from mere works of art. Thus the group of French artists whose general tendencies are most splendidly represented by Rousseau, the landscape painter, began to see nature, the ordinary French nature around them, with young and fresh eyes, with newly discovered interests, almost as if they had found a new world at their very doors, without forgetting, for a long time, the impression of the great Dutchmen. The conventionalities of Holland helped them to dis- PERSONALITY AND CHOICE 53 cover France. They began with admiration of the portrait feeling of the Dutch, with the Dutch acceptance of things as they were, with what seemed to them a departure from the arbitrary classicality of then: own French school. They admired and they imitated the solidity of make of these northern paintings, as well as the placid- ity of their subjects, the apparent absorption of the artist in his result, and they began by imitat- ing the surfaces of these representations of nature. With a man like Rousseau, continually in love with each thing that he saw, unwilling to elim- inate or simplify, because he could not put aside one love for another, the result became as com- plex, as multitudinous, as the results of the Dutch- men's likings were simple and self-contained. But throughout, wherever, as is necessary in painting, which is eminently a conventional art, there were passages in nature that reminded him of his old loves in Holland I mean the Holland of pictures ; wherever he had to supply, as we all have, the insufficiency of observation by the procedures of mechanism, there Rousseau's filiation from the 54 LECTURE II Dutch is evident and often beautiful. He holds the past by the hand, however far he may stretch towards newer gains, newer ambitions, unknown, or apparently unknown, to his more peaceful pic- torial ancestors, the Dutch painters that he loved. Corot, a greater lover of Italy, a less naive lover of nature, less willing to accept all the blemishes of his beloved, and preferring to see her reflected in himself, passed away from these early tendencies, but never from their principle. Not the things themselves, but the spirit of the things became the object of his representation, and in that way, as Fromehtin says, "No one can be so little of a Hollander." But the origin of that great French school, I use the word school as stating certain beliefs in common, and not objects in common is Dutch; and Flers, Cabat, Dupr6, Rousseau and Corot all began together a form of opposition in which their enemies felt the distrusted influence of a foreign school which had ended in a Rem- brandt. They feared, not the opening of nature again the Ecole des Beaux-Arts did not look so PERSONALITY AND CHOICE 55 far as out-of-doors, but the possible triumph of a school of colour and of light. You will notice that this school of nature began in the Museum, and that old Dutch pictures ex- plained to young men that there was such a thing as a French nature round about them. The im- pression made by the representation of that nature concealed from the admirers of these men the manner of the first steps taken towards this discovery. Such a freedom of sight, uch personal life, may therefore come from the admiration of others. But often, when we look at certain works of art, and I mean the successful ones, the complete ones, we may decide that, so far as we are concerned, what we see is complete ; that is to say that the thing is over, and that we need to take for ourselves some other direction, to explore some other less discovered country. Occasionally this feeling takes an ugly form in ugly people who say, "I don't like this; as for me, I like that." But I am only talking of the essence of a meaning, not of our saying and 56 LECTURE II thinking in an ugly way, which is only a way, and not the constitution of our thinking. We may have such likings in studying nature (that is to say, as I have defined nature all out- side of us) through other artists, greater and more complete than ourselves; and yet it often happens that we need more than one man's view or one school's view, to be moved ourselves to action. We need some other admiration to fructify that first one, as if another element had to be added ; as if the plant had flowered, but needed some favourable wind to carry to it from others what would make it fertile. I am leaving out of consideration entirely that point of which so many young people are very proud, the actual going out of one's own free will, seeing the things of nature and out-of-doors for one's self, and taking only from what one sees alone, unaided by any one's influence, un- influenced by any memories that one has ever known. This side we shall consider later; it will furnish us, I think, with surprises greater than any the strangest painter can ever give us. PERSONALITY AKD CHOICE 57 But meanwhile, I may give you a premonition of what we shall find. We can consider all that we record in our brains as memories com- posed of many other memories. We can, there- fore, see nothing without the use of the memory of sight or we should not know what it is. Nor, as you know, could we judge of the rela- tions of the things we see, without memories of practice in observing relations. Even for such a simple thing as knowing that one thing is further than another we have had to make many trials of the eye, and get away from the early condition of the child who puts out his hand to touch the moon. And so for the use of our hand in painting, and so for the use of our colours. When you try to paint a colour or a tone that you see out- of-doors you have to draw upon some practice of mixing some colours together. Say it is a blue sky some use of blue has been made by you ; and you have gone instinctively to the colour-box to find the place you have in your memory, the kind of colour you have in your 58 LECTURE n memory, the kind of mixture you have in your memory. Not once in millions of times do you see a thing painted as if the painter tried that combination of paints for the first time. Usually he has a recipe ; he must have one, even if he has to abandon it for the moment. Nothing is more ironical, therefore, to any one who has a set palette of certain pigments, than to suppose that he can be absolutely free-minded in the way he reproduces things. It is as if we said : We shall be free in the use of words, and if necessary, put in words of other languages any which seem nearer, Japanese, Chinese, French ; and as these cannot meet all cases, we shall invent them as we go along. Of course we do arrange words, combine them, combine their intonations, their sounds, their suggestions, and the memories they suggest, as well as their distinct and limited meanings. And we scramble through with these difficulties. As to the painter, he does the same, feeling that his intention is the main thing, and trust- ing, without being conscious of that reliance, to PERSONALITY AND CHOICE 59 the manner in which we the lookers-on help to make the illusion. For we make the illusion ourselves : The painting has nothing for us but what we can co-ordinate of our memories. An Ashantee negro or the average picture dealer cannot see a painting with the eye of a Rem- brandt or a Rousseau, and make as great an illusion for himself. When I look at the brush-mark of a Jap- anese painter, which is but a sweep of India ink, it may have for me modelling, colour, air, texture, the sense of weather, of wet, heat, or windy cold a feeling of reticence or of fulness of detail. Between his few lines I shall feel the water of the rushing waterfall or the wet surfaces of the rice fields. The black etched line of Rembrandt will give me a far spreading horizon not in the direction of his line, but running to it. A few scratches of his will make the earth sink or rise, remain solid, or be covered with water : no longer in fact be ink and paper, but light and air and shadow and varying form. 60 LECTURE II But of this further, when the time comes to consider how we see, which I hope to make you think of later. Meanwhile we may be sure that every-one carries out-of-doors some memories of the studio, and an enormous mass of acquired habits, partly not his own. Such studies and inquiries as we can follow will reassure us that there is a general direction always followed, even by artists who are not known to each other, who in their path might be said not even to be within hailing distance. And we can clear our minds, and call things by their right names, and not confuse mam principles with the various practices or methods necessary to carry out the principles in each varying case. No; we artists must whether we will it or not, whether we recognize it or not be led by our individual being. We give our attention, then our liking, to some one, now caring for this one, now delighting in that one, and out of the practice of each one often getting without know- ing it the essential principles held in each case and in common by each artist we have loved and admired in turn. PEHSONALITY AND CHOICE 61 And sometimes, if instead of looking at the artist himself, i.e. his works, we listen too easily to talk about his work by others than himself (for he may be dead), we may be told that certain practices are principles that certain habits are essential reasons. In addressing you confidentially, I feel the occasional necessity of coming to anecdote and memories, so as to reinforce by actual single fact what I am saying, lest it should appear abstract and inapplicable. I had rather not speak to you of myself and of other painters I know and have known. But the main value of what I have to say to you students and younger people is that I am older and have gone through many of your experiments of practice, your admirations or dislikes, and your trials of mind. They are new for each of us singly, as they come along, fresh as they were when the first man looked about him. After all, remember that what I tell you is the result of life, whether in thought or in action ; and that I am only able to give principles and 62 LECTURE n foundations for thinking, through having visited certain regions of thought, through surprises that have fallen upon me, and that what confidence I have to-day in talking to you is based on no a priori certainty that I had it all before begin- ning. And so certain little experiences of myself and others have been, in a sort of foreshortened man- ner, lessons to me and helps to thought. What has made me break off to say this to you just now is the coming back to my mind of an inter- view with a younger man. Some while ago a former assistant of mine in my work in glass called upon me, and in friendly talk perhaps as a sort of confession intimated to me that he had often been told that I was wrong in my principles, and that he had thought so himself; and that yet, when he had to judge of the results, he had found his advisers unable to attain them themselves, and that somehow or other my results were right. I reminded him that I had never talked of principles to him at all, that our relations PERSONALITY AND CHOICE 63 were mere matters of practice, he doing what I told him to do, in so far as he could understand what I asked for. And I repeated to him the following story. Some years ago, while painting Trinity Church in Boston, I employed for part of the work a firm of New York decorators. It so happened that, displeased with much that they did, I left large spaces bare, with no indication of my intention, which places I proposed deco- rating through men whom I was training for the purpose. One day the foreman of the firm, himself a decorator, well known, I suppose, by this time, came to me in anger and dismay, and told me bluntly that I was working against every principle of painting. As workmen are always worth listening to when they speak sin- cerely of their trade and I thought the man a workman I expected to get some important information. But my man merely stated that the painting of any room or interior should be begun from the top, and go right down to the bottom without interruption. Hoping for some new point in optics, I questioned further and 64 LECTURE II asked why. Then he told me, with contempt as well as anger, that otherwise some of the lower work might get spotted by a workman, and would need repairing and perhaps cost money. This story gives the clue to a great many methods which are used because they are convenient and not because they are the best. And thus I have sometimes relieved the minds of conscientious students troubled by assertions of principles ; I have drawn their attention to the fact that there are trade methods which are trans- muted into principles by people whose interest it is to confuse them, or whose minds have been attuned to the confusion at an early stage of development. Even if this were a proper place, I should not feel inclined to allow you to believe that there was only one proper manner of carrying out a work of art : that getting canvas of a certain thickness and of a certain absorbent or non-absorbent quality, and painting thereon with a certain kind of brush, either a square one or one of a different shape, and using with that PERSONALITY AND CHOICE 65 brush certain pigments bought at certain places in the city, from which certain colours are ex- cluded, or among which they are included, and dropping that paint on in a certain way, con- trolled by the shape of the brush, and the man- ner in which the manufacturer made the canvas, is the proper method of painting. Whatever I might myself believe, such a teach- ing as I have described would be absurd in a museum. Can you imagine the smile that would disturb the faces of the Egyptian mummies in the rooms below us, who may have known the sculptors that made the "Walking Sheik El Beled, or the sweet face of the lady Nefert, or the terrible Chafra who sits at Boulak ? The meth- ods of to-day were unknown when these men lived, and yet who of to-day can hope to go any further ? And what would Rembrandt think, and Veronese, and Rubens, and Velasquez ? Surely these men painted as well as you can ever hope to paint, and each one in a different method, and each one admiring the others, won- dering at the other's scope and the other's art. 66 LECTURE II Understand that what you have to learn here, where all things are gathered at the risk of every possible contradiction, is the size of the world and its being greater than any one per- sonal experience. The science of to-day, while it establishes more certainly many things which the artist who works in matters of sight has stated from per- sonal certainty, makes us understand how wide are the variations within which these certainties are apprehended by the artist, and explains to us more and more the importance of his per- sonal equation, shows us what we painters have always felt, through what imperfect means and against what enormous odds the soul of the artist has tried to express itself. As we consider the history of the long struggle of the artist at expressing his likings of the outside world, from him who first scratched the outlines of the reindeer and the mastodon upon fragments of bone, to Rembrandt or Velasquez who can de- ceive our eyes by films of superimposed colour, we see how accurately men have always felt, PERSONALITY AND CHOICE 67 and how inaccurately they have seen. At the same time, with every inaccuracy has been blended some distinct proof of strong perception, which has been willing to accept certain deficien- cies, that the main purpose of observation might be carried out triumphantly. Each man has succeeded in turn, through fitting his means to his capacity, that is to say, to the sum of memories accumulated in him by his ancestors and himself, and by using his very deficiencies to introduce us, as if by human sympathy, to the truths of impression that he valued most. If any one should ever wish to give you a fixed equation that shall cover every problem of paint- ing, without taking any account of your carrying it otlt, if any one gives you a general nostrum to be applied at once by yourself, remember what a hesitating artist once said to another kindly one, willing to impart to him, for his good, the abso- lute secret of Titian. " It is all very evident," said the more prudent painter ; " no doubt you have the complete for- mula ; and you, in your strength, can apply it and 68 LECTURE II produce works of art quite equal to the formula. But for me, I am a weakling, and I should stag- ger under such a heavy weight of certainties. I had rather carry a burden more suited to my back." In such a place, then, as a museum, we may well look with awe at the long succession of efforts made by our ancestors in art, those whom we know and those whom we do not know, but from whom we inherit in common. It is to study some of these efforts, among which there may be some that will avail you, that we have come together. We are not anxious, at present, to place any exact date or sequence upon them, ex- cept as the one may strictly derive from the other. For our purposes, we may often be anxious, oi the contrary, to forget their date and the place where they were made ; because what is most interesting to us in the line of our proposed inquiry is that these artists of all kinds and degrees were men like ourselves, and had to work with means not dissimilar to ours. Men, then, are all important; the ways in PERSONALITY AND CHOICE 69 which we paint or shall paint are the tools they have used or will use. It is well that you should admire how well these tools are adapted to their use; and if, moreover, they fit your hand, you do well to use them. Though we do well to tend towards an absolute way of painting, there is no such thing if by painting we mean the representation of what can be noticed or seen. But there are wise ways and less wise ways more generous ones less nar- row ones more universal ones ; some more per- sonal, others more general. But each of these is based again on what the man intended. Of him we can judge as we judge men; and strange to say, it will always be more or less by a moral idea, by an appreciation of the way he looked upon the world. And in the artist, have you ever noticed how simple it is to disengage the man? When once the artist has summed up in himself the mem- ories of his apprenticeship, the acquired memories of others, and his own, derived from them per- haps, but at any rate added to them, you can try 70 LECTURE II with him the following experiment. Take him to ten different places; set him before ten different scenes; ask him to copy what he sees before him. I say to copy, so as to make our task of finding him out more easy. All of these so-called copies, which are really representations, will be stamped in some peculiar way, more or less inter- esting, according to the value of our artist. And you will recognize at once that they are really ten copies of his manner of looking at the thing that he copies. Suppose again, that you could persuade ten different artists I am speaking of craftsmen, that is to say, of people who have already the use of the tools of their trade ask, persuade these ten men to copy, as I have called it, the same subject in nature, the same landscape ; and you will have ten different landscapes, in that you would be able to pick out each one for the way it waa done. In short, any person who knew any- thing about it would recognize, as it were, ten different landscapes. 1 R. Topf er. PERSONALITY AND CHOICE 71 Now we have evidently brought the question to a case so simple, to a trial so absolute, that anybody can understand it. And this trial, or a similar trial, is made over and over again, when- ever two or three artists of any character have gone out sketching together. I remember myself, years ago, sketching with two well-known men, artists who were great friends, great cronies, ask- ing each other all the time, how to do this and how to do that ; but absolutely different in the texture of their minds and in the result that they wished to obtain, so far as the pictures and draw- ings by which they were well known to the public were concerned. What we made, or rather, I should say, what we wished to note, was merely a memorandum of a passing effect upon the hills that lay before us. We had no idea of expressing ourselves, or of studying in any way the subject for any future use. We merely had the intention to note this affair rapidly, and we had all used the same words to express to each other what we liked in it. There were big clouds rolling over hills, sky clear- 72 LECTURE II ing above, dots of trees and water and meadow- land below, and the ground fell away suddenly before us. Well, our three sketches were, in the first place, different in shape; either from our physical differences, or from a habit of drawing certain shapes of a picture, which itself usually indicates as you know, or ought to know whether we are looking far or near. Two were oblong, but of different proportions; one was more nearly a square ; the distance taken in to the right and left was smaller in the latter case, and on the contrary, the height up and down that is to say the portion of land beneath and the por- tion of sky above was greater. In each picture the distance bore a different relation to the fore- ground. In each picture the clouds were treated with different precision and different attention. In one picture the open sky above was the main intention of the picture. In two pictures the upper sky was of no consequence it was the clouds and the mountains that were insisted upon. The drawing was the same, that is to say, the general make of things ; but each man had invol- PERSONALITY AND CHOICE 73 untarily looked upon what was most interesting to him in the whole sight ; and though the whole sight was what he meant to represent, he had un- consciously preferred a beauty or an interest of things different from what his neighbor liked. The colour of each painting was different the vivacity of colour and tone, the distinctness of each part in relation to the whole ; and each picture would have been recognized anywhere as a speci- men of work by each one of us, characteristic of our names. And we spent on the whole affair perhaps twenty minutes. I wish you to understand, again, that we each thought and felt as if we had been photographing the matter before us. We had not the first desire of expressing ourselves, and I think would have been very much worried had we not felt that each one was true to nature. And we were each one true to nature. Of course there is no absolute nature ; as with each slight shifting of the eye, involuntarily we focus more or less distinctly some part to the prej- udice of others. And not only would this result 74 LECTURE II have been the same if we had gone on painting, but had we made a drawing had we made a careful representation, or a rapid note of what we saw by lines (that is to say, by an abstraction of the edges of the surfaces that we saw), any one could have told the names of the men who had done it. All this sort of thing is perfectly well known, but on that very account you will have passed over the importance of its meaning. You will see again what I have been telling you, last week and to-day, that the man is the main question, and that there can be no absolute view of nature. I do not know how often you may be talked to about theories of art, and how much you care for the same at the present moment ; but at some moment or other you will have brought before you that most important conflict of realism and its opposite. I don't say idealism, because I don't so distinctly know what is meant by it; while realism has been in the market now for quite a time, and has served as a beautiful play- ground for various intellects. What I want you PERSONALITY AND CHOICE 75 to notice is that though in abstraction there must be such a thing I should be the last to gainsay it yet, in these realities with which we are concerned, realism is a very evasive distinction. If the experiments that I spoke of if experi- ences such as I have just related about myself and others bring out the result that you have seen, there is for you practically no such thing as realism. You need not, therefore, be afraid of the word ; you need not be afraid of indulging the illusion that you are rendering the real reality of the things that you look at that you are copying, that you are transcribing. If you ever know how to paint somewhat well, and pass beyond the position of the student who has not yet learned to use his hands as an expression of the memories of his brain, you will always give to nature, that is to say, what is outside of you, the character of the lens through which you see it which is yourself. Have no fear, therefore, as I say ; perhaps of all moments for indulgence in the belief of abso- 76 lute representation there is none better than our first beginnings. We might perhaps take an example of the manner in which the truth of a scene in nature affects an artist, and see if from this example we might not deduce a scheme of teaching, per- haps not very deep, perhaps limited at once in its applications, but quite comprehensible in all its parts as one went along. By the use of exam- ples, and by appealing to your own experience, limited as it may be, by taking the facts one by one, we might, if I may so say, get our theory along with our facts. There is a passage in Fromentin's book on the Algerian Sahel in which are developed various ways of looking at a given scene, so that we can see the picture of it become one thing or another, according to the character or the intentions of the artist. I shall begin by quoting a part of what he says; and I shall then trust to giving you suffi- ciently the analogies that he makes, without confining myself to a quotation, which perhaps in this case would be too beautiful to modify, PERSONALITY AND CHOICE 77 and would not allow me to make the small divisions which should cause it to fit more completely into our argument. This is the way in which he comes to make this analysis : he was trying to show his friend the geologist, and to explain to him at length, how different painters might look at the scene they had now before them. He begins : " We were at that moment in the market- place of Blidah. A number of children were playing ball in a way which is cosmopolitan which is known in the "West as well as in the East. A ball or a stick, no matter what it is like, is thrown rapidly and far away. Each player has a stick, and he who gets there first strikes the ball and drives it again. The players were young children from eight to twelve years old, with agreeable faces and delicate bodies, as have most little Moors ; with clear-cut features, large and handsome eyes, and skin as pure as that of women. Their arms were naked, and their delicate necks shone above their open waistcoats. Their floating trousers were pulled 78 LECTURE II up above the knee, so as to let them run easily, and little red chachia, like the skull-caps of choir- boys, just covered the top of the little bald heads. Each time that the ball was struck and started, all together ran in its pursuit, side by side, in a serried troop, like so many gazelles. They ran with many gestures, losing their head- dresses, losing their belts, flying directly to the goal, and appearing not to touch the earth ; for all that one could see of the light step of the runners was their naked heels moving in a wave of dust; and this aerial cloud seemed to hasten their running and to bear them onward. "It was two o'clock; the market was just over, and the place was entirely deserted, a square of houses, low and without roofs; one or two cypresses pointing above the terraces; the moun- tain beyond, whose serrate horizon divided the sky by more than half ; that sky empty ; a great stretch of level ground, that was the landscape. The houses were of a dead white, slightly dis- coloured by blistering ; the cypresses were black ; the mountain was frankly green; the sky of a PERSONALITY AND CHOICE 79 vivid blue, and the earth dust-colour that is to say, nearly lilac. A single shadow in the middle of the bright light was drawn on that side of the place to which the sun inclined ; and this shadow, inundated by reflections from the sky, could have been, in a way, expressed by blue." "Do you see," said Fromentin to his friend, "this place and these children? The scene is a familiar one, quite in the conditions of what we call genre. The frame of the scene, that is to say, the place w T here it occurs, has this double advantage of accompanying it in a very simple way and still a very local one. The example is as good as any other, and the Orient, which I am trying to represent, can be said to be contained within this narrow frame." Then he goes on and asks naturally, just as I would ask myself in painting, not by words, but in intention just as I would ask you in words, if I were giving you a lesson, " What do we see and how shall we look at this subject before us ? Are these children who are playing in the sunlight, or is it a place in the sunlight 80 LECTURE II in which children are playing ? " At once, as you will see, if you call to mind what Fromentin has been describing the scene before him and his friend could be looked at from two very different points of view. In the first case, if we suppose that we are looking at children playing in the sun, we have a figure painting, a picture of figures in which the landscape is accessory. In the second case, if this be a place in the sun in which children are playing, then we are looking at a landscape where the human figure is subordinated put into a back- ground of intention. Now then, the landscap- ist will see there, in one case, a landscape ; the figure-painter, in the other case, what he calls a subject. And in these divisions behold how many directions open! Will the landscape painter see it as a scene of colour and of values ? Will he look rather upon the firm lines and the solitariness of this empty place abandoned to the noonday sun ? Where will he take at what point of their career will he take the little figures which are scattered over it? Are they PERSONALITY AND CHOICE 8! leaving it ? Are they entering it ? Do they fill the centre ? Are they gathered in bunches or divided into spots of colour and moving shape ? Is it their mass casting shadows, or the manner in which the reflection of the light breaks up all other details, that most affects him ? Will they repeat, in some way or other, the lights and shad- ows of the entire scene, or will the scene with the greens and blues be modified by the little spots and accents within this frame of landscape ? Shall he fix his eye on that solitary cypress and its dark shadow lying upon the blazing earth, thereby making, as you have seen in Fortuny's sketches, of the blue sky above, a half-dulled cur- tain of blue light ? On the contrary, shall that blue light on which he fixes not only the focus of his eye but the purpose of his attention shall that blue light be the subject, and shall he follow its gradations and its variations through the landscape itself, through the harsh brightness of the houses and their accidental shadows, and finally detect its tones even in the many colours of the children's garments and the 82 LECTURE II brightest spots of vermilion of their little mov- ing caps? If he is fond of the angles and sudden contrasts of line presented by the buildings before him, will he look upon them as his theme ; upon the moun- tains and the sky as something to reinforce them and make them harsher and firmer; and find in the little figures of the children merely something to keep these lines steadier and more immovable, by a suggestion of constant change elsewhere ? I have only mentioned a few of the many possi- bilities that we can derive from this first state- ment and division of the subject by Fromentin. Now let us suppose a figure painter, to whom the landscape will be subordinate in greater or less degree. Will he use that landscape as a faint tapestry behind his figures? Will he depend upon it, on the contrary, to accentuate by strong lights, and by occasional strong shadows, the grouping of his children? Will he care for the mass of their gestures or for their individual suc- cession ? Will he make a point of their gestures and their relation one to the other ? Will he PERSONALITY AND CHOICE 83 follow out their characters, the characters of their faces, the amusing variety of their costumes? Will he make a symphony of the arrangement of their colours ? Will he make a symphony of the lights they scatter, or a pattern of the shadows they cast, which divide or which connect them ? Now from how far will he see them ? " For," says Fromentin, " according to whether they are placed near or far, these children will become all or will be nothing. And if you suppose them near enough to the painter, so that the portrait of each one has a dominant interest, then a singular change will appear, and in this very simple picture all the landscape will disappear at once; only something like earth struck by light, from which even the indication of Oriental scenery can be suppressed, will remain." " Therefore," he goes on, " nothing will remain visible and formulated but a group, important especially by its human significance, composed of children animated by rapid movement and pas- sionate joy, and presented to us so as to draw attention to the expression of gesture with some, 84 LECTURE II and to the play of the faces with others. From elimination to elimination we shall arrive at the reducing of the frame, then at its suppression ; then at increasing the group in importance, and then at simplifying it. The costume itself be- comes a secondary accident, in a subject whose interest is centred so completely in human forms and expressions." And then he adds a most important observa- tion : " We can suppress the sun and the excessive light, a double obstacle which has rarely before to-day preoccupied any mind when the interest was first that of painting human beings." " What then becomes of the place in which we saw the scene, this white place, these green cypresses, this white sun of the meridian hours? What becomes of all these outside matters so local and significant; essential if we wish to localize the scene ; useless, on the contrary, if we wish to generalize it?" "Thus we touch abstractions, and without in- tending it, by the simple fact of a severer and more concentric point of view, we leave outside PERSONALITY AND CHOICE 85 nature to enter into the combinations of the studio. We abandon thereby relative truth for an order of larger truth, less precise and therefore more absolute, since it is less local." "For us, at this instant, this little place of Blidah, solitary, violently lit by the full light of a beautiful summer day, these red jackets and white trousers, these pretty children, seem strange to us; and that especially is what pleases us at this moment ; this heat, this noise, the diversity of the scene, changing at every moment, all this com- poses a unity of multiple impressions, and charms us, and especially so because we see in it the individual character of a picture of the East." "There are, on the contrary, painters, and I know them, who would only take from this what is necessary, esteeming that what is most interest- ing in these children is not to be little children of Blidah, but to be children; and these certainly would be in the right." Let us consider now that for all these varieties of manners of looking at this same subject there must be a corresponding system of painting : that 86 LECTURE II the vibration of light, the refraction from the brilliant surfaces described in the Oriental scene just sketched, will demand a placing together of high-keyed colours in painting, in contradiction of another manner that might accentuate, by clear- ness and little modulation, the sharp and distinct features of the real picture in nature. And which side of nature shall we choose ; the look of great breadth and simplicity and absorption of details, or, on the contrary, that appearance of absolute finish and particularity in multitudinousness which almost makes us hopeless of any due record ? The sparkle obtained by Fortuny through con- stant oppositions ; the blending of colour and tone by Delacroix, would again belong to some variety of manner of looking at the subject in the one the search for smaller things, in the latter for greater ones. And so on, for varieties as many as you can remember painters, and I abstain from even thinking of draughtsmen. And for each new method of painting, some still more physical, more manual distinctions ; thickness or lightness of colour, softening and blending of paint, PERSONALITY AND CHOICE 8*7 or bringing its edges harshly together; surfaces with many underneaths, made of many veilings ; or with coverings of colour, placed as nearly as possible by the first touch of the brush. Even the brush would vary ; and this mention of the type of our art brings his lengthy statement of differences to an end. And yet each man would have been true to that nature which we see, and which for us painters only assumes existence in ourselves, is merely the recall of innumerable memories of sight. LECTURE III SUGGESTION AND INTENTION SYNOPSIS OF LECTURE HI The illusion suggested by the artist's work is directed by him but mostly made by us. Selection of one factor in the scene to the exclusion of others. Drawing a natural convention, a manner of synthesis and suggestion by lines that imply things. Illusions of black and white. Hieroglyphics of representation by drawing, a bridge over which we pass to receive the desired impression. What is there is what we intend to see. The religious painter: Michael Angelo's view. LECTURE III SUGGESTION AND INTENTION IN our last lecture we considered at some length how the artist beholds the intentions of his mind reflected in the face of nature ; and we took one single example, which we supposed had really happened, of two travellers one of them a painter looking at a certain scene in a foreign country, and we considered from how many dif- ferent mental points of view they could have seen that landscape. We passed on to various other sights enclosed within that same scene, which apparently had not at that time appeared to the mind of the man who had first recorded it ; and in the lightest manner we considered a few of these many facets of a described fact. I believe that I implied that the possible varia- tions would be endless, depending on the combi- 91 92 LECTURE m nation of the desires of the artist with certain sights out of the multitude of things seen ; and that these two great divisions, each one compris- ing innumerable variations, would be modified again by unconscious desires, the result of heredi- tary memories or memories of training. For each variation there ought to be some special transla- tion by the hand, to which variation by the hand ought to answer some modification in the use of materials. For it would be absurd to think that our practice should be the rule to determine our intentions. And I beg you to remember you who are students to remember to distinguish in your mind principles which are taught you from practice which is recommended. But our struct- ure is so complicated, and in our art the relation of the mind to the matter of the body and to the matter which the body acts upon, is so subtle, and varies so much through the indeterminable value of personality, that we are everywhere met by what might at first appear contradictions. Some of these may be insoluble ; for many, as we go along, we shall find, I believe, quite adequate SUGGESTION AND INTENTION 93 explanations in the past, in the acquired mem- ories of the artist. The very manner in which my mind travels away from the direct line of my general intention of speaking to you, warns me of the impossibility of an adequate, or even a plausible consideration of the details involved in the choice that we artists make when we determine or are compelled with- out self-consciousness to see a scene in some given manner. But with a possible example of contra- diction, I may continue by a return to the more direct line of observation. You will remember that I have only spoken of an entire scene ; I have not supposed the selection of any one factor in the scene, to the absolute exclusion of all others. The art of painting as it has become as it may perhaps have been in works of the past, lost to us in everything but name is a manner of representing the entire thing seen as it is translated to us, to our working mind, by colour and light. I am only speaking of painting as we painters think of it. We go so far as to arrange, as to 94 LECTURE m condense, as to simplify, as to see, under different angles, from different points of perspective ; but as painters, properly so, strictly so, we consider ourselves as attempting to embody all that we see. This strict division, which is of the most absolute importance in thinking correctly upon the subject, we shall keep to and consider many times in the course of these talks, and at all times in the direct, practical teaching that I give you. When I first thought of an exception to the manner in which the artist makes his material plastic, and in an exception was reminded how his material turns against him, I was thinking of that line which divides painting properly from other methods of representation. This is the memory that awoke in my mind as I thought of what we call drawing. Three years ago this month I was on a little island in the middle of the Pacific, and I sat through the long afternoon, with a little savage maiden dressed in flowers and leaves, and watched the play of her still younger brothers and sisters. They amused themselves by drawing, in the wet sand of the beach before SUGGESTION AND INTENTION 95 us, with their fingers, or with bits of broken cane or palm, the outlines of well-known fish and birds ; somewhat proud of their skill, and anxious that the stranger should recognize it. The island dove, the parrot-fish, the mullet and the shark, were given by a few lines of remarkable char- acter. I marvelled at the fact that the savage the beginner in thinking was representing these things chosen out by him, in the most abstract conceivable form. The savage child began artis- tic life by summing up his acquaintance of sight concerning these creatures into three or four conventional lines I say conventional, meaning thereby not a single real line, but a line so com- prehensive as to include others, the detection of which others had given him this one that he had made. I might also use the word conventional because, had I not seen these animals, I might not have recognized them as represented by so few characteristics. Of course, like yourselves, I knew what draw- ing is, and I had a clear idea of it not different from what I have to-day; but the little lesson 96 LECTURE III given to me in this way, by the small savage, brought to my mind the fact that he had begun first by making a complete synthesis of certain points that interested him, and that he had assumed to himself and to others that this syn- thesis which was not a copy of nature this arrangement and co-ordination of certain facts of sight, would be understood by others and repre- sent the thing seen. I need not say, perhaps, that I never supposed that my individual savage had any conception of the mechanism of his thought, or would even be capable of making any analysis of it; but that we can do. Now for the exception, that I may get rid of it. When, hi compliment of these children's skill, I gave them my notebook of smooth paper and easy-going pencil, to trace again these same forms in the same way, the lines they traced were no longer so expressive ; their hands seemed to be checked by difficulties. Apparently the opposi- tion given or made by the material of the sand - its friction against a motion of the hand, helped SUGGESTION AND INTENTION 97 to determine security and certainty of direction of the lines they had traced. As, in another way, the Japanese child who draws a shape beautifully with a brush, has this rendering altered into dryness and apparent irresolution when he uses a lead pencil an unaccustomed implement. Here again is the artist dictated to by his technique. As I have said, this is a little exception a little contradiction, which I think can be easily explained when we ascertain or consider later the involuntary element in the action of the hand. What is astonishing is that the symbplical character of an outline drawing, the apparent necessity for a great effort towards condensation that it seems to require, its being in reality the representation of nature which is furthest re- moved from our actual sight, that this syn- thesis should not belong exclusively to late forms of art, to degrees of culture when taste has been refined to the point of appreciating the abstract delicacy of such a mode of repre- sentation. On the contrary, you see, it is the 98 LECTURE III mode of art of the savage ; it is the mode of art that children understand and first care for. Conventional art, which one would think ought to repel them, is, on the contrary, the most suggestive and the most delightful. It must then be that in a narrower way, the entire mind of the child or the savage goes into the object to be represented ; and that at once the main power which we have of accepting the illusions created by ourselves or others, is the means trusted to by man in his first attempts. It is evident that to fill in the empty spaces of such representations, our imagination is drawn upon, and thus to a certain extent it is our imagination that gives to this naked space, sep- arated from the rest of space by a more or less continuous mark, those details that are wanting both in colour and in modelling. You may remember how Lionardo recommends to the student to look for help in composition to the spottings and veinings of marble, the breaks and disintegration of old walls. Therein are to be found the form of landscapes, of mountains, SUGGESTION AND INTENTION 99 and of buildings, and "whatever you are seeking to find." I have not the passage at hand, and I cannot remember the quaint details of its language. And it is as he says; you have probably dis- covered these images yourselves, as you have seen dissolving views in the glow of the coals ; and you have also, in looking at the glittering points of the stars of heaven, joined them to- gether by lines which make traceable figures ; you have gathered the constellations in the net of a geometry. These arrangements, which are the seeking in the sky for what the artist calls the lines of composition, in his little records of pictures these triangles, these squares you have really seen them. You, as it were, see the object within an interior sight, and other things that could be seen are dropped away by your will. Thus, through the crossing of many drawings and tracings, one upon the other, we can choose the one we like. We distinguish and see noth- ing but the lines of writing that we are look- 100 LECTURE IH ing for, in those crossed letters which in former days we received so frequently. If the words are very important to us, we see none but those, and not the ones that cross them, however dis- tinctly these may all be traced. That is to say, that voluntarily and by effort we strengthen the sensation we wish to have, and weaken the one that we do not care for. And so in looking for a set of composition lines, like those that make the constellation of the Dipper (Great Bear), I end by knowing them as if they had an objective existence outside of me. I may seek out, in the coloured ornamentation of a tap- estry, all the curves and leafage which are of a certain colour. They seem to me the pattern, and the remainder a ground upon which they appear, and I may reverse them and so forth. SUGGESTION AND INTENTION 101 Thus, if on a white surface I trace two concentric circles, I can look upon the image as representing two black rings, and I shall see black rings; or I can look at the interval between the circles, and see a white ring ; and if I turn away, I can still keep my intention, and see the one I choose again, according to my chosen memory. This very humble illustration is thus akin to the splendid spectacles that are written in the clouds of sunset ; and in the same way, we see, on a little piece of paper upon which Rem- brandt has scratched a few lines, some vast hori- zon of open plain, masses of trees, or whatever he has wished us to see with him, so long as he can appeal to our memories of things seen. This hieroglyph has evoked in us certain images of memory : and still more strangely, a single line has given us the idea of a solid body, which our eyes see, in what we call reality, as a surface of at least two dimensions. Let us grant and it is not certain that this line reproduces or copies the outline of the object. The difficulty does not decrease ; in our 102 LECTURE ni general use of the eyes, just what we notice least is this outline of objects. What we apprehend of anything is its full spread, which is always a coloured surface having a given form, a modelled pattern, not an outline. So that the line of the draughtsman is not the thing he wishes me to look at. He makes it to determine the shape of the object, which I, as it were, cut out by imagination from the white surface of the paper. What he means me to see is the interior, within his line. I can follow his line, but then I cease to see the thing as he represents it : if my imagination fixes on the manner in which he has represented the thing, the outline is but a shadow on the edge. This is so true, in our usual way of looking at draw- ings with little but outline, that when the line is thicker, we feel an intention of representa- tion of shadow; and any inaccuracy, any want of sensitiveness in such a use of the outline, annoys us like a gross blemish. Compare the line trembling with meaning of Raphael or Lionardo, now light, now heavy, now wide, now SUGGESTION AND INTENTION 103 narrow, though apparently struck out at a single blow with the stupid intentions of shadowing in the outlines of the outline engravings of the beginning and middle of this century. Compare Blake's outlines after Flaxman with those of weaker, conventional and proper copyists. In such a case we decide that the increased width of dark belongs to the figure represented. We do this by our own will, which has been started on its path by the intention or will of the artist. If, indeed, he has made a mistake, however brutal, and he meets it fairly, recog- nizing it, and leaving the blotch of a patch, our mind joins with his, and we take the edge of the line that belongs to the figure as the one he must have meant. Thus, as the line is only meant to separate meant to divide the figure represented from its background, say of white paper; as it is an abstraction, we shall feel the need of destroying it when we come to paint fully. The more full and abundant the details, the richer in modelling, in colour, in light and shade, the more the per- 104 LECTURE in sistence of the arbitrary outline annoys us. We allow it only when the painting is imperfect, flat, conventional, unreal in other words, wheji some- thing is wanting which we replace by a conven- tion. We see the fact at its worst in the poorer kinds of what is called artistic stained glass, where the lead outlines stand out unbidden, unconnected. 1 1 You will remember that this persistence of the outline, of the abstraction, remains in certain artistic works of high type ; for in- stance, in the fine or mediocre Greek vases in the first paintings of the modern period in most of the Florentine the most exquisite ones and even somewhat in Michael Angelo's great frescoes. We see its maintenance and assertion in old Japanese and Chinese art in such examples, for instance, as those lately shown in the Museum at Bos- ton. But there of course, as in several of the cases just referred to, the line is more abstract yet than the mere outline serving to give the place, and it is used as a special refinement a sort of orches- tral accompaniment, which holds the looser details in a firm net of harmonious arrangement. The dignity of abstraction, of synthetic choice, of refined absten- tion, is so evident, that a judicious imitation of it has always been in favour, and hence the continual tendency to attribute meaning to the works of art which insist on a prominence of this feature of line or outline. It is sometimes put in anyhow rather than it should be wanting or not very visible ; and even incorrect as it usually is except in great cases, it is an appeal to culture, on which many artiste and many schools have lived. And if you will reflect a little, you will see why the Frenchmen of the eighteenth century, with the insistence of the line in their Tragedy, SUGGESTION AND INTENTION 105 All that the draughtsman, in such a matter as rendering by outlines can give, is the separa- tion of a figure from the background. It is we who endow it with life and resemblance. It is our knowledge of the play of features that makes us see the movement of expression in a couple of lines of a caricaturist, and recognize a likeness in some few traits put together. Yes, it is all very simple : a line or two on the paper, and the spectator sees his friend, or a great landscape is spread for him; the glories of sea and sky, the expression of feeling and of passion, the cadences of action. Yes, that would be easy, if any one could see in it whatever he chose to. But the decision of the creator of the drawing is final. The variety of dreamland into which we enter depends on his manner of open- ing the gate. And the less he does, or rather appears to do, the more effort is required for all that we have to do. We scarcely wonder at found it impossible to care for Shakespeare, in whose works the line is covered up or rather they found him (and they were relatively right, as you will see) too natural recording too truly the varied aspect of nature, which has no outlines set. 106 LECTURE III it, and it is only in certain greater cases that we recognize, through our uplifting and exhilara- tion, how grand that simple effort may be. Thus, again, it is the intention of the artist, not his adequate copying, that makes us under- stand him. And the larger his intention, the more he includes, the less he actually gives, the more we feel the magic of the wand his pencil, his graver, his brush-point full of India ink. And this magic will continue when, assuming to use more than line, he gives us effects of light and shade, and fills in the spaces of out- line that divide his paper, with gradations of light and dark, which may mean as he wishes, and as we are persuaded; that is to say, modellings of form, shadows or sunshine, spot- tings and deviations of colour or of light. The surface of the paper may be dusty with charcoal or crayon greasy with printer's black we see other things than those upon the level of the paper. Nay, he may have drawn in white upon a SUGGESTION AND INTENTION black ground, as when he draws upon a slate ; and we sympathize with the struggle ; the white marks which indicate how black the hair; how deep the red of the lips. If his drawing be on grey paper, we can see the light tone of the light and follow its vari- ations. Has he not made us believe that wher- ever he has not put dark the place is to be called light, the glitter of metal, the glow of the sky, the shine of the sunlight ? He may care more for the light and dark which to us mean form, and he may abstract for the thing he wishes to represent certain details, as those of form, and abandon all representation of the full look of nature. That is to say, he may be what the French call a dessinateur, an exclusive lover of line or form. Or he may propose to himself, with Rembrandt, a synop- sis of everything that the eye can take in, colour and light and shade, form and the movement of form, and the peculiar tone which envelops each picture that we make in looking at nature. 108 LECTURE in For each separately and all together of these results, he may make lines and spots upon a ground of white. Their joining or their sepa- ration will make, at the distance from the drawing that we assume, a tint which means to us the tint of nature. The cross lines and cross hatchings of an engraving rush together at a certain distance, and the eye feels in them a continued impression of tint darker or lighter as the marks are nearer or further apart. Even if our eye sees that this fusion is im- perfect, we know so well what is meant that we are not troubled by the drawing of shadow in a head of Lionardo, for instance, through a number of parallel straight lines, put not closely together. We see those lines not as lines but as one shadow. And you follow, in the same way, the intention of the line en- graver, when his curves describe the shape of what he wishes. You know that a woman's arm is not covered with curved stripes; you know that the human face is not tattooed with fine lines fitting its form. But you recognize SUGGESTION AND INTENTION 109 the intention. The lines are the section, ap- parently, of the place where they are put; and this accumulation of sections, if correct, reassures you as to your pursuit of the form in the engraving. So that we follow, indeed, only the mind of the artist. When he leaves this system of lines, which describes form as a soft bracelet describes the shape of the arm of a woman, and when he suddenly adopts a new system of lines to mark that he is not thinking of form but of shadow, we follow him again into another form of artifice, and see as he wishes. In the differing arrangement of lines or dots, he may now give us the impression of texture, now the impression of the tint he wishes to represent. If he has a given quantity of white and of black, the effect will be much less, when he rubs them together and makes a grey, than when he leaves the same quantity of white and black side by side, and makes them affect the eye and excite it by contrast. In such a case he may place them together, without mixing, in innu- 110 LECTURE III merable combinations; each arrangement, as in the art of the wood engraver, will give a sepa- rate tint, and their greatest amount of black will even yet be transparent, because it will be per- meated by the lustre of some separate little white spots and lines. This, by the bye, is one of the systems used by some of the latest modern painters, im- pressionists, pointillistes, etc. Photographed for that purpose, their placing of colour side by side resembles the mechanism of engraving on wood, which may have given the first idea. In this case, as in the case of the little checker patterns, the little rain of dots of the wood engraver, our eye is first excited by one colour, then calmed by another; in the painting by a con- trast of colour, in the engraving by contrast of light and dark. The energies of nature, there- fore, not their realities, are translated by our own energies. 1 The process, which is extremely interesting 1 Indecisions of seeing our not seeing all with equal distinctness, which is part of our sight as well as seeing distinctly are recalled also by such methods. SUGGESTION AND INTENTION HI from the indefinite extension it can receive, is the one we see in stuffs and brocades. The Japanese silks and brocades and common cotton goods offer us an endless series of wonderful solutions of the problem, where the colour re- sulting from these dissociations of values makes a bloom difficult to render into words by name, extremely difficult to render by colour of one homogeneous mixture. And indeed we can see those effects given in this singular manner by the patterns especially used for men's clothes, in which ever so many " shades," as they are called, of grey, are produced by the placing of alternate spots or stripes of black and white, which only mix in the eye, and get their effective existence there. These humble methods of the men who make the patterns of your trousers are, in another very complicated way, the methods through which Rembrandt has awakened your appreciation of light and dark. Those scratches of different sizes ; those blotches of white, more or less stained ; those lines, now blurred, now sharp, have allowed him to make, on a bit of 112 LECTURE III paper, pictures as wonderful as any painting ever painted; as full of reality, of mystery, of imag- ination, of intensity of natural and supernatural life as his stupendous paintings themselves. It is always hard to pass from what delights us, but wherever, as we have decided in our first considerations, wherever any full method, any adequate clothing created by the artist for his ideas, has resulted from his using all his powers, there has been a mockery made by others, an imitation of the methods, a copying of the outside clothing. Now curiously enough, just here, we can again recall in our first classification of imita- tion, of a manner of looking at nature as if she were petrified and crystallized, in some shape far from her fluid readiness to change ; far from her being seen by us only through colour and light ever varying. In certain etchings, for instance, we can see quite distinctly what is obscurely hinted at through many works of art of different pro- cesses of execution. Many times we see in work that we feel is poorer, the etching of an etching, SUGGESTION AND INTENTION 113 if I may so say, the rendering into black and white of a nature for anything outside us is nature all in black and white, which nature is created for the purpose in the inferior artist's mind. For the glories of nature in which we lose ourselves are not the glories of black and white abstraction. The spaces that we see are seen by us as coloured light (if I may so put it), and he whom we call the painter, most of all artists, emphasizes his recognition of this luminous col- oured impression under which all things are seen. It matters not, though it be not clear at first, that he has used only black and white ; in any case when he has wished to give the sensation of nature, he has made a synthesis of this lumi- nous impression, which in some way bears out the suggestion of something more than black and white being copied in his representation. Never has he or any artist of full life copied or represented the representation. I have named the etcher as most evident in such a failure, most tiresome in his copying the look of an etching not the look of things that etching fairly conveys. 114 LECTURE in So the water-colourist imitates a water colour, and the oil-painter the look of what I have been told was a real hand-painted oil colour. The sur- face, the contexture of some kind of work of art is in their minds. Many a painter of the begin- ning of the century saw Roman statues when he looked at his model. Indeed it might be said that he even saw his model in the form of a plaster casting. Only the strong obsession of another individuality in nature, and the influence of earlier studies, forced him occasionally, as with David when painting portraits, into a pur- suit of the luminous and intimate changes which are impossible out of the moving flesh and blood. Remember now that I am only speaking in a general way, and that each case has its own record. Because again, extreme and delicate beauty can be obtained even in such artificial arrangements. But they need a man behind them, and he must make an attempt to conciliate them with what he feels of all nature. Thus in Prud- hon's lovely work, the " plaster-cast " shadows look no longer like admiration of the statue, SUGGESTION AND INTENTION 115 but become certain types of beauties of shade, such as are felt by us in the mysterious destruc- tion of colour values by moonlight. And there are even sculptors who have managed to give you an impression that the originals they pursued in imitation were already cast in plaster. 1 We have passed already too far away from the first question of the rendering of many things by a single one, of the suggestion of things that are not there. Any artist who has kept many studies of his own will remember the manner in which we select out of some drawing certain lines, cer- tain marks, because it may be a drawing having more or less colour added to it or shade. We select out of the marks on the paper certain ones which bring back, by connection with memory, the entire picture which we saw at the time that we made it ; whether those lines were records of nature or records of the imagination that is to say, of the intention of doing something. It 1 Even in Japanese lacquers yon can distinguish those which repre- sent nature in gold or black varnish from those which represent well- executed lacquer patterns. 116 LECTURE IIJ might be even such a question as the indication of a whole subject by the supposed main lines repre- senting movement, which movement fully carried out in all its details, and placed in what might be called a body, was to make, by a process of evolu- tion, a completed work of art. Last Wednesday Mr. Cazin was reminding me of the danger of looking over former notes and studies when out of them some one had to be found which we needed at once; the tendency, as one came across each special record, to see an entire scene either a scene in nature or a scene that had occurred in our mind, in which, delighted with the delight of former memories, we rebuilt the entire world of former experience, and forgot at each time that on some other piece of paper, on some other sheet of an album, was the one little dry separate fact that we had wished to consult. And he added : " I sometimes do not care to look over them myself ; I find some friend some one in the family, who is willing to hunt out the special thing ; because he has no other association than that of the moment." SUGGESTION AND INTENTION H7 Who shall fathom the mystery of the impres- sions made by art impressions which become confused, when one tries to declare them and describe them; strong and clear if we feel them again, even by the recall of memory ; so that we realize how much of ourselves constituted the feelings that seemed to come out of the things that struck us. In our art these impressions are tangible, if I may say so. We enjoy what we think is the representation of the certain things, at the same time that some sense of what they mean for our mind affects and moves us. These figures, these objects, which seem to be the thing itself to a certain part of our intelligence, make a sort of bridge over which we pass to reach that mysteri- ous impression which is represented by form as a sort of hieroglyph ; a speaking, living hieroglyph, not such a one as is replaced by a few characters of writing ; in our art and in that sense a sublime means and creation of man, if we compare it to that in which thought can reach us only through conventional arrangements of the signs we call letters. An art more complicated certainly than 118 LECTURE IU literature, but infinitely more expressive, since, independently of the idea, its sign, its living hiero- glyph, fills the soul of the painter with the splen- dour that things give ; their beauty, their contrast, their harmony, their colours, all the undivided order of the external universe. 1 Later, we may consider, if we have time, the enormous difference between the representation, even incomplete, through the thing itself, and the representation by a name for it. Should you hesitate a moment, and believe or rather imagine that the reasons I give are subtle, are fine-drawn, pause a moment and ask yourselves, on the contrary, whether they are not gross, heavy attempts at handling with words a thing so subtle even as the representation of any- thing by a line. If, in fact, I can express these ideas adequately in words of ordinary language, I must have left a great deal unexplained. Art be- gins where language ceases, and the impressions that we receive, and the manners through which we render them, are in themselves so subtle that 1 Paraphrased from Delacroix. SUGGESTION AND INTENTION 119 no one yet has been able to analyze more than a certain exterior or part of the mechanism of sensa- tion and of representation. I have said art I mean of course our arts, painting, sculpture, archi- tecture, music. Do not let us talk of our putting down re- cording what was there ; there was there what we intended to see. The religious feeling of the religious painters of the past had no other means of expression than the faces of the people they saw about them. The women living then, whose faces are enshrined for us in the pictures of Christian sanctity, were not different from those of to-day. They had the same lightness of mind, the same caring for fashion, the same meannesses, the same devotion, the same high pure-mindedness, that they have to-day. From what they showed, the artist who cared for the higher things chose what he cared for. He who did not see, as we say that is to say, who did not mean, gave us dryness, hardness and meanness of character in the early portraits of those same periods when religious art flourished. 120 LECTURE m My students, perhaps, have never read the jour- nal of the painter, Francis of Holland, who went to Rome, and knew Vittoria Colonna, and through her kindness managed to meet Michael Angelo, and to record, a few expressions of his. They may remember Francis's portrait of the glorious old gentleman, a demigod of art, with his collar up, with his hat pulled down, and the gloves he wore to protect him, the Michael Angelo who at that time passed through the streets of Rome to make his calls. It is years since I saw the journal of Francis of Holland : and I quote from a long memory. But something like this was said in the cool chapel of the closed church of San Silvestro in Monte Cavallo in answer to the questions they asked : " Of what consisted elevation in paint- ing : is it the representation of great and splendid things, of angels and saints and robes and back- grounds of gold?" "Good painting," said Michael Angelo, "ia noble and devout in itself, for with the wise nothing elevates more the soul and turns it toward devotion than the difficulty of perfection, SUGGESTION AND INTENTION 121 which is a tendency to approach God and to be united to Him ; for good painting is as a copy of His perfections, a shadow of His brusji, a music, a melody. " The painting of which I speak, and which I praise, asks only the imitation of one of the innu- merable things which God's Infinite Wisdom has created, be it [a fish of the market-place or] a bird of the air." The heavy record of Francis of Holland runs somewhat like this : but out of much tedious misrendering, speaks the real voice of the man whose versified poetry expresses an anxious sense of the spiritual world. If we only see that paint- ing, in the words of Delacroix, another very great artist, requires the whole man (" veut son homme tout en tier"), this humble dedication of Michael Angelo's powers need not surprise us. As the creature represents in itself a record of the forces that have made it and made also the world, and as it is in so far an epitome of the universe, so the man who brings his mind to con- template the creature, is himself communicating 122 LECTURE HI with the entire world. He is acting in the spirit of poetry, which touches us by establishing, over and over again, this connection of ourselves with the universe ; through our seeing how, in the poet's mind, some single thought, sometimes some mere fancy, some mere word, has ties with all that we care for most, with the very foundations upon which we live. LECTURE IV MISAPPREHENSIONS OF MEANING SYNOPSIS OF LECTURE IV What we see in an artist's representation is our sight of our mem- ories in it. This not equally possible for all. Ignorance or oppres- sive knowledge may interfere. Difficulties that may stand in the way of appreciation. Difficulties in the way of the painter's free sight owing to training. The artist's frequent narrowness not unnatural. Often it is the proof of a final closing of his susceptibility. Rea- sons for not enjoying certain works of art. The student may add to his powers from what is furthest away from him in art. Of necessity the artist's own record of memories may come to be understood only as other people's memories accumulate, if he goes beyond what all expect. Hence time must be a factor in the growth of appreciation. LECTURE IV MISAPPREHENSIONS OF MEANING WE shall have seen, then, that the illusion suggested by the artist's work is directed by him, but mostly made by us ; that we no longer see his mere piece of canvas, when he tells us that it is a hollow mirror of the world; that the marks he makes upon the piece of grey or white paper become to us memories of what we have seen or desired to see ; and that, though I know that this is Naples yellow, that that is cobalt, that I can name each colour and each mixture of colour, in the five-minute sketch that Turner puts on a bit of Whatman, I can at the same time that I see them all separately, the paper, the kind of colour, the paint and brush-mark, see also the blue Mediterranean basking in the southern sun. 125 126 LECTURE IV We have looked a little way into the mystery implied in those scratches that the savage, or a Rembrandt, makes, and we saw in what is called drawing a natural convention, a manner of synthesis and suggestion; in it man speaks to man by lines that imply things. And we can think of these as a bridge over which our spirit passes, beyond these things implied, to reach still further, to newer sights, or to some meaning more or less recognized by us, according to the intensity of our desire, according to memories suggested to our view of our relations with the universe, or what the universe itself may mean. Then, in another attempt at limitation, at definition, I said that art begins where language ceases; and as I said it, I was reminded again of the wider and vaguer sense of the word art, which, however, we cannot better. I thought how the writer, the poet, uses words, and how their ordinary use and value are changed by him ; how their ordinary position is misplaced, that he may convey, through his art, an illusion MISAPPREHENSIONS OF MEANING 127 impossible to the average language, which lan- guage is not personal with him. By his cadences, by the stress laid upon cer- tain words, by his placing of words in an artificial frame, the poet suggests, not the actual thing itself that he says, but what our memories will make of it; as soon as he has thrown us out of the hearing of the language of every day. A line came back to me, while I read my own words to you, a line of Virgil ; a line loved by Millet the painter ; remembered by me, perhaps, because of its association with the story of his painting : " Majoresque cadunt altis de montibus umbrae." Certainly, the real fact of the shadows grad- ually filling the plain below the mountains was known to Millet ; but when he repeated the line, or saw it aloud if I may so say he felt how the word " Majores," which means only greater, is placed so as to suggest constantly greater in- crease ; and how the shadows, which end the line in the soft word "umbrae," that means these, have spread from the beginning of the 128 LECTURE rv line, and have descended, as if with a fall, from the high mountains. And again, we said that we saw what we intended to see, we who paint; and Michael An'gelo defined for us what made a religious painting, by the spiritual attitude of the painter. Through these followings and pursuit of the fact that each artist sees in his own way, through memories of what he has been, and of what he has liked ; even when he says to himself, in asser- tive moments, that "that is the way the thing looked," we shall come to perceive, perhaps, why it is, that this faceting of truth must be so, how the perpetual Maia, the illusion and enchant- ment of appearances, plays for each of us a new part, sings for us a new personal song, as if she returned our admiration as if she cared indeed, as if she existed, in the way that we say we know her; for she takes form in us and fits our shapes. If, therefore, we cannot separate ourselves from what we see ; if our energies are necessary to help the artist to impress us ; if what he appeals to us MISAPPREHENSIONS OF MEANING 129 about is not an actual sight, but merely our sight of our memories in it, so that we could not put these things to a man born blind on his first recovery of sight, we know that it is because at least a great part of the influence exerted by* the artist is the recall to our own experience of our own memory. We build upon that, and recog- nizing its conformity with that of the artist's memory, we trust him and continue beyond ex- perience to whatever new sights he may wish to lead us among. But we must believe first in the conformity with our own of these first memories of his which he offers us. Now this is not equally possible for all ; it will depend upon our sensitiveness, our capacities of all kinds. 1 To some kinds of intellect certain con- 1 Sensitiveness at the word I pause for a moment. Has it ever occurred to you how excusable are the misapprehensions of many literary critics of pictures such as any of you of my hearers who are artists may have suffered from in yourselves, or in what is still more aggravating, the mis judgment of greater men all of whom have suffered in that way ? Constable, Ge*ricault, Delacroix, Millet, Rousseau, Manet, Corot, the list is great. Just think a moment. The different arts have each and in common, one property which is Expression : based on a correspondence between the sensations of K 130 LECTURE IV tradictions to their memories of sight will be so important that those contradictions the defi- ciencies of the painter or artist, will prove insur- mountable. The reminder of the illusion will not take place with them to a sufficient extent to the soul and the sensations of the body. A colour, a line, a sound, may influence the soul with a similar sentiment of result. A paint- ing, a statue, a melody, shall cause upon us, the public, a similar moral impression, and the literary critic may translate it for the public by some explanation say that of sweetness ; and that with- out his being able to understand what is properly sculptural, pictorial or musical in this triple expression. Notes, lines and colours smile or weep, are sad or gay, equally, but each in its way. And yet it is neither sadness nor joy which constitute what is proper to music, to painting or to sculpture. Thus each art has its particular language and another in common understandable by all. A French poet, whose thought I am follow- ing, has compared three arts, painting, sculpture and music, to three persons speaking in three languages, say French, German and Italian, before another who should understand only English. Now there are common human expressions which will allow these three persons to be understood in part, but certainly not in all, nor in what is most precise, and in fact only in what each person would consider a mere help to his own language. The public are like the hearer : because they feel, they therefore think they can judge works, only part of which they are competent to pronounce upon. There is in each competent artist a sort of unconscious automatic mathematician, who, like the harmonist in music, the colourist in painting, resolves in his way the problem of sight or sound which the scientist puts into an equation. MISAPPREHENSIONS OF MEANING 131 move the entire mind. It may come from too much ignorance; it may come from too oppres- sive a knowledge of certain facts. We should be troubled by Shakespeare's geography, by his statements of historic fact, and the characters he And yet owing to the extreme difficulty of these problems and the improbability of their being solved completely by them, people have the assurance to decide about them. Perhaps this may be the cause of the special failures of the critic of paintings. Music has been noted. It is not possible to acknowl- edge that one does not know one note from another, and yet criticise them. But the plastic arts have no complete notations. (Archi- tecture, however, can use some notation.) These differences are not absolute, but are relative to the limits of our perceptions, which are not the same for sight and sound. The series of musical sound appears to us discontinued. The gamut could not be figured by the contiguous positions of a point moving on a line. The gamut would be more like the stepping of a pair of compasses on a right line. The series of colours, on the con- trary, is continuous. Hence you can see how infinitely more difficult to follow and to define. And also more difficult to find out the man who makes a mistake in criticism of coloured appearances. Hence of course the fact that the painter only can execute his painting : he cannot notate it in colour. And so for the lines, which are born of his personality, their directions imply a number of curves whose radii are in infinite number and are continuously variable. All equa- tions fail before them ; at least by the means of scientific analysis of which man yet disposes. And yet we know that they must be obedi- ent to the Sovereign Art and Science which has moulded the world and which has somewhere above us an adequate notation. To ask, then, of the average critic a sensitiveness capable of such 132 LECTURE IV builds, were we not, fortunately for our apprecia- tion of what he meant, bowed down into the right attitude by the pressure of long continued opinion. I think that I can remember my professor of anatomy's objection to the Venus of Milo, about whose hips he had much misgiving. Something was wrong there, (and as she is big) with no small measure of blunder. If you have followed your course of anatomy, you will know what I mean and whether the trouble has been removed with the readjustment of the statue. But this defect spoiled the pleasure my teacher might have had. And so with Barye's animals, which my teacher admired freely it troubled him that certain de- formations and exaggerations were there; and appreciation is cruel. Music and its rules he may hold, because explained and notated. But how is he to hear the Voice of Nature calling to the painter, unless he too has a similar physical sensitiveness ? For from what we saw a moment ago, when we noticed the subjec- tive continuity of the impressions of colour, and the infinity of line, you can see why nature, the world of the eye, is always singing to the painter. The notes of the prism continue indefinitely, and the painter, or he who has his temperament, sees at every moment in the world about him the absolute harmony which the other arts obtain by effort. That is why the record of nature is the painter's manner of expression. MISAPPREHENSIONS OF MEANING 133 apparently the result of deliberate purpose with Barye, the intention, perhaps, which had be- come a habit, of changing the scale so as to pro- duce the impression of size ; as the actual bronze was small, but had to appear the size of life. Had these been the errors of a novice, my professor might have been more indulgent. To his own modelled works my teacher was more indulgent. Their defects being mixed with the qualities he was looking for, he easily allowed for these defects, and could create for himself the necessary illusion. If there can be all this difference of apprecia- tion in such an art as realistic sculpture if I may use the term so near the actual form, so tangible, so much the thing itself that a sculptor can be blind, as you all have seen, and yet make a statue or image whose form at least, if not the appearance of its form, will be correct, how much more excusable if I can say so how much more pardonable, will such deficiencies of sympathy appear to us in those who cannot en- joy the full illusion of painting, of drawing; of the more sublimated manners of art. 134 LECTURE IV Any sort of knowledge (which is stored mem- ory), any memory of training, any kind of preju- dice, as we may define it, may stand in the way of appreciation. We shall see the result of a sort of obsession in the intellect, like a hard deposit in a living body, prevent the free action of its energies, and arrest its acquirement of new sympathies. As in our studies and the records of the impression of nature upon us artists, in the things we do be- fore new sights, in the notes we take of what is new to us, we are hampered (fortunately for our self-esteem, without knowing it frequently) by the habits of memory of the studio, by certain methods of painting or drawing (and of sight even, as I have shown you), which were invented and perfected for other sorts of sight and things, seen by others than ourselves, who taught them to us ; or seen by ourselves, under conditions far removed in the past. Hence the difficulties of the painter who brings to his study in the open air of the New World harsh, clear, light- coloured, crystalline not the principles but the MISAPPREHENSIONS OF MEANING 135 methods he has learned in studios of grey and rainy France, or the dry formulas of school-bred Germany. And if in the face of ever-changing nature, he is overburdened by that part of him- self which has hardened like his bones, and he repaints his old likings of studio practice how excusable is he in objecting to the newer impres- sions of others : the works of others who are not carrying as a weight the same memories of prac- tice and sight which he has. 1 1 This was part of a lesson noted by a pupil. We have considered the technical sides of art as merely the means of expression. We have noticed, however, that these means this dress in which the idea is presented to us are only, in part, the result of the feelings and perceptions of the artist : that he begins at first by accumulating memories that properly are not bis own ; that are the memories of his ancestry, of his first predilections, and most decidedly of his first training. Later on we must always remember that time is of no consequence, and that these words may represent a very brief interval or a very long one the artist introduces into what he does his own development of personal memories. He may, then, come to a prodigious difficulty, the explanation of which diffi- culty will give us the clue of certain mistakes which are not infrequent in the work of art, and which especially control its appearance to-day. We can suppose the artist passing out of his childhood of art, out of the pleasant expanse of certain methods and a liking for the manner of looking at the world embodied in these methods. He has become a graver person. He has strong feelings that become more and more 136 LECTURE IV And if these objections to sincere expression, perfectly natural, as I said, belong to a narrow mind, if indeed all this is but another statement of all that I have been noting, either combined with strict views, or joined to a tortuous nature, the main ones in that part of his life that he desires to express. Or else he may always have had such graver or higher or more noble sides, which have remained dormant during the apprenticeship to the external ; and he may revert to these fundamental loves of early life. Suppose, for instance, that all that turn towards the interior world which we call religion, should awake in him or come back to him from the time when he lived contented, breathing the atmosphere of feeling, out of which he had passed insensibly, into the dryer and more confined air of the average aesthetic life. For you must not think that the average aesthetic manner of life is so much richer than any other. A Bohemian may be a chump like any other fellow. Nor does the love of the ornamental dado or of "art colours" necessarily expand the mind. During those years of apprenticeship, the external body of his art will have been made by something like crystallization. He will have accepted methods that belonged to men of other ways of feeling methods never used to express any depth of thought or emotion, meant perhaps as an indication of there being really nothing more in the world than the momentary pleasant perceptions through which we pass without looking beneath, or without any interior questioning. What will the artist do ? His language, its cadences, its colouring, every part of it, will have been meant to state something almost the reverse of what he really now feels most. His methods do not imply respect ; he has learned to express himself only in accents of lightness or triviality, and he knows no others. He can no longer sing in any other tones than those to which he has trained his voice. What shall he do f MISAPPREHENSIONS OF MEANING 137 we shall see here, in a sort of natural history of man, part of the causes of opposition to artists whose career has been a free one, open to na- ture's grace and influence as the earth they love is to the showers and the sun. If he is a very great man, I mean, rather, a great personality like Millet, for instance, he will live in a struggle with the methods that he uses. There may occasionally be such successful cases, which prove to what should be our great satisfaction that the human mind cannot be classified like the forms of the lower ranges of animal life. But all the probabilities of life are against the man whom I have tried to bring up before you. His means will contradict his end. We shall then feel curiosity, interest anything that you may like to name except the main thing, and that is that he has expressed himself. This difficulty will not be recognized easily by himself. He will wonder why people do not take him seriously. He will wonder why his work is always treated as a remarkable piece of technique ; while he has perhaps often hoped that it might preach something, that it might at least give testimony or recognize some lesson of doctrine. As you will remember, when we explained to ourselves how limited our range of vision was, we saw how difficult it was to free ourselves from our memories of sight ; we can thus appreciate how the artist's memories will call up no other memories of sight, in such a case, but those connected with the expression of ideas which he does not now care for ; and since he is always sure that he is himself, it will become almost impossible for him to go against these memories, gauge them as they are, and put them behind him. He would have to be born- again. This, I think, will explain the feeling that we have to-day, of so much in the art of painting or of sculpture not to mention the others which makes us doubt the existence of strong feeling and 138 LECTURE IV Add to this the temptations of life : the fierce desire for success and selling one's wares; the necessity of banding together, and thereby keep- ing others out all the things that excuse what we do collectively that is wrong in the individ- ual ; and the reasons for not admitting as plausible the illusions of others, become clearer, and however to be regretted, less unnatural. desire in the artists whose works are meant to appeal to some of our feelings. We can see why, in certain German painters, for instance, the method of painting invented and developed for the representation of barnyard scenes, of comic situations in peasant-lift', for the tawdry imitation of silks and satins and theatrical show, is anomalous I might say unthinkable, when it is applied to the Divine tragedy of the life of Christ, or to carry the plaint of the exiled sons of Eve. I have taken the German painter as a better instance, because of a certain lower level of art developed in Germany, which allows us to see more distinctly, by not calling upon us to judge the exceptional. The same analysis would, however, distinctly apply to the methods of the French artists, learned in the studios of the Beaux- Arts ; where the point has been to make a good study of the model, with or with- out drapery, in such a way as to avoid getting into any difficulties, and to keep entirely within the range of the academic a range less annoying, perhaps, than the vulgar, because it appeals to us as people of society, but just as preposterous in the representation of the ideal. Or again, the methods used for what is called decoration, for the covering of surfaces of walls, or stained glass, or any kind of furni- ture of a more aesthetic pretension all of which methods, in the usual way, arc meant to escape work, to ease the mind from inquiry, MISAPPREHENSIONS OF MEANING Besides, it is inevitable that on one side the painter the artist will be narrow ; I had almost said must be narrow. He has to act ; he has to choose here and now; he cannot travel on two paths at once. For the moments in which he brings his idea into the real world from emotion ; to bring back things to the intellectual value of the average carpet. These methods cannot be informed at once by any passion which will take them away from the irresponsibility of the furniture which they match. So that the question put to me by the Philadelphia lady, as to which of the decorative firms had the most religious feeling, seems preposterous. It is true that sometimes these methods do not annoy us so much, partly for this very reason, that they are so inadequate that we do not hear any voice ; partly because, as the methods of decorative art are of necessity connected with the past, and with the firmest founda- tions of the pictorial art, there is something which at least on that one side may seem to connect with what we know has been a part of certain great expressions in the past : as the use to-day of gold in a background, or of a line of gold for the halo around a saint's head, reminds us that once upon a time, there were artists whose works represent all the religious feeling of the ages, and that these artists used gold in their backgrounds, and gold in the halos of their saints. First, therefore, see that your methods are respectful. Never make light of difficulties or slip easily over what you find to be obstacles. Better be gawky than flippant in your work. Imitate in your methods the methods of religious life, even if they oblige you to the lengthiest preparations. And if a passionate impulse carries you away, your expression will still have the accent that comes of previous respectful meditation. 140 LECTURE IV of mechanics, what he has to do is all that he can manage. It cannot be done too thoroughly, too singly. He is like the general, the com- mander in the field : the battle has to be won ; what side issues can there be ? The riders tram- ple down their own companions who have fallen ; the cannon wheels crush out friend and foe. From this habit of mind alone, the artist, on the side that he has in common with men of action, may well retain that attitude which marks the soldier in a cause. "A quoi pensez-vous ? " (What do you think of all this?) said Fromentin the painter, to his friend the officer, who was holding, almost by mere force of will, some little far-off post in the desert, just conquered. " My friend," the officer answered, "if I thought of all this, I should become too much of a philosopher for a soldier." So also, the artist usually closes his mind to argument ; wisely enough, the combination of his instincts reminds him convinces him of a fact : that his opponent's being able to argue better MISAPPREHENSIONS OF MEANING 141 than he does, does not prove his opponent to be in the right ; it only proves that his opponent is stronger in argument. As to himself, he must be persuaded besides being convinced. And he cannot, without loss to his power of grasp by what we call instinct, or what I have tried to state is a form of genius, accustom himself to go step by step, at the pace of the logicians. So that he is obstinate, and a dreamer, like many men of action; and, like them, not so different from women. And his moral nature having to be soothed by a sense of justice, he attributes to those who give other impressions than his, who build another kind of bridge, some form of moral obliquity. A well-known French painter repeats that if Millet were alive and he could again keep him from the Salon, he would do so, on account of his deteriorating influence. Ingres says of Delacroix, who yet had defended him as an artist, when Ingres was still misunderstood, "Ne me parlez pas de cet homme la." (Don't mention that man to me.) One sees the same sort of 142 LECTURE IV thing in the white men who hold some post in far-away lands, among what they call natives. Were they all to understand them, with sympa- thy, the grasp of the conqueror might be loosened. It is the power, the awful power for the moment, of ignorance. Much of this is the result of knowledge crys- tallized too rapidly. But knowledge is simply a filling of part of the great void of ignorance. The beginner, the youngster, out of school or still in it, has of course memories that are fewer; the first associations of some manner of liking with the thing seen. How can he help seeing little else than his methods just learned, and with the faithfulness and "solidarity" of the boy, look for these only " the kind of thing the other fellows are after." Indeed, he hardly recognizes anything in nature that is newer than his own records, unless some one has " done it," who himself has some actual connection with him, and over whose method of work he can walk as on a bridge, to this new land of representation. He may so crystallize his memories that all MISAPPREHENSIONS OF MEANING 143 else is closed, and he drops out of the list, at length ; or he may go the furthest length of his classmates, and walk as far as they. As small or great will be the same to him, he may do as David's pupils used to do ; throw things at certain pictures, say the famous Wat- teaux, and object physically. It is not that he sees the other thing and objects. He does not see it at all. I have known an intelligent young painter burst out with laughter at the painting of a great Delacroix, not one square inch of which he could have paralleled as mere brush work, in a thousand years of continuous effort; and then go and admire voluptuously the surface of one of the smaller French painters of to-day the name doesn't matter a surface he could parallel and reproduce fairly ; all but the in- vention connected with it, and that freedom of brush which sometimes seems to mean : I have learned this way, but I might have learned another, for I am a good executant. Like Narcissus, and as fatally, he was admir- ing his capacities reflected in the smooth mirror 144 LECTURE IV of a painter, as a mirror undisturbed by any motion, any waves of the great wind that blows through the world from higher spaces. Prob- ably by this time the water nymphs below have dragged him down. Again we return to this that we see in the work of art what we wish to see: the picture of our own memories of sight; the mirror of what we are or have grown. Now if in the artist (on his poorer side) we have analyzed his resistance to impressions offered to him, at the same time with others that he dislikes, or objects to, or does not under- stand, what must not be the obstacles in the way of people with still less sensitiveness of organization ? Not that all artists are more sen- sitive to art than those who are not artists. Remember that what decides the career of a painter is the curious relation between the eye and the hand the desire and power of making a movement with the hand, to repeat and recall the memories of the brain. Do not let us confuse things. MISAPPBEHENSIONS OF MEANING 145 A writer to the savage is a man who writes; a painter is a man who paints. To the savage, any man who can make, as we all do, marks which can be interpreted into sentences, is a writer. Difficult it is to gauge whether he can understand what gradations we see involved in the word. To the savage of savagery, to the savage of civilization, any man is a painter who, making marks with paints, can have them inter- preted into the meaning of things. But we are obliged to supply, by the use of the name of artist, the deficiency in classification. The artist is he who, as I said when I defined art again, effects an intellectual connection with nature outside him; has accumulated memories of sight rarer than the common, and memories of their connections ; and is open to new memo- ries placed so suddenly with older ones that they look like first apprehensions and reachings-out. But what appeal can there be to the man who has few memories of sight that are personal, few acquired through works of art? Museums, collections of various kinds the 146 LECTUBE rv looking at nature with the feeling that it can be rendered ; the enjoyment of nature on account of art, and of art on account of nature ; all this will tend to make a collection of memories and encour- age the confidence in them, and prevent their being lost or displaced. For the child has often begun to collect impressions, and yet after a time loses those first memories of the pleasures of sight, as other memories of other things displace the less reasoned, less analyzed early impressions. We can end by seeing how, still more than with the artists, the great public recognize slowly any new addition to the wealth of the world in the records of things seen, in the works of art that imply such records, be they of painting, of sculpt- ure, or of the smaller arts of decoration, and finally why the mediocre and the plausible must always reign for a time. Were we to look about any museum, were we to look about this one, we should surely see waifs, fragments of work stranded on the shore, if I may say so, bits of old shipwrecks ; but which, at one time, were carried over seas, buoy- MISAPPREHENSIONS OF MEANING 147 ant and inflated with the wind of popular favour. Museums, alas ! are like all great institutions not merely ideal; they give examples of what should be avoided, of what ultimately is avoided ; but which for a moment confuses the mind of the young, and impresses memories upon them, that may return to do them harm at least automat- ically. It is always impossible to explain how such things have happened to be included. Perhaps they have not happened here by themselves, they are parts and fragments of circumstances not so painful. To obtain and enjoy means for greater purchases, we are willing to accept gifts that we ought to decline; we yield to personal considerations. Have I not recommended per- sons and paintings myself, rather than claim authority, rather than dishearten in the pub- lic an interest which has to be fanned like a small ember about to go out ? These examples represent an average perception and reflect average personal likings of a moment; but as soon as something more has been acquired 148 LECTURE IV and expressed, then we see all there is in them, and are shocked at coming to the end of a world ; since it must then be unlike the real one which it represents ; for the real one has always more to give to our inquiry or appreciation. And yet even there, with certain minds (so true is the defi- nition that we make the value of the work of art), we shall detect their delight in feeling assured that there is nothing more, that they know every bit of it, and can name all that is there. Offensive to them must be the work of art, the man, the kind of view of any truth, which cannot easily be held in a short formula, which has any impression of superiority and escapes their grasp. Some of us dislike, some of us fear, all of us are at least chary, of what cannot as yet be cata- logued and stamped with a trade-mark. Balzac had a motto : " Comprendre c'est par- donner " ; and, to a certain extent, I hope that this analysis of the reasons for dissenting from admiration and enjoyment of certain works? of art, will make you, my students, pause a moment MISAPPREHENSIONS OF MEANING 149 before resenting. Patience long-suffering, has always been the badge of those really favoured by Minerva ; and one of the earliest of great artists in words has shown what she did for Ulysses; and how she brought him home at last, and placed him on the throne that belonged to him. We may also we students as pupils together (for Michael Angelo, you know, went to school, as he called it, when he was so old that he could not see, but had to handle the famous ancient torso he cared for, which goes by his name), we may learn also that we can admire what is greater than our- selves, without thereby personally caring for it as much as for something nearer fitted to us. There is nothing to be ashamed of in such a choice. And if we see the result of meanness, of vanity, of envy, of all the hard sides of man, in his con- sideration of works of art, so we must beware of the loss of our mental dignity in yielding to our weaker and more amiable side; the caring only for some personal liking, and our coming in that way to what is injustice. Therein again, personal memories of likings, 150 LECTURE IV memories that fit our inmost nature, would be allowed to take precedence of those records of memory which establish greater choices ; which we feel obscurely belong to characters more highly strung than ours to beings breathing in a higher air, more difficult to live in rarer. But why should we not be as well pleased to recognize the fact; why object to what is great and splendid and lofty and immortal, because we cannot use it in our every-day life of common, though happy, moments ? Does it hurt me that Michael Angelo was greater and is greater, while Carpaccio and Cima are sweet to me, and my mind makes no effort to comprehend them, but is simply soothed, as by simple melodies? Nor is the limit what we can do ourselves, how far we can leap. Have we not, perhaps, limited ourselves; and if not, can we alter the fact by taking thought? We must not be bound by what we can do, or what is most akin to what we can do. And even from what is furthest away from us in art, we may some day draw the feeling for something MISAPPREHENSIONS OF MEANING 151 to add to our powers. Or we may see in methods that are not just our own some fault that helps us to an expression of an almost contrary feeling. Much, for instance, of Delacroix's power of ex- pressing melancholy and romantic feeling comes from his having admired, even against his will, what may be called the robustious healthiness of Rubens, and from having actually studied out the Fleming's material means, which seem usually so joyous and so unfitted for the Byronic, new anxieties of this century, distracted by the loss of old faiths, disturbed by the apparition of new necessities of inquiry. "Ses couleurs crues, ses grosses formes," Ru- bens' unbroken colours, his coarse forms, annoyed Delacroix, but with them he felt the wisdom of the Fleming and his determination to use any means for an end. "Get homine ne se refuse" rien," Delacroix says. And the great example of Rubens conveyed to him the idea of a real unity, the presence of a great life which should animate and sustain both faults and qualities. 152 LECTURE IV For remember again (as we saw last week) that the wish and the decision to be interested especially in the life and movement of nature, implies another point of view, as well as another method of treatment, from that which would represent pleasure in the quiet, the steadi- ness and the peace of external sights. From each view and interest a different manner must result. A man giving even what all expect, some- times goes very far beyond, and his own record of memories will only be understood as other people's memories accumulate. He will be a constant reminder of there being something more. Little by little, other recorders will make notes that will sustain and justify his ; his necessary deficiencies, his necessary exaggerations, will no longer surprise. We shall pass over his bridge to a new land, and thank him whom we doubted at first. It may take a long time ; other roads may have been travelled meanwhile, by other ex- plorers whom we notice and whose memories we enjoy ; so that Donatello may come fresh MISAPPREHENSIONS OF MEANING 153 to us after several centuries. The Rembrandts, which we recognize as so mighty to-day, whose possession represents so much money, were to be had, even when his name and fame was known, for less than you, my pupils, would accept to-day for any study of yours. Millet required some twenty years or more to be fairly sure of the Salon ; while you, young ladies and gentlemen, if you go to Julian's Academy in Paris for a little while, and are fairly polite, are pretty sure of being accepted where Delacroix was rejected. Perhaps, then, if you have to wait awhile for a real recognition, you will be patient. If it comes later, in a few more years, you can be humble when you think of such names as those I have mentioned. By asking you to join me in the calm consider- ation of the causes that lead to misapprehension of what the artist has meant of what he has really said and of his slow acceptance by us, the world, I have invited you you who are students with me (though I am named the leader) to look down in peace upon the battle of 154 LECTURE rv the world of art, in which, at another moment, some of us will be combatants. As in all contemplation, you are placed above the field of strife. Do not think that you cannot hold, for a mo- ment at least, such a place that you have of your profession a less high view and less respect. In any museum, worthy of the name in the least, you cannot feel so. It is your ancestral palace ; of whose great inhabitants you are to become worthy. The greatest of reputations belong to your family, the family ready to adopt you. You too may become heads of great houses, and chiefs of clans, as your kinsmen have been. At least, in some branch you will establish your claim to continue the race to continue their pursuit ; to make also a representation of the world by yourselves. If there be a place which is yours, it is this, in which there is no lower position except by gra- dation of service ; where rivalry means something more than opposition and triumph over others. For as one of us once said (my old companion in MISAPPREHENSIONS OP MEANING 155 art, Elihu Vedder) : " It is not with others we are struggling, as the public think, it is with ourselves." And Thackeray, who was with us for a time, as a soldier, and who left us for triumphs in another art, says : " The humblest volunteer in the ranks of art, who has served a campaign or two ever so ingloriously, has at least this good fortune of understanding, or fancying he is able to understand, how the battle has been fought, and how the engaged general won it." LECTURE V MAIA, OR ILLUSIONS SYNOPSIS OF LECTURE V The museum a modern make-shift. Older methods of teaching art. The Museum and the Academy. The lesser arts. The work of art that we call decoration. Its insufficiency to-day. Its fulness formerly. Colour and composition. Consideration of how we see through the impression of colour. What we see is translated to us by some effect of coloured light, and that effect is placed within laws of arrangement which sometimes we call perspective and sometimes composition. Painting and the painter of to-day. References to the difficulties through which we see. The illusions and inaccuracies of our senses. Partial review of artistic vision. The sight of the moment a theme upon which we embroider former memories, habits and images. The illusions which we recognize, which prevent our giving to ourselves an accurate account of certain qualities of the tilings that we look at, can be used in turn in the illusion of the work of art. The impression of sight connected with the impression of the hand. Hence the touch can designate the mind of the painter. Time in execution of the work of art not a measurable quantity. The exe- cution of the work of art implies the joining together of former memories to the perceptions of the moment. Hence the necessity of constant purification of our memories. Heuce the use not only of our own, but of the memories of others. LECTURE V MAIA, OR ILLUSIONS THE museum, then, is the storehouse which holds the records of your ancestors. It would be better if in the monument of family history only the memories were kept of those who have done honour to our long struggle ; and that we should not have any reminder of those who have disgraced us. For them the empty space should be enough, like the place held in the walls of Venice for the record of Marino Faliero, Decapitatus pro criminibus. But the further that we go back, the more our streams of descent seem clear. Time, as I showed to you before, having disposed of many questions, it is only with the more recent examples that we can become confused. The analogy to all records of ancestry is therefore quite complete. The museum, as you know, is a 159 160 LECTURE V modern institution. It is admirable in one sense ; in another, that which it replaces was better for the life of art than what it gives to-day. If it were not so, this age of museums, of collections of general interest in art, of written teaching, of oral explanations, of academies, of government and municipal schools, should have given us the largest and richest development of art which the world has ever seen. However much the present century has seen done, either in the logical development of art, by the development of the things implied in the memories of older artists, or by the triumphant record of certain men, who here and there, usu- ally in an unforeseen manner, have come to bloom, and have added their stock of memories and their impressions to what we had before no one, I believe, will consider the statement at all out of the commonplace, that the past cen- turies, without museums and without academic organization like ours, have given us, not only together, but often separately, proofs of stronger life, of greater technical realization in our arts. MAIA, OR ILLUSIONS 161 The change was inevitable, and in certain ways we shall have to accept it for an indefinite future. With time we shall readjust ourselves ; we shall develop better the methods imposed upon us ; it may be that we shall make still stronger what remains we have of the methods of instruction that belong to the past. Even the destruction now forced by what is called commerce, upon all those branches of art, which, being worked collectively, by many people together of different grades, are specially liable to disturbance which no individual devotion, no individual high-mindedness can check; which also being mechanism, can be made into organi- zations entirely ruled by the commercial spirit even these injuries, these degradations, may have an end, when again it may become the interest of what is called commerce to thrive by the rivalry of doing well. No doubt that with each year the guardians of such vast intellectual property as we detain in museums will feel more and more the responsi- bility entrusted to them, and will aid by many 162 LECTURE V means to diffuse their knowledge, to appreciate the manner of their production ; and as the posi- tion becomes more and more a part of high edu- cational service, men of learning, men of inquiry, will more and more be chosen to make, by their aiding efforts, common intellectual property of this accumulation. The breaking up of the old world destroyed the ancient system in which the student of art entered by the gate of the workman "played in the gate of the Master," as the Japanese called study. He was a child and treated as a child, and things were done for him or not, as might be good for him in the opinion of his betters. Meanwhile he served them. He learned to become a tool, first the tool of his master and then his own. All in- struction went directly with practice, I do not mean the mere practice of using the hand as we artists use it, but the immediate use of that skill acquired, for work which had its place already assigned. No detail, therefore, was slurred ; and in an art so humble on the side of its execution, so dependent upon materials, there was an unbroken MAIA, OE ILLUSIONS 163 chain between the greatest painter and the man who ground his colours. I think it is again Francis of Holland who speaks of having met Michael Angelo out on his walk, with his old friend and colour-grinder, a man to whose memory he wrote lines as full of devotion as the great sonnets inspired by what we call his love for Vittoria Colonna. Those relations still subsist in certain countries, as they do in Japan ; and this making one family of the greater artist and all who have to do with him has given that peculiar completeness, that sense of peace and absence of struggle which we feel in Japanese art, from the painting of the draw- ings to the workmanship of their lacquers and their medals. In those smaller divisions of work in art, which I referred to when I spoke of work done in community, we shall probably see for us some return of the past. But the day of such a nat- ural manner of life may be far off. For our art of painting, the nearest approach to it to-day is still in the schools; but the hold there is a 164 LECTURE V precarious one, and the connection between the greater and smaller is interrupted and dependent upon something else than the necessary progress from first knowledge to full development. In the older days the master might show his pupils what had been done before them by others than himself, in separate examples, with each of which would go a form of teaching all the more influential from its not beipg academic. The impression on the younger painter's mind of the great works hung in churches, seen one by one, their colours, their forms distinctly fitted to the place for which they were meant, their meaning emphasized by the circumstances of the place, by the importance attached to the use for which these works of art were meant, must have been far stronger, from its unity, its singleness, than that which students can get to-day from these very same works, confused upon the walls of a building like a museum, not built to hold them more than others; where light falls with demo- cratic indifference, lighting each one impartially, and none of them as they were meant to be lit. MAIA, OR ILLUSIONS 165 With this division, then, established in the methods of record, the Academy teaching certain things and the Museum all things ; the one analytical and in sequence, the other as life teaches, in a mass of facts, we come to feel that to bring back the ancient synthesis, the two divisions forced upon us by modern changes must be brought together. What we need to think of to-day, and in a certain way I am here to show you, is that the Museum knows more than the Academy. In the smaller arts, in that innumerable mass of mate- rials made for use, or what we call mere orna- ment, the glass, metal work, carvings of wood and stone, fragments of buildings, leather, tap- estry, the teaching is evident. Every rule has been applied, both those you know and those you have not heard of. It might almost seem at first, if the museum is great enough, that whatever rule has been set down for you will find a contra- diction and a triumphant contradiction in some small treasure, some choice fragment stored in the collections. In such a case, it will always 166 LECTURE V be that your teaching has been too narrow, probably not narrow so far as any execution may have gone ; because that of itself carries its own reasoning, through the use, and sometimes the predominance, of material ; but it will have been because some question of practice, quite valid, even very splendid, has been put before you as a principle. And in no division of the arts of sight has there been more misapplied ingenuity of teaching, more narrowness of reasoning, more individual asser- tion, more professional incapacity, than in the law-making which has been done in our century, for the reasonable production of the work of art that we call decoration. Perhaps there, more than in our art of painting, is this natural ; because of the less powerful, human, individual factor, and the necessity for the artist to carry out such forms of art in conjunction with others, his superiors in the social management. For he, individually, does not count so much: his material is more dominant than in any other form of art, I mean more rebellious, less a creation of his MAIA, OK ILLUSIONS 167 own (compare at the two extremes a drawing in ink and a stained-glass window); and he works already to supply some wish of others ; and he is directed, therefore, somewhat by the taste of the day ; somewhat by the larger interests, for instance, of architects, some of whose work he supplies. But whenever one wishes to breathe freely again ; whenever one wishes to see freedom in the use of material; whenever one wishes to see the man and not the workshop, the artist and not the trader, the poet, not the schoolmaster, then, tired and dis- gusted with the present incapacity, the present deplored, undoubted incapacity, one shall find in the museums a rest to the mind, and perhaps, as man after all is the same, a hope for the future. Remember how human the so-called older pieces of little art seem to you, when compared with the modern. Recognize, then, how you come across the result of that same principle which we first recognized, that the man is almost every- thing, and that anything which does not allow us to feel this is at once the imitation and not the reality; be it a piece of machine-made lace, 168 LECTURE V or a regulation stained-glass window, or the nine- teenth century carving of a Renaissance fa9ade, or the fine and silly tooling of a piece of modern silver. And do not think that even in the slightest way, by drawing your attention to what are called the minor arts, I go outside of what I am teaching you. If I should ask you to come upstairs with me, and look at some little piece of Japanese lacquer, for instance, with a surface suggesting the weight, as well as the mystery, of moonlight ; with depths of shadow that are typ- ical of the art of varnish glazes; with irides- cences like those of living birds or insects ; with sparklings recalling the track of the stars in water; with patterns firm like the pattern of a flower; and all so dwelling in unity that you cannot think of their being displaced from the little world of box or tray in which they live, so that to the eye, they give the pleas- ure of notes of music in accord ; if I took you to look at sucn a thing, as a lesson, it would be, among other things, a lesson of what we divide MAIA, OR ILLUSIONS 169 as colour and composition. That is, as you know, the special line in which the Museum has re- quested me to direct my teaching. And there is but one way of considering such a division : and that is, that it is almost so large as to include all that your eye can possibly light on. You know that what you see is translated to you by some effect of coloured light, and you know that that effect is placed within certain laws of arrangement which we study out in some cases, and call perspective ; but which, in other cases, are so obscure, or rather so compli- cated, that all we can do is to assume that they all must fall within a universal geometry. So that we can feel at ease in the spaces occupied by all the arts that appeal to the sight, and get from each or any what setting right we require. Perhaps in the way that you think of your drawings, in the way that you make your first drawings in black and white; first, perhaps, from casts, then from the model placed in a light before you, which allows you to see it more by light and shade than by its local colour, 170 LECTURE V that is to say, by that flesh-colour which it has in common with all other flesh, you have learned to think of your impression of sight as having been first a sight of black and white, or a sight of form. Let us remember our consideration of how, on the contrary, this representation by what we call a drawing, of light and colour and shadow (determined by an edge) was recognized by us as being, on the contrary, a final synthesis a sort of abstraction ; that you or the savage be- gan at the final end, which was a brief and violent summing up of all seen, in the least real of all possible expressions. You will remember that the savage, by two long lines, which he swept from an imaginary central one and in opposition, gave you a shape of a fish, that is to say, with two black lines which did not exist (for there are no black lines that con- stitute a fish ; there are only the edges of the place which the fish occupies and a re'sume' of thousands of these edges in one) ; that these two or three lines represented a surface brilliant MAIA, OR ILLUSIONS 171 and shining in colour; covered with hard scales, flecked with dots and patches; glistening with muscular action ; itself placed, if in the water, against a moving luminous background and in- volved in it; or if thrown, let us say, upon the grass, against a background formed of multi- tudes of dots and lines of light and shadow, and patches of transparency, of a colour as uni- form, as soft and rich as the surface of the fish was many-coloured and iridescent. Can anything be more abstract, as I showed you, than the fact that these two things that do not exist give you the image of the fish? provided always that you have seen a fish. Had you never seen one, or anything like it, that fish would not exist in this drawing. Sup- pose, on the contrary, that we could paint in some approximate way after nature; and give the colours, the brilliancy, the light and shade which make the appearance of the creature and determine its form determine the way that we think it would feel if we put our hand on it and that behind that fish we could render ade- 172 LECTURE V quately the surface or surfaces of the grass. Then, though you might not have seen one, you would be incalculably nearer the certainty of the reality of the meaning of these marks. Roughly, I might say, you would see the fish, and recognize some sort of animal unknown to you. You have probably been well taught I may say certainly; but many of us have not been well taught; and we are often made to be- lieve that the first objects that our memory of sight recalls and hence reproduces are not colours and light, but really form. And we are told so because with most men colour does not seem to be the thing of most interest. That may be perfectly true it may be perfectly true of the artist, even of the artist of highly organ- ized temperament and of great culture ; but the two questions should not be confused. Our sen- sation is one thing and the conscious interest that we take in the sensation is another; as it is we who do the thing, our record being a record of our interest in the matter, if we de- light in this or in that, and we make a record MAlA, OR ILLUSIONS 1*73 of it so far as we are artists, we can be satisfied ; as it might be if, instead of taking an interest in the representation of the thing, we took an interest in its classification, as scientific men might do, nay, even in its profit to us by sale or purchase, as merchants do. But its sensation to us, which we translate into what we wish, is a luminous coloured sensation. Of course I refer to the eye which is sensitive in what we call the normal way that is to say, is not colour-blind. Whether the eye of man was originally so, or has gradually become so, and the deadness to colour impressions of a part of the retina is a remnant of an earlier, less cultured stage, is out of my line, and practically has very little value ; like the question, whether the savage, or the ancient Greek, who was perfect in all things but that, would have less perception of colour because he did not carry the whole dictionary in his mind. The fact that the colour has no name to the person who recognizes it, is of no consequence to us painters. We all know that we painters find 174 LECTURE V it extremely difficult to tell the names of colours to outsiders, while we can reproduce them in a way that they cannot. So with the savage whom I have met, and whose vocabulary is so slight that red and purple and orange have a similar name, the slightest change of colour in fruit or leaves, or the plumage of animals, or the scales of fish, or the surface of the sea, or the moisture of the atmosphere, is detected, in a way to make even a careful painter ashamed of his inadequate colour training. As the savage, after all, uses his observation of these colours for another purpose than the enjoyment of the colours themselves, to him they are indications rather of the form or of the state of the thing ; and possibly, if I were to examine him, he would rather give me an account of it hi such a way as to eliminate the colour and describe tbe form. We only fix our attention upon our sensations insomuch as we can use them for the knowledge of exterior objects. Hence, for a good many of us, notwithstanding that we recognize certain things only by the variation of colour, MAIA, OR ILLUSIONS 175 we only think of them as in their usefulness to us. If, for example, the fruit that a boy took up were deficient in colour, and in that way showed him that it was not ripe he would eat it all the same, I know, but he would know very well what it was that he was eating ; and we who are no longer boys would reject it. If, for example, I meet a friend whose colour strikes me as altered, who is pale, yellowish, whose lips are no longer red, whose hair seems less rich, what I say and what I think is, "He is ill." The sensation of colour that I have received is translated into an intellectual descrip- tion ; but this very fact, we will see, proves that I have stored away a whole treasure-house of colour impressions, since I compare them again with the colour impression of the moment. The illustrations that I could give would be so numerous, that I shall only call up that one which occurs to me from having looked, a moment ago, at the surface of some china, which surface, by its colour and light, by the exact value, as we painters call it, the amount of 176 LECTURE V brilliancy, and suggestion of material by that exact brilliancy, decided for me the question of its authenticity. The question of the pleasure that we take in recalling this freshness cf the first impressions, all made through light and colour, is the question of the pleasure one takes in painting; that is to say, in abstaining from abstraction, and trying to give a full result in keeping with the wish of recording the face of the world, in such a way that the actual voice of nature, in its first call to us, is still fresh in our memory. Examples might help you : might mitigate the harshness of such general statements as the pressure of time obliges me to make. Were I carrying out these readings (as they well might be carried out) into long talks, where the hazards of the moment would allow me to modify the use of examples, by cautioning you in regard to what part of my examples I wished you to see, I should state nothing without some reference to a thing of present sight. But no museum would be large enough for one side, and on another I MAIA, OR ILLUSIONS 177 should need the scientist's apparatus to make you follow delicate experiments. I say this because it occurred to me, but a moment ago, that I might use some painting from above, in the Museum, to draw your atten- tion to the fulness of my meaning when I speak of painting and of the painter in the strictest sense, the more modern one and speak of what painting gives in its greatest power of mirroring the world. "We are speaking as if we were judges, and as I said to you, we are speaking of some one of our family, when we discuss any artist and ap- preciate him as if we were his equals. Let us take some painting by Mr. Bonnat. If you will remember how we described the methods of the engraver, his patchwork and crossed lines, you can put yourself perfectly in the place of the artist accustomed to such illusions of sight in black and white, who will see nothing but what his eye is accustomed to when he notices that Mr. Bonnat models fingers and hands and flesh, with strokes and markings of black like those of the engraver. 178 LECTURE V As I told you, for him they melted in his eye at once ; while another artist, less accustomed to reduce things seen to black and white equations, would see these tones more separately, as if they had been transferred to a painting from an engraving. You might tell me that you saw things so, if you explained to me while you were copying the method of Mr. Bonnat. As far as you can see anything, you might perhaps go so far as to tell me that you saw things modelled in that direction ; that is to say, that these curves represented curves which de- scribed the sense of modelling. They are half- way between the intention of a painter and a sculptor. Admire Mr. Bonnat for his success in using this other method, without injuring the meaning of his work ; but when you think of what you see, remember better, as a record of absolute observation, the splendid portraits by Rembrandt which Mr. Havemeyer once loaned to the Museum. There, naively, like a child, like a great man, like a Shakespeare in prose, Rembrandt filled in MAIA, OR ILLUSIONS 179 every space, as if he had never known any method of any other art. Flesh tone followed flesh tone, and tints of clothing and of hair, of fur, of linen, followed each other in a mosaic of adjustment so perfect as to make the French painter look like an engraver in colourless material. Of course there is injustice in the actual words that I use ; between the two men there is no comparison as painters, but there is as seekers after character, as placers of the individual human being before you. Hence Mr. Bonnat loses nothing by the photograph ; sometimes even he is better there, or in the engraving, the birthplace of certain parts of his manner of painting. The functioning of our perceptions of sensations of the very simplest character is so automatic that it is not often possible to make their existence evident to every one. In a general way, as we all know, we conceive with most trouble that thing the possession of which is to us the most familiar and the most certain. The actions of our organization are so much ourselves that we certainly never realize in action their enormous 180 LECTURE V complication and their possible subdivision by analysis. From the point of view of a painter, then, the painter as I at first defined him, the painter of our day, the artist anxious to analyze in the construction of his work, as he synthesizes in the effect of it upon us, what we see first is not form, but lights, colours ; colours that contrast, and colours that are broken or mixed. The sensation of coloured space or extent leads for the painter to that of a solid image, and his work of art is what has been called an equation of light. However abridged and transposed is our rep- resentation, we are urged to it through a desire to enter into the intimacy of nature ; and in establishing that relation, we have to bring in the use of faculties which we divide, when we try to classify them, into faculties of per- ception, attention and memory. Our organism records impressions afyer the original excitement of them has passed. Consecutive images persist for a time, and through this persistence of cult- ure by us our faculty becomes stronger. Even MAIA, OR ILLUSIONS 181 in what we suppose to be inattention, in what we call absent-mindedness, memories are read- justed which we recall afterwards, and we say, " I remember now that there was such and such a thing." Or even we may say, " There was just something I don't remember." We readjust, perhaps with greater difficulty, things that we owe to our visual memory. If it were possible to compare music with painting, we should feel convinced that it is easier to recall the details of a piece of music than of a painted composition. Any one can notice even ourselves, the painters how much sooner we can remember a melody than we can recall with similar certainty the arrangement of a painting. With each of us, also, the intensity of what might be called our sight, that is to say, the strength of the momentary impression and the later recrudescence of the same, through memory, varies extremely. With certain eyes the colour space, with others the edge of that space, the outline, remains more distinctly. With us, the use of the hand, which translates into 182 LECTURE V muscular energy the attention given by the eye, is the process which records our memories, and which to a great extent recalls them to us forces them back, through some extraordinary connection. The hand would then have a special memory, and later I shall draw your attention to it. You will remember how we clearly saw that drawing from life is an exercise of memory. It might be said that the sight of the moment is merely a theme upon which we embroider the memories of former likings, former aspira- tions, former habits, images that we have cared for, and through which we indicate to others our training, our race, the entire educated part of our nature. It is so much so that this memory of the more conventional side of our artistic feeling is organized more easily than that of the colour and light, that is to say, the real momentary impression that we receive. For hundreds of artists who have done great things in the record of their teaching and their love of abstractions of line, for instance, there MAI A, OR ILLUSIONS 183 is not more than one who has recorded for us the magic of colour, the mystery of light. In other words, the man of line is far less rare than the man of light. Could we devote some special time to it, we might consider how we are so accustomed to see with our two eyes that it is difficult for us to get a representation of what the single eye would do. In the rapid review of the tech- nique, if I may so call it, of artistic vision, we shall be obliged to put aside any present con- sideration of this question of the manner in which we make out of these different sights a single sight ; and how, in reality, with them both, we never see simply. But you can recall how the single circle of each side of the opera- glass merges into an oval ; how with one eye we realize a greater depth ; how with two we broaden our sight; how with the habit of seeing surfaces larger with two eyes than with one, we exaggerate the size of smaller objects ; how we disfigure with the two eyes a small square, for 184 LECTURE v instance, which seems to us higher than it is wide, as long as we fix it, while it becomes wider as we see it from the side. It would certainly be of use to us to go through the question in a lengthy way, because, though the artist has worked from the beginning without help of such analysis, still all reasoning about his use of this first necessary tool, the eye, will give him the advantage of a sort of gymnastics, a sort of hygienic exercise, which may occasionally help him in moments of doubt, or may, on the other hand, reconcile him with those difficulties which arise from his constitution, and which he might otherwise ascribe to the objects outside of him, whose adequate memorial he desires to preserve. Or else he might imagine that he had more special difficulties peculiar to himself, and lose that directness which is one of his greatest charms. But he might be relieved, for instance, from being troubled too much at finding that one eye sees colour in a different way from the other, and asking himself which one is right. Or, as you were probably taught at first, he will MAIA, OR ILLUSIONS 185 know that the photograph, which is of such use to him, which helps him out of so many difficul- ties, by preserving memories of sight that he cannot remember, by its cold-blooded indiffer- ence, by its sudden perception of fleeting acci- dents that the photograph gives him only an image seen by one eye. And as to the very capacity of sensation, we know how much that varies with each personal factor, with age, with our habit of noticing, with the way we, feel at the time, and with our practice. He who has learnt to work in a faint light ends by seeing as clearly as he who works in much light ; although the outside light be not the same for each. And, conversely, you may have noticed that the landscape before you, which at first is so radiant with light as to contrast strongly in your mind with the tone of the objects seen within doors, assumes, after a time, greater depth of colour, a greater amount of modelling, consequently a greater proportion of shadow. So much so, that working a whole day in the sun- shine enables one to consider the depth of colour- 186 LECTURE V ing as of equal interest with the brightness and intensity of light which was the first impres- sion. 1 Need I speak of the illusions produced by the contrast of a colour ? Need I go into the diffi- culty of adjusting that relation between the oppo- sitions of colour and our eye, those it detects in nature, and the necessity that we have to repro- duce these analogies, to reinforce them or to weaken them, because the luminous scale of nature is not enclosed within the limit of our pal- ette, and light has to be translated into pigment? These complementary analogies are felt by us where they are perhaps only indicated or supposed to exist in nature. 2 Here what I should like to 1 You will remark that this fact widens enormously the range of the plein air, "out of doors" rendering between extremes of depth and lightness. 2 My friend, Mr. Roelker, has pointed out to me the following extract, which confirms our perceptions of the early instinct of artists as such. "The artist could derive little advantage from that theory by which the optician, with his negative efforts, explained the phenomena which took place. For although he and the other spectators admired the bright colours of the prism and felt their harmony, yet it always remained an enigma for him, to know how to distribute them among MAIA, OB ILLUSIONS 187 have would be the knowledge of a lecturer whom you heard last winter, whose name is everywhere associated with the question of colour. With such a great dictionary of information, of experiment, I should be able to touch lightly on the subject, and yet to give you the suggestion of what you have either read about, or will read about when you wish to be thoroughly informed of how we feel colour, and through it see, in a more mascu- line way, the means of recording it. I refer to Professor Rood of Columbia College, whose writ- ings were a consolation to me long ago, in my the objects which he had formed and arranged according to certain conditions. "A great portion of the harmony of a picture depends upon the light and shade ; but the proportion of colours to light and shade was not so easily discovered, and yet every painter could soon see that his picture could attain perfection only through the combination of both harmonies, and that it was not sufficient to mix a colour with black or brown to make it the proper colour for shading. Many experiences, in conjunction with an eye favoured by nature, the practice of feel- ing, expression, and the example of great masters, brought artists to a high degree of excellence, although they could hardly communicate the rules according to which they acted ; by looking at a large picture gallery, one can easily convince oneself of the fact that every master has had a different way of handling colours." GOETHE, Contribu- tions to Optics, 1791, Introduction. 188 LECTURE V attempts at disentangling what was right in my instinctive apparitions. And not only must the painter gather together these effects of light, both those he thinks are objective, that is to say, are discerned by him outside, and those that are subjective, that is to say, are translated through him, by his own exaggeration or his own diminution in rendering, but he must also obtain the effects of relief in the same way, by simplification or exaggeration. On a flat surface he must give the sense of space, and accommodate the two visions, of the one eye, for which he has perspective, and of the two eyes, which cannot be traced for his uses by geometry. Representation then, in comparison of the phe- nomena of light, demands reflection and practice. I believe that Kant has said that " our senses do not deceive because they do not judge. All illu- sion is to be charged to the intellect, which often misjudges the material offered by the senses." Which otherwise might be transposed into saying that our senses do not present the ultimate phe- nomena, more especially the sense of sight; for MAIA, OR ILLUSIONS 189 there are no luminous rays that are blue or red or so forth ; but certain rays, of different wave-lengths, wake up within us, through some mechanism of our organization, a sensation of what we call blue or red. It is for our intellect to know these phe- nomena and to put them in order, to weaken them or strengthen them, to enforce and illustrate them, to ennoble them through our admiration, and through that love to make them beautiful. Let us think of a few of the appearances of things which misinterpret other facts behind them. The list is endless. Equally lit, a long-waved colour is more im- portant than a short-waved colour. Frank com- plementary discontinuities, as, for instance, black and white, bright red and deep green, may empha- size the division of coloured spaces, but render all the more difficult the comparative gauge of their real dimensions. To any one accustomed to draw, in the usual way, a colourless object, it will be difficult to avoid mistakes when translating into 190 LECTURE V black and white a model of one complementary colour placed against its complementary back- ground. A long rectangle, tinted in its upper half by a long-waved colour, in its lower half by a short-waved colour, will appear larger above than below. The space comprised between two light lines upon a dark ground will seem narrower than the same space enclosed between two dark lines on a light ground. The distances between the stars seem to diminish when the moon shines in the sky near them. Two black lines which appear parallel traced upon a white ground, no longer seem so if the end of one be tinted with light red, and the extremity of the other with dark blue. Two red flowers on a green ground seem nearer, one to the other, than two blue flowers ; the light gains in size and the dark loses in proportion. These illusions which we recognize, which pre- vent our giving to ourselves an accurate account of certain properties, certain qualities of the things that we look at, we can ourselves use in the illu- sion that we now in turn shall create in our work MAIA, OR ILLUSIONS 191 of art. The last examples that I have just given you, if you have had any practice at all, will occur to you as means of increasing the appearance of space or of depth, or of narrowing and diminish- ing the same, and these means have been used by painters from early times. And here I remember a deception of sight that I have occasionally referred to with my pupils, when they insisted that they were able to judge absolutely of the size or length of some given space or line. Here are two lines, which you see are of equal length, and at the extremities of each I draw two angles meeting them in opposite ways. As you see, our first lines have changed their length; and what is strange, when I wipe the first lines out, the spaces which both of them traversed still continue to appear different in length, though we know they are not. 192 LECTURE V This is again a double lesson. You can see the variations that in your work which is an imita- tion of the effect of nature you can produce, without the alteration of what might be called real dimension ; whether this be by modelling or by opposing lines. When you cheat in your little world of imitation, you do not cheat any more than the great world about you deceives you. And for a moment yet I will detain you on the edges of this endless field of illusion. Our sense of certain sensations becomes dulled by habit. In our usual attitude we feel colour and size less intensely; but should we displace the eyes, should we throw our head to one side, the colours become more intense, more driven in, one upon the other ; and the heights that we see with, the usual vision change with this displace- ment. 1 Often you have been surprised by what seemed the newer beauty of the landscape, the mountains, the sky, the cloud above, reversed in the mirror of the lake. The whole scene reversed 1 Very recent experiments testify to a real change in the colour- and form-fields. MAIA, OR ILLUSIONS 193 is reinforced also, the gradation of colour, the sense of modelling, the sense of retreat of the upper surfaces of leaves upon leaves, the receding flanks of the mountain, the more evident poise of the cloud in mid-air. And notice that in all your delight, you have thought of it as a painting. So also we are deceived because we know, and things in the distance retain somewhat the size that we know they have ; as in the painting of the early masters the human figure keeps, even in the distance, the proportion of its natural superi- ority. In faint lights, in the twilight, in the fog, the importance of objects that we desire to see makes them change their apparent size, and de- ceives us as to what they are. And we are deceived but that you do not know as I do hi the spaces and sizes of the landscapes of our childhood. When we see them again, they are measured by another scale. We do not know if all men see with an equal scale ; ;md we cannot even know whether the image that we receive ourselves remains alike from its first apparition to our losing it. 194 LECTURE V No light is immovable; and it may be said that to reproduce life is to reproduce the fluctua- tions of the movement of light ; whether it be the glance of the eye, the play of the smile on the lips, that expression so visible, so evasive when fixed by our eye, of intellectual capacity, or again, the movement of the body hi gesture, or the strain of muscles in action. Still life, as it is called when thought of as art, is still nature animated ; for the slight move- ment of shadows, the glistening waves of air, the shadowing of clouds, are all expressions of movement; and, indeed, is it not because of this that at certain moments, when the change is slow or gradual, we feel as if the surface of nature slept? We see a number of points of light that are joined, apparently one to another, as making a continuous line, as we see in more exaggerated cases the line of fire described by a torch that is waved, or the straight lines given by the fall of drops of rain. For the eye which sees, the bird that flies has more than two wings; he MAIA, OR ILLUSIONS 195 may have four. The horse at full pace has more than four legs; he has at least eight. It is for us to adjust this multiplicity of sights, and in some way render the appearance of con- tinual fluctuation. Hence, to many painters to those who have been especially fond of life, of animation, for whom action and passion have been of most importance, or who, like Rubens, have insisted beyond everything upon the living- ness of their self -created world comes a fear of petrifying the figures that they paint, by too sharp and rigid renderings, and they try to avoid sug- gesting that their eye has been able to follow in quiet all the details which they had before them. So also, very often, the intimation of an unfin- ished sketch, the help given to the illusion in the suggestion of movement by the retaining of more outlines than one ; by the artist's not effac- ing slight variations in these outlines, by even keeping sometimes the general plan indicated within which the attitudes are expressed. There is a great deal of truth in a statement 196 LECTURE V of Vdron, in his work on ^Esthetics. And many of you who have seen the drawings that he mentions can appreciate the meaning of his crit- icism. " Sketches," he says, " are in general more living than completed drawings ; and some years ago we saw rather a striking example of this. TJie Gazette des Beaux-Arts had published in fac-simile a certain number of sketches by Mr. Baudry, for his work in the Opera House. They had an animation and life in great part lost in the painted work. Gestures, however, were not wanting in the paintings of Mr. Bau- dry. One might even say that he had been prod- igal of them, and yet ' cela ne remue pas,' and yet all is stationary. All these personages, notwithstanding their long arms, their stretched- out legs, are fixed in an immobility all the more disagreeable because it contrasts with their sup- posed movements. Why," he continues, "such a disastrous transformation? On this account, because in the sketches these gestures were indi- cated by a multiplicity of neighbouring outlines, which, owing to this very neighbourhood, ani- MAIA, OR ILLUSIONS 197 mated the figures by marking their several move- ments that is to say, several successive attitudes, all perceived within the same movement; while in the one only and precise outline of the final rendering, this mixture of succession and of simul- taneousness has completely disappeared." Without insisting upon the excellence of his choice in this case, for Mr. Baudry was a most elegant and refined painter, there is something fundamentally true in these remarks of the French critic. Hence in the very movement of the brush, one wishes to see the sensation of movement deeply felt. Hence our annoyance at the crystallization of movement given to us in the instantaneous photograph, that makes of a sea of water a sea of hardened metal. I have connected, as you will see, the im- pression of sight with the action of the hand. The voluntary attention of the artist is trans- formed into muscular energy, ending in the repro- duction of images by the hand, and forms the first part of an extremely complicated process, 198 LECTURE V which even this motion of the hand does not fully discharge ; for there are still the controlling of possible errors by the sight, exercised again, and by that power of thought which is behind every- thing. The hand will even act, as it were, as we recognize in drawings that we make without our looking at them, even while we think of other things, or in the extraordinary way in which, when ordered, the hand will work while we converse with our model. The professional portrait painter in that way carries out most astonishing disassociations, when he draws out, for instance, the political notions of some sitter whom he is anxious to place at his ease, and seems to us, who are not in the secret of his interior life, more absorbed in conversation than in his painting. The hand, too, as we said before, has a cer- tain memory of its own, and works, as you will remember, more easily upon accustomed surfaces even such as are not facile ; as the delaying sand I spoke of, in which the young savages traced their images. We have all gone through the MAIA, OR ILLUSIONS 199 suggestiveness of a pleasant paper submitted to tools that we felt would suit us. We feel the materials responsive to what they are really going to express, ourselves. I told you that the very touch expresses yourself. It expresses either your being yourself, or your striving to be Mr. So-and-so. It expresses your great anxiety to repeat the movement of light in nature ; the manner in which your sense of form has been awakened ; your sense of the depth of things as they receded, of the distinct- ness or indistinctness with which you see certain parts of the luminous coloured spectacle before you. 1 It shows whether you analyze by separating or by grouping together your impressions ; whether you keep adding fact to fact, as in a catalogue, or whether you choose deliberately, or whether you subordinate, making one point you have detected in your sight more important than others, and letting others derive from it. It will look careful, and merely patient and attentive ; or again, as if 1 For we must not forget that painting represents not only what we see, but what we do not see. 200 LECTURE V you were impressed by the endless mystery of what you see. It may look cock-sure, as if you didn't find so much in things, after all ; or it may look as if you admired the beautiful swing with which you did things. And it will surely tell whether that is all you know, or whether you have a store of memories, only implied and not brought out. Hence the touch of a great master is something not to be rivalled, except with a similar equipment of memory of the eye, and an equally developed memory of the hand. Nor indeed have we attained the mastery of our execution until the hand can work almost by itself. Should you, indeed, attempt to copy the final work of a Rembrandt or a Velasquez, which is a final synthesis of all his manners of work, the result of an enormous series of memories preserved or rejected, should you attempt this, you will see that you have only been able to copy a part of the top of the paint, the look of the surface of the colour; and that even your move- MAIA, OB ILLUSIONS 201 ment of hand has not and naturally enough the ease that comes of extraordinary practice. Hence you will never wish to repeat motions that you cannot well (I shall not say fully) under- stand ; as if you repeated the action of the hands of the conjurer, without being able to accomplish his ends, his making you take the card he wishes, or his being able to draw out of your pockets things that you know never were there. But if you repeat his processes of study, with similar disposition of mind and body, then the action of the hand will come in normally, and have all the value of a gesture meaning some- thing. And in this amplification of the sense of the word touch, do not think I mean only the actual contact of a fraction of a second. There is no time in the work of art. The long processes of a Dutch painter, or a Venetian, are all one thing: the firm foundation of drawing; the graduated un- derneaths, as painters call them; the veilings of their washes, or half-opaque coverings of paint ; the glazings ; the retouchings ; the scumblings ; the 202 LECTURE V. d raggings of coloured substances, are all one thing, just as much as the single drop of india ink put on a kakemono by the artist of Japan. It is only another way of expressing the mul- titudinousness of nature, by different forms of synthesis ; and if you think that the Japanese manner of running a brush full of ink on paper or silk, is a short way, try it. In their schools they give many years a length of time which would appall your young Western minds eight years perhaps to get an adequate representation of the touch which characterizes the school. And, indeed, it might happen with them that one might hear what I have heard : " So-and-so of a couple of hundred years ago can no more be copied. The last man is dead who had the secret trans- mitted to him through all this time, and cultivated by him all his life. So that it is not to be hoped that any one will begin it all over again in Japan." Let us never be deceived by the slight rapidity of a few moments or a few years. In a supposed case, were a painter to devote all his life to one MAIA, OB ILLUSIONS 203 painting; could he do so; were he great enough to do so ; to make a vase strong and fine enough to hold these feelings of his whole age, he would only have occupied a little piece of time, dispro- portionate in relation even to the continuous ex- istence in time of the world he attempts to mirror. In the execution of his work the artist is brought, even by the mere mechanical progress of the work, to a recall of all his latent conscious- ness. In all that we do freely, in our perception of things, we are obliged to join together, at every moment, thousands of former visual memories, recent or very old, to the perceptions of the moment. From the first movement of the hand to the last even, as I said, from the first sight of the paper or the canvas on which the painter is to draw, every moment when he thinks of work, all the accumulated images come back to him, and have a right upon him. Some he will welcome, others he must reject ; what he has that is good of his previous education will be a source of strength ; where he has made mistakes, where he has been badly taught, where he has been incom- 204 LECTURE V petent or inattentive, in these very memories he will suffer later. In a certain way, what he is really entering upon is a discovery of himself in an order fatally marked for him. The block of marble of which Michael Angelo speaks, which contained all that the greatest artist could ever find, is himself. In the long run he may be sure that he will discover himself ; and the slow-grown genius is often not the least great. Hence the necessity of constant work ; hence the necessity of constant purification of our memories ; hence the use, not only of our own memories, but of the memories of others, such as are gathered about us. What we can feel sure of is that nothing has been done once for all that all the illusions, the realities, have not yet been reproduced through other illusions, and that no matter how completely all has been done, all the more chance for you to do it again : to make once for all, another time, the Runner, the Sower, the Thrower of the Disc ; to paint again, as for the last time, the great sea and rushing waterfall. That one window open upon the world through each great MAIA, OR ILLUSIONS 205 artist is closed for you, but out of all others you can look, and within their frame make your own picture of the world again. The very fact that it has all been done is enough to assure you that it can be done again, and done as never before. LECTURE VI SINCERITY SYNOPSIS OF LECTURE VI The contemplation of nature has moved the mind of man to ex- pression. Its contradictions make us realize in art an order made by us according to our reason. In the work of art man is the measure of all things. Meaning of the word design. Confusion in the work of art of methods belonging to different memorial systems. This confu- sion a blot in the logical balanced world of art, usually brought about by appropriation of the works of others. Self-righteousness and belief in made-up formulas. Dependence upon a grammar meant for other purposes. The formulation of practice as principle. Consequent dishonesty. Every complete record of sight must contain a record of our ignorance. The attitude of the child. It is absurd to copy the memories of others so as to pass them off as our own : it is profitable to copy them so as to purify our own. Donatello, Niccolo Pisano, Raphael, Michael Angelo, Rubens. As our art is composed of visual memories, or affected by them, so memories of thought outside of what affects handiwork will either elevate or degrade art. The subject is merely the place where we express ourselves. The sculptor Socrates, the painters Euripides and Pyrrho. There is no art without a craft. Value of all methods that can avail. Good language is learned by living among people who can themselves speak well. LECTURE VI SINCERITY IF before now I have sufficiently brought to your minds the quality of the memories upon which we build ; if we keep in mind how we work with prejudices of sight, or how often we en- tangle one matter of seeing or recording sight with another, it may seem that though we are always on the threshold, on the edge of origi- nality, that is to say of a personal solution of all memories in a unity, we can each have a very little of it, to leaven the mass with ; but yet that a very little of personal power will represent a great factor. In that way I could say again that all is to do over again ; and again that if it happened to you to have the extreme honour of re-inventing, you will have the delight of having made in v 209 210 LECTURE VI your own self the experiment of ages. Over that bridge the least variation will bring you into newer worlds. Always has man been interested in nature in a contemplative manner. I mean by nature what is outside of ourselves, man included, his mean- ing, his constitution, as well as the world he inhabits, its laws and its appearances. The en- chantments of nature and her disillusions ; the caresses and cares she has for us, her supreme indifference to our individual existence, have in turn moved the mind of man to expression. The struggles of moral good against the evil that reigns in the world ; the battle of will against blind fate ; the presence of the constant pain and sorrow which are the basis of life; the law of death for which everything lives, have in turn been spectacles to warm or chill. On this basis have rested the foundations of love and pity, of courage, of law, and of all the virtues. The contradictions of the world of existence ; its over-profusion ; its escaping at every point SINCERITY 211 from any fixed comprehension ; its suggesting the opposite; its constantly taking in our eyes the appearance of a world of chance, makes us realize in art another world, which has some rules, some order made to our stature, to our reason. In the made-up stories of art all is explained. They come to an end deliberately chosen ; every detail is used for some purpose of that very story; and when we close the binding of the book, we really come to an end. It is not so in nature : but in art the end, the meaning, is for us; we are the final cause; in the work of art "man is the measure of all things." Each form of art is a restoration of nature to what she should be; an emphasis of some hidden view that escapes us, otherwise, from the size of the entire world. So that in the forms of architecture we recognize, with the relief that we call the sense of art, the setting forth of a geometry, a proportion which the tangled world contains, it is true, but does not set out clear and unmixed, without contradic- 212 LECTURE VI tions, without hesitation and weakening. The faint curves are made into geometric ones; the horizontal and the perpendicular, which are ab- stractions, become now concrete one might say living; everywhere all is developed in an order implied within the idea of structure. At last there is no form in nature which does not sup- ply some suggestion of abstract form, and is not told of in some settled form whose final establish- ment is a creation of man. And so in the arts that connect with architec- ture ; which are mistakenly said to be derived from it, I say mistakenly, because the instinct of order, of repetition, of balance, of assertion and discovery of geometric form, is as evident in the pearl-bead bracelet of a savage girl, in- vented and used long before buildings were built, as in any form of what we call decoration. But we delight in finding some such arrange- ment in the face of nature herself; we choose our place for looking at her features ; we place ourselves so as to emphasize some of these ab- stract properties of things ; we so place ourselves SINCERITY 213 that we can most feel certain curves, certain per- pendiculars, certain horizontals, certain arrange- ments of triangular spaces. For a rough example, in looking at a waterfall, we may choose some place whence we can feel the under curve and the masses of the upper wave, their curves and breaking, and the return curves of the splashing water. We may take into our sight a tall cliff or a tree on one side ; so as to have the illusion of depth or height increased. And so for any other choice. Our way of looking at things is composition. So that it might be said that we compose in our very way of looking at nature, without ever thinking of any copy, any imita- tion of this appearance of nature in art. And we say that this or that is more beautiful, mean- ing that beauty is the thing that we love, as it takes form for us, through our choice. The following of this detection of a plan, which in its extreme shape, a sort of grammatical analy- sis, gives us the Moorish geometric decoration, leads us to seek also for what we call the line ; meaning the ornamental line which we think we 214 LECTURE VI discover, and which we discover for the purpose of bringing what we see a little closer to a de- sign; that is to say, in the original meaning of the word design, an intention, a purpose, a hu- man arrangement of the present for the future. The more strongly we feel this, the more im- portant the result of our work; because all the more does it insist upon that primal intention of reducing nature to art. That is to say, of insisting upon the law and order implied, a law not always apparent in a world full of acci- dents which we cannot reduce to order. Compare the fateful look of one of Millet's figures, with the accidental, haphazard appear- ance of a figure of what might be the same peasant doing the same thing, in the work of smaller artists if indeed it be quite fair to com- pare them, because not seldom the weakness of observation runs through every detail of the paint- ing of the smaller man. Not seldom the peasant himself, the theme of the picture, does not make his traditional gestures in a full and complete manner : as also, not sel- SINCERITY 215 dom, does the animal (who is, however, yet nearer to the law of nature) step poorly, stand poorly, make a deficient equation. The reign of accident, of contradiction, runs into and interferes with the government of law which we are looking for. Notice how in the reflection of the world of sound by the art of music, the musician does not seek to represent its possible violations, its breaks of harmony. So that Millet turned one day to a friend and said, " Do you do this motion for me. The peas- ants here cannot carry it out as it should be. The lines they make do not fill anything." Whenever I look upon the engraving of the draw- ing which he then made, I have the satisfaction of a standing lesson upon what composition means. 1 The hand of which we have spoken as having a memory of its own, follows these lines of our choice, until at length, almost of its own accord, it traces curves, and divides spaces which recall the order that we call ornament. All of you know this more or less, and you also know that even when your mind knows, the hand will not 1 The engraving (on wood) is by Mr. Pierre Millet, upon his brother's lines, and represents a ditcher. 216 LECTURE VI always obey. We have been speaking of compo- sition, and you see that the detection of its exist- ence in our impressions of nature accompanies more or less all full artistic sight. Roughly we can determine some of the preferences of its laws. The whole world of ornamental art is based upon them. In our more plastic arts the geometric law is more difficult to disentangle ; because our arts include the representation of that part of exte- rior nature where accident has its place more dis- tinctly ; where the energies of animal life may be part of the picture ; where moral and intellectual life may be implied. For remember that for us, just now, nature is all that is outside of our inner- most, unanalyzed self, and that the moral life ex- pressed in living beings is nature for us just as truly as plant life or crystallization of minerals. You will have remembered and kept steadily in mind our considerations when we have paused for a time in the discussion of memories of education, of training, of rule given to us from without, and their entanglement with the memories collected by ourselves, either in the remote or the imme- SINCERITY 217 diate past. We have also dwelt upon the confu- sion in the work of art of methods of interpretation belonging to different memorial systems. Such confusions are extremely frequent; they can be lived through, it is true, by a strong personality, by one who feels the fundamental rule, namely, that all methods are man's property, that methods are for art, not art for methods. Yet his needs are not necessarily yours, and if you have the least choice you cannot employ his without bringing out more fully in your work this irrational, contra- dictory side which may be all right in the world of chance, but not in the logical, balanced world of art. Strange to say, some of the greatest blunders, some of the greatest annoyances of sight, have been brought about by this error, this want of comprehension, have come in just where their authors were encouraged to feel that they had been obeying the law, nay, were proud and self-righteous about their obedience, or rather their testimony, and considered that knowing that they had the true faith, they had but to keep to the rule and shut their eyes. 218 LECTURE VI But though in this they were not different from many of other schools, who also think that the conscience of their own eyes need no longer be considered, they and all are in risk who forget that in art there is no collective salvation. Its theology is as cruel as that mediaeval view of the future which made Dante place popes and priests in the singing flames of the Inferno. And each man is judged by himself. You will remember that I referred, in a pre- vious lecture, to the evidences in the work of certain painters which prove that they retain a memory of colourless representations or per- haps I ought to say of black and white represen- tations of nature, within their other memories of the dress that nature always assumes, which is a coloured one. We called up our recollec- tions of paintings which looked as if studied from plaster casts or statues, and of paintings that represent movement fixed and frigid as the cast; of paintings wherein are preserved methods of black and white memories ; of engraving, of drawing with pencil or with crayon ; of paint- SINCERITY 219 ings where the entire surface, even the move- ment of the brush, transfers to your eye the sensation, not of a vacillating coloured atmos- phere, but of the steady, measurable world that lives in engravings. We made out the causes to have been the persisting memories of things already made within the immediate memories of things seen. It was useless to go further and to imply that the colourless representation is an easier and more measurable more commercial manner of carrying out the form, the appear- ance of a painting, so as to make it understood by many or most therefore more negotiable. We might also notice that, connected with this obsession in the way of having the colourless representation, already made, direct for us what is apparently our fresh perception, we may also suffer from an obsession of arrangements of composition as it is called, by which we single out certain arrangements, certain divisions, that we have already seen made artificially, and seek to impose them upon the face of nature, either that nature which we see at the moment, or 220 LECTURE VI the nature which we see in our minds, and which is the memory of outside perceptions. For example, there was a time when the very landscape painter, apparently, forced the arrange- ment of what he saw into a set mould already provided. Or else and it has lingered to our day he arranged what we call his imagined pictures into some similarly conventional division of light and shade, for instance, or of distribution of masses. Nor can we think that we can escape from such a fate merely because, in the studying out of the necessary realism of our made-up pictures, we feel confident that we have only recorded, as far as distribution at least, the impressions of the moment. And in such a matter as this I feel quite sure that for all of you who may be passionately fond of realism, who may delight in the thing as it is, who may avoid too much thought, for fear of endangering what you think is not thought, but impression, I may be sug- gesting a valuable caution. Those of you who are as fond of the extraor- SINCERITY 221 dinary work of Menzel the German as I am ; who, like myself for the last forty years or so, have followed with sympathy this very modern worker, may still have noticed how conventional, how artificial, is, very often, the framing if I may so call it of light and shade, or the arrange- ment of groups within which are included studies that, seen at a proper distance, make the photo- graph look careless in observation. Evidently, with such a man, this is the fragment of past early education which he has carried all along, which is not his own, which perhaps he may not see. In colour also there have been practices sup- posed to be principles, practices which were evidently based on the memory of some successful momentary arrangement. I do not know whether any one still remains who learned the principle of what used to be called the broivn tree ; but those of us who have known painters of the beginning of this century, or of the end of the last, can remember that there was a dictum of the studios which stood 222 LECTURE VI in the way of newer attempts that now them- selves seem conventional, attempts at intro- ducing the unbroken prevalence of tones like the greys and greens of trees and herbage. Therein, at one time, the connoisseur required that some patch of brown, of warm colour, some brown tree in a landscape, should restore the balance suggest what we can now understand to have been some feeling for complementary colour. The composition of colour in painting is a matter so important I mean that scheme of affecting the eye and the mind which has been so beautifully used by great and little artists that I dare only refer to it. One side of the question, however, has always struck me as un- explained, and that is that the succession, the inheritance of such means has been with us in the West always broken ; while in the East the tradition of the balances and adjustments of colour seems to remain uninterrupted. It is not that I cannot perceive the possible influence of the struggle in the West between SINCERITY 223 that tendency which took form in the Greek and the opposite tendency which seems to have been the genius of the northern races. A certain something came to bloom around the Mediter- ranean, rapidly, within a few lifetimes ; and ever since the world of the West has felt the power more or less. The Greek moved in the moving breath of the World. With him art was fluid ; but though his influence permeated the northern world, always that world protested, returned to something set as soon as possible, returned to arbitrary, savage, symbolic formulating, to pat- terns instead of the reality, to what looks like archaism. It is not strictly barbarism ; it is a holding-on to antique ways. The savage is con- ventional on principle, and often on religious prin- ciple. This opposition persisted, perhaps, far into the Middle Ages, and the turn of mind which I am considering on several sides to-day may be an atavistic survival. In certain great painters I might say it also of smaller ones, but I am thinking of Titian, of Veronese, of Rubens, of Delacroix 224 LECTURE VI the arrangement of colour has a similar effect in the painting to the arrangement of notes in music ; it is an arrangement of voluntary repeti- tion, of harmonizing which is not hidden behind the apparent mere representation of the fact. All the more, then, does it affect the mind, by sug- gesting, as music does, a certain direction of our feelings. The turn which the artist wishes us to give to the mood in which we shall look upon his work, our indulgence in the feelings of joy, of sorrow, of sadness, or of triumph, has therefore been called, perhaps not inaptly, the orchestration of colour. This is rare among paint- ers of the moderns who may have every excuse for not utilizing this tremendous force; because the faces, the sides of their interest in what they represent, may be so wrapped up in the accidental details of nature, in the chance happenings of light and shade, of expression, of dramatic action, of place, that these more arbitrary intentions might count too much count too much as they are able to control them. I say able to control them, be- cause, with most of the greater men, even of those SINCERITY 225 who have not visibly used this architectonic scheme, there is at least no contradiction to its principles, and very often a strong suggestion of their having been felt. But why is it so extremely rare among archi- tects, or among the artists of decoration, to whom especially these principles, even if only felt in the blindest way, have given, at certain times, a power of affecting the mind, which with the scale of their means is tremendous when compared with the smaller effects, that the weaker and smaller, though more intellectual, methods of painting and sculpture can merely hint at. In the past the architect has given a golden glow to the interior, to lift you up into the New Jeru- salem ; has made his walls sombre with black marble; has greyed them with stone that was neutral; has made his building clear-minded if one may so say. And what shall we say of the whiter material, which is intellectual when it emphasizes fine thought, commonplace and courte- ous when it is used for average expression ? Now why do we use all these things haphazard to-day ? 226 LECTURE VI One man likes this, another that, as if he were some little lady anxious about being in the fashion, and willing to go even against her complexion, provided she do nothing that others do not do. And at length architecture, the means of largest importance that we can use, takes on a dress of triviality ; like the madonnas of southern countries, dressed in paper and satin, with real costly diamonds, perhaps. But that is relatively excusable. I was thinking, a moment ago, of the extreme dignity of architecture as illustrated by a saying of Delacroix, that a great architect was rarer than rare, and consequently held the very highest rank as an artist ; because he had to find beauty in what is most irrelevant, usefulness. These were not the sequences I was thinking of, however, when I left off speaking about the mechanical influence of ideas of composition. Our processes, the processes of modern painters, are complicated, both in observation and execu- tion. You know that the modern painter, in the development of specialty, has long lost the clue SINCERITY 227 of his relations to decorative art, to work done in large buildings for fixed places, which work is to be lit as the walls happen to be lit, not to be carried about from building to building or from room to room, in a portable gilt frame. Among the painters or designers who have tried to take up this lost thread of connection with architecture, there was for a time, there is still, a fear of abandoning some clearly stated and commonplace basis of arrangement ; for instance, a method of putting something in the middle to emphasize the feeling of a perpendicular, and then something on each side to recall, perhaps, the case of divid- ing the remaining halves by some suggestion of a diagonal : that is, the pyramidal composition of the books and of the schoolboy in art. But Raphael did it, and so did Homer write in hexameters. Which is the important thing, the hexameter or the Homer? It is just Raphael's beautiful way of escaping the suggestion of grammar which is his charm. What you feel, as you look at his work, is the poetic feeling, the splendour of movement of the limbs, and all 228 LECTURE VI the freer composition which has covered the original, simple programme. To save his statement of such arrangements, to keep their arbitrary nature, to prevent your forgetting that he was a licensed grammarian, who had passed examinations, the modern painter or draughtsman was obliged to give to his figures, and other objects represented, a greater stiffness than he saw in nature, and thus another distortion of memories became and is still a habit. To think only of just so much and no more, in look- ing at nature, then wilfully to remember some ancient way of doing which seemed both imperfect and abstract (and about that I shall have something more to say), to continue artificially these contradictory memories for we cannot fully control the memory of actual sight this became the mechanism. Now, perhaps, of all things it is most difficult not to remember; to forget deliberately while one is receiving im- pressions. Were I told that it is impossible, I should not contradict. And another difficulty came in the way : the SINCERITY 229 older methods and appearances of representation were all synthetic, not analytic; were all more or less in the manner of that fish outline which I spoke of as done by the savage, all that he can do; not an elegant, civilized choice. This for both drawing, as we call it that is to say> choice of synthetic outline and also for model' ling and for colouring. Consequently the modern aesthete usually produced an unthinkable equation, His figures looked like the sections of an archi- tect's work ; for had he not tried to believe in the possibility of a single outline ? And his col- ours were applications upon that interior section. Note that we have seen the same sad blunder in the bas-reliefs which are modelled upon the outline of a section. I have quoted a criticism a criticism by a child of this modern method, in a paper pub- lished last July in The Century Magazine. It ran this way: "The light of truth fell upon the subject from the words of a child who had been listening to a talk in which I, and others wiser than myself, were trying to follow out certain 230 LECTURE VI boundaries which outlined true methods of deco- rative art, and which kept to the received in- structions of abstention from this and that, of refraining from such and such a reality, of stiffening the flow of outline, of flattening the fulness of modelling, of turning our backs on light and shade ; of almost hating the face of nature ; and we wondered that when our Euro- pean exemplars of to-day had fulfilled every condition of conventionality, had carefully avoided the use of the full methods of art in the great specialties of painting and sculpture, their glo- rious work had less stuff to it than a Gothic floral ornament or a Japanese painted fan. ' Father,' said the child, ' are you not all making believe ? Is the Japanese richness in their very flat work so different from what you can see in this sketch by my little brother? See how his tree looks as if it had light and shadow, and yet he has used no modelling. He has used only these markings of the tree and their variation of colour to do for both. He has left out nothing, and yet it is flat painting.' ' SINCERITY 231 Nor have the great workmen of the past, even the Egyptian, the painters of the Greek vases, left out things. The draughtsman like Caran d'Ache, the caricaturist, solves the difficulty in the same way, by the most decided use of synthesis, by making his line again like that of the savage by implying colour and form and modelling and perspective in his line. But this is a personal method, impossible to teach by analysis, or we should all study for it, and do it, too happy in getting to the end at once, which end is to express what you care for most by the simplest means that will avail you your personality, your knowledge, your experience; whether you do it in work that takes years, or whether you do it, like Caran d'Ache, in the line of a few seconds. In the division of our subject that we last dwelt on, we can discern the dangerous use of a merely analytic method in creative work. There is this danger, though none of us would like to avoid it, of much knowledge in certain matters which can be used in artistic representation, that they are assumed to be the objects of artistic representation. 232 LECTURE Vl The object of artistic representation is not your knowledge, but your way of using knowledge. Certain learnings of form, for instance, such as are possessed by the anatomist, have often been a something between the things we see and our- selves. And this difficulty is based on so honour- able a prejudice that it is only when we have so mastered our knowledge, great or little, that in comparison with our great fund of ignorance it seems but a trifle, when we again become our- selves, as it were, that we can truly be free of it and use it. Looking at the subject from another point of view, if we were perfectly honest and gave our knowledge pure and simple, and nothing more, as being perfectly honest, we should still be perfectly artistic. We should express ourselves hi that direction. Who has ever felt distressed as an artist by anatomical plates which described any- thing that he wished to know ? As long as every- thing about them was carried out for no other purpose than instruction of that one kind, has the most sensitive eye ever felt a want of taste SINCERITY 233 in them? Is anything more beautiful than the drawings which accompany certain purely scien- tific books of botany those in which nothing but the idea of the plant, the leaf, the flower, is expressed? The beautiful arrangement and com- position involved in nature's constructions cannot be more honestly suggested. Now suppose that the professor of botany should imagine that he has what the French call a charm- ing talent for painting ; for the representation of light and air, for the finest variations of colour, for all that is evanescent, fluctuating, irreducible to a set of lectures in botany ; and then that upon these knowledges he places the appearance of things which and notice this with extreme care is, both in nature and in art, a statement that we don't see everything that we know. Unless our man is at least as good a painter as he is bot- anist, I had almost said a better, there will be a veil of misstatement of fact floating in front of his record of knowledge. Many a time, when looking from the sea into the interior of some island of the South Seas, I 234 LECTURE VI have tried to guess at, to analyze the plan of the mysterious intricacy of mountain-lines confused in the ancient volcano-centres around which the islands are built. With each motion of the ship or of the whale-boat, these lines played one into the other ; edges of great slopes, smooth and green, or broken with precipice and wreathed in coloured mist, that trembled in the sunshine. What would I not have given to have their map clear in my head, like my friend the captain, or the engineer officer who accompanied me. And yet I said to myself: "My friend's knowl- edge of the geography (in fact, my own knowl- edge, if I had the map before my very eyes) would only be a help, and only a help to me. He could not paint this fluctuating scene, the light, the colour, all the things by which, through which, the scene was there." This knowledge of a map would have been an abstraction, an idea perfectly well represented by the fact that I could have looked down on the black and white lines which made this image of an abstraction, all dotted with figures of heights, SINCERITY 235 streaked with long Polynesian names, Oropaa, Tautira, Tev&, Porioufiu, names full of historical and legendary association, while the image that I saw before me blazing in the sunlight had no legendary meaning, had no heights marked upon it was, conversely to the flattened map, more like a vast curtain of lit-up cloud hung between the sky and sea. Would the fact that I knew the height in numbers of feet of the great waterfall that crawled down the cliff, help me to give its many motions, or the glistening rainbow cloud that hid its path half down? And do not let us forget what I put in as a sort of parenthesis, a few moments ago : in painting, in painting more especially than in drawing, but in drawing also, in every form more or less, in every form of art which represents any part of our record of sight, one of the most important elements is a record of our ignorance ; a statement that at a certain place our sight was confused, that one thing intervened to prevent our seeing another. It matters not whether that one thing be an actual object that I can take hold of, a rock, 236 LECTURE VI a tree, or a wall ; or a mere veil of mist, a glanc- ing of light, the interference of one shine of colour with another, the fact that my eyes' range has stopped at a certain distance, at a certain angle, in the same way as the furthest range of a tele- scope is still limited. Therefore, we painters rep- resent, as I think I said before, not only what we see, but what we do not see ; without that involu- tion there is no such thing as painting. I re- member how a well-known oculist, who had little experience with painters, tested the sight of a patient who was an artist. He was surprised at the artist's avoiding the traps that are laid to detect defects in sight, and at the artist's power of describing and analyzing what he saw, what he thought he saw, and what he felt he saw indis- tinctly or with uncertainty. Said the doctor, " I have only two cases of eyes with worse defects than yours, but I have never met any one who seemed to see so correctly." " That," answered the artist, " is my profession. My profession is to see correctly." It is this difficulty of the learned man that con- SINCERITY 237 fuses the mind of the small child. He too stag- gers through the world, on his little legs, laden with the enormous responsibility of the knowledge he has acquired. Look at his drawing; he has got a face turned half away ; he has put one eye in it, but he knows there is another. Where is he to put that eye that extra eye ? He has to get it in somehow or other; and he will put two on the same side of the face, rather than go against his knowledge ; which, as you see, like all knowl- edge, is imperfect. Over and over again, the child worries about the representation of the windows on the other side of the house, about what is hap- pening inside ; and I have seen drawings in which a child, troubled by the fact of the two legs of a man, which legs are on either side of a horse, has made his horse transparent, so that you can see the other leg. Otherwise, to him, it was a one-legged man. There is, in that small compass, again the phi- losophy of all our systems of representation. You see the difficulty that the child has in separating his thinking from his sight. He has, perhaps, by 238 LECTURE VI the time that he begins to draw, a very keen, a very delicate sight. As long as the colours that he sees can be used for use, for eating the fruit, we will say, for catching the bird, for knowing where the eggs are, he makes no mistake; though if the scientific Mr. Gladstone will forgive me he can- not name the colours which he uses any better than you or I, for the purposes just mentioned. It is only when he has to represent to himself the action of these colours upon himself, that, as we have seen, he becomes confused as to what is asked of him. I have known children quite un- happy at finding these difficulties, and relieved at having this weight of knowledge placed for them where it should belong. The child has explained to us this cause of error ; he can also show us again what we have been considering, the main intention of the work of art. When before he knows how to write or draw, perhaps when he first makes marks on the paper, he hands you an unrelated scribble, and says, "Papa," or "Mamma, this is a letter to say that I love you," there is the work of art in its first intention. And so SINCERITY 239 when later (if he have the tendency inherited from Heaven knows how far back, nor how near) he plunges rashly into drawing, like the savage, he often makes a synthesis before which many an artist will pause, in admiration at the number of impressions co-ordinated in some single line. He is really, at that moment, further advanced than when he becomes a student, and is obliged, by slow analysis, to separate all these impressions, to learn what they are the sign of; to accumulate notions of the different schemes of facts behind them ; the botany, the geology, the anatomy that we artists never know enough of ; to go through the never-ending accumulation of memories of the use of materials ; the aesthetic systems into which he is forced ; the contradictory admirations which entangle him; perhaps even such considerations as I am now obliging you to weigh. I have seen the process begin very early with children ; I have now, in corners and tucked away, drawings by children which represent boats and ships moving with the wind, and seen in various perspectives ; carried, also, by the motion of the waves ; all 240 LECTURE VI with an impression of nature and a relative accu- racy admirable both to the artist and to the man who knows about the sea and ships. Later, in the life of the same children, the drawings that I have no longer show the same ingenuous character. The ship is drawn in profile (in reality with a tendency to making a section) ; masts and yards and rigging are accurately outlined, as if the little draughtsman were counting them all over in his mind, and asking himself whether he remembered them all. The impression of art has disappeared ; in the case of some children, never to return. The artist can hope that in his fullest devel- opment he may become again as a child; and that as he looks, or we look, at his work, it may seem impossible to discriminate between what is the ingenuous statement of ignorance, and the consummate synthesis of knowledge ; what is the frank and fresh record of a momentary impres- sion, and what is the deliberate cumulative state- ment of choice. I am coming to the end of my reading, the last one of this series. You see clearly now why SINCERITY 241 I can say so little in this short space of time. Any one of my pupils, if really he gave out what he had noticed, could give us much more than the details I deal out to you amount to. How much more then, I, older and having lived longer ; and having longer memories of all I have learned and half forgotten, discarded, reserved, amended, apart from what I have believed that I saw myself ! So that I feel as if the very despair of the case would show us how I can only have pointed in many directions ; as from the central mile- stone of Rome, the Roman ways passed into the entire world. For our subject is the mirroring of the world by the means of our art. We have considered many directions, however. We have seen of what is composed our arsenal of means : our memories of sight acquired from others or made by ourselves. We have seen, as students, how absurd it is to copy the memories of others so as to pass them off as our own ; how profitable to copy them so as to learn from them and purify our own. 242 LECTURE VI We have seen how it did not matter if we did copy provided we did not copy the surface, which is the dress of another man. Thus Donatello, who was a greater sculptor and artist than we are likely to be, and who is to-day nearer to our own observations than ever, more fresh, more original than ever, studied and copied the antique. So Niccolo Pisano was awakened by copying the Roman Tombs. So Raphael, who appropriated all of antiquity that he could, who absorbed Perugino, who learned from Fra Bar- tolommeo, who imitated Michael Angelo. So Michael Angelo himself first imitated the antique. So Rubens, who never forgot the Italian, but to whom we refer as the type of a distinctly different national art. So the architect of the Renaissance, who thought that he was copying the classics. I might have decided many things for you : I might have said that this work of art was right, and that another one was wrong ; I might, as the Chinese philosopher phrased it, have divided by black and white, and hard and fast. As a gen- eral, I might have made war on an enemy's SINCERITY 243 country, and spared none but my friends. I might perhaps have shown you more distinctly that a white thing is white, and that a black thing is black; nor do I object to doing so in a proper place and time ; for of all things, what we begin to doubt of is the well-known ; and we can never be too sure that twice one is two but what is one and what is two ? I prefer go- ing through what we might see or what we have seen, in some sort of peregrination, hoping to find principles through some way of dividing what we have seen. All that older men can give is advice, and it is only in details that their experience can serve and be carried over into the future. Since our art is composed of memories and affected by them, so the memories of thought, outside of what directly affects your handiwork, will either elevate or degrade it. So obscure and unfathomable are our latent memories, which have accompanied our recording of nature, that we are unconscious ourselves of their preponder- ating influence with each of us individually. 244 LECTURE VI We can discern occasionally in some work of art, if we happen to have a clue, how much its peculiar turn, its importance, may depend upon causes that are not apparently included in the statement of its form. Nature, as we said, is everything that is outside of us, and our views and feelings about her problems can be ex- pressed even in the tracing of an outline : the subject, as it is called in catalogues of pictures, is merely the place where we express ourselves. Remember what I quoted from Michael Angelo's talk to Francis of Holland ; remember how, in the designs of Michael Angelo, you feel that you are in presence of a most serious mind, occupied with the end of life. He himself has lifted the veil for us, in what he has recorded of this con- stant preoccupation. Dr. Bode, the Director of the Berlin Museums, was telling me, this autumn, of his constant sense of Millet's religious turn of mind in the noble drawings of plants and flowers, which with other more clearly stated expressions of moral attitude, hang in Mr. Quincy Shaw's wonderful collection. SINCERITY 245 Sometimes the presence of strong feeling or high thought behind the work of art is ex- pressed in a sort of contradiction. It is some- times the hidden cause of a subtle disturbing charm that appeals clearly only to the few, until its existence has been long recognized ; though that very informing element has affected the looker-on without his separating it from the subject represented. As its absolute proof can rarely be given, except from some fixed knowl- edge, it must often be only a matter of divination or surmise. Not so long ago, I was speaking to a sculptor whose beautiful work is touched by a certain elegance which approaches sadness. We were admiring a beautiful female model ; and as he described with the enthusiasm of the artist, some particular delicate sublety of form that he proposed to embody at some future day, I no- ticed an expression in his face which made me ask him, "What else are you thinking of?" "Of the fact," he said, "that all this that I am doing and others are doing is but the labour of little insects, little living points upon this 246 LECTURE VI small speck of dirt, rolling in illimitable space, which we call the earth, and which is destined to perish unperceived in the multitude of worlds." Let us remember that among our ancestors were Socrates, the sculptor, and Euripides, the painter. Last week, as I looked over that col- lection of Hellenic paintings owned by Herr Graf, so many of them mere perfunctory trade- work, but all full of meaning, for reasons of historical association as well as of their methods and technique, I pondered in divided reflection. Anything made, anything even influenced by that little race of artists, the Greeks, brings back our mind to its first legitimate, ever-continuing ad- miration ; with them the floating Goddess of Chance took off her sandals and remained. I was amused at recognizing, in the work of Alexandrian or Egyptian Greek, some traces of method not far removed from the system of touches which we analyzed in the work of Mr. Bonnat ; marks and scratches painted in like memories of the tooling of a oestrum ; as SINCERITY 247 well as the manner in which the brush or the cestrum moved in the distemper and the wax, and gave the direction of modelling; just as it has always been with Western work, almost as it is to-day. Hardly a trace of the vase outlines remained ; the so-called modern idea of painting by colour, not by line, was there implied : and again, there is nothing new. The cestrum moving in the wax was used there as Euripides, the poet, used it, after he had given up the career of the athlete and had not yet come to write the verses of which it was said that they were " sweet as honey and the song of the Sirens." And Pyrrho, the philosopher, had also been a painter before he followed Alexander into the far East, and returned with memories of the Eastern con- tempt for the vain shadows of this fleeting world. He had met the philosophy of India, the thought of the East, and may perhaps have heard from the first Buddhists the doctrine which represents our life as one of constant illusion, in which nothing is safe to rest on, but the small 248 LECTURE VI momentary obligations imposed by our every-day relations, by pity towards others and the ties of daily duty. He had lived not so many years before these paintings which I was looking at may have been painted, and he, too, had used the cestrum and the hot irons and the wax. I remembered also that returning with the treasure of a philosophy, to his native Elis, where he served as high-priest, he passed his life quietly and humbly, helping the sister with whom he lived in household work, carrying garden produce to market, and sweeping the house. So, too, in the books of an Eastern author, who may have lived in Pyrrho's day, a Chinese philosopher and pupil of Laotzu, I have read a story with a similar moral. It is the story of the pupil of some sage, who at length attains Wisdom and a full comprehension of the law of the universe, about which he had fretted for many a day, anxious and uncertain. Then, when he has attained, as the word is, he retires to live at home, in silence, in ordinary duties; sweeps the room and feeds the pigs, says the text, SINCERITY 249 as if they were human beings. I confess to the extreme pleasure that I take in thus bringing the East and the West together, in noting that this lesson is as modern as any that I could learn ; that is to say, that there is little difference caused by the delay of a few thousand years, and that another colour of skin does not affect the general law. And so with us, pupils of wisdom, the attain- ment of any clear and high view of our art ; the dwelling in regions of noble intention ; the consciousness of having powers above the common, require all the more, as proofs of having attained, that we should have care of small things ; that we should cook the meals and sweep the house. It will be to us the proof of a sober certain holding of the higher principles of art, that we care for the small matters that allow us to express greater ones. For us there can be no details that are unimportant; there can be no art without a craft. (" II n'y a pas d'art sans metier.") Every- thing that gives us a better hold upon our humble materials, upon our use of tools, will be of con- 250 LECTURE VI stant interest. Our life as workmen will never be tedious; and we can take a childlike and healthy delight in our work and its success; our paints and their preparation, our brushes, our canvases, our papers and varnishes. We shall be curious of all methods that can avail; underneaths and glazes, preparations and retouchings. And the experience of others in all such matters we shall seek out and respect. We cannot tell how important the knowledge held by some older workman may be. And so, however full our philosophy or lofty our imagina- tion, we shall still care for the washing of our brushes for the sweeping of the house. Have you not all been pleased as painters by the respect of the Dutch school for good work ; for a sort of honesty and good faith in the very material offered ? Can you not picture with approval, even though you may smile, the Dutch painter of high finish, whose room is as cleanly and orderly as a laboratory when a test experiment is being tried ; who abhors dust more than any housekeeper can abhor it; who steals SINCERITY 251 on tiptoe into his studio, and almost withholds his breath from disturbing the air about his canvas ; whose paints, whose varnishes, are culled from all that the world of experience can supply ; who never loses a moment, and yet works slowly ; whose steps from first to last are all measured and thought out ; and who may even have, out- side of this well-applied use of time for art, some other more commercial occupation ? That man can stand in any presence : before the greatest of masters. Has he not testified that nothing can be too precious to adorn an idea that time does not exist in the work of art ? For on one side our art is as humble as on another side it is great ; and in this we but mirror again the world about us, whose great and small are but expressions of momentary relation, are but as plains and hills melting into one another. Terms are not final ; there is nothing in all creation which is not great; nothing which is not small. To carry out all these great ideas, small means are necessary. For this all men are not equally forceful, nor 252 LECTURE VI can all men be equally narrowed into the pro- jection of themselves through the obstacles that meet them in the realization of their ideas, and which to men of larger views, less obstinate, too sympathetic, might often mean opposing truths. It is possible, then, and I am far from denying or doubting it, that the defeated in life are not the most to be pitied. If there is one thing more than another that we can learn from the ideas which we have contemplated, it is that all that is most important is our attitude of mind, and that time is of no consequence. When I talked of failures, of carrtires manquees, when I deplored the destruction of such a great painting as Titian's " Peter Martyr," when I re- gretted that Lionardo, or whomsoever you wish to name, had not lived to carry out his famous work, my Buddhist friends in Japan were used to say that these interrupted influences had con- tinued through other worlds, as they had con- tinued for a time in this one; that the sum of wiiat we had tried for here, or had done, was to be added to what other worlds might see us SINCERITY 253 do. The fuel is consumed, but the fire may be transmitted, and we know not that it comes to an end. I hope and believe that my talks can have done 3 7 ou, as my students, no harm, even if they have done you no great good. Every time that I speak to you of what you may be doing at the moment, every time that I have the actual to touch, I feel surer than I can be in this process of analysis by language, of at least insinuating some knowledge of ex- perience, some application of principles, and of not being led to add what you have no use for yet. Children do not learn to speak because taught by professors of the art, doctors in language, but because they live among people who can them- selves speak. The means I may use, therefore, may not be the best ; the reasoning may be more or less faulty. The whole point is this : have you per- ceived through my language some ideas that may help you ; have you been able to look at 254 LECTURE VI ideas already known to you in a newer and fresher way, as we painters look at our pictures in the glass to see them differently ? "When the fish is caught, what the trap was may be for the moment forgotten ; when the game is caught, the snare may be forgotten." When the idea is expressed, the language may be ignored. "But when," thinks the artist, " shall I find a man to put aside language, with whom I may be able to converse ? For perfect argument does not express itself in words." APPENDIX Notes and Memoranda of Lessons A YOUNG man brings me a painting which in his mind is a representation of an idea. It is " The Vengeance " or " The Triumph of Justice," or something of that sort. He explains to me what he means by the different actions, and all the symbolisms that he has within the action even to the accident of his choosing the colours of the place, the scene, the figures and their drapery. I understand it to a certain extent ; but I assure him that it might be quite possible that a man should think, without being out, that Justice is not blue but red ; and another man might think that both were wrong and that Justice was green. From that I go on and state to him the main question, namely, that the plastic arts architect- ure on its artistic side, painting, sculpture are not the best forms for explanation and develop- 265 256 APPENDIX ment of a moral and metaphysical notion. From their very constitution they represent, not the ab- stract world which we make, but the world as it is, out of which we disengage, through morals and metaphysics, certain ideas which live only in the world of metaphysics and of morals ; they do not really live in the actual world as consti- tuted by an impenetrable Providence. It is the pride of morality the pride of metaphysics to disengage these ideas we think written all over everything, in our lives, in the things we suffer, and in the things we see. There would be no difficulty (any more than there is in meeting the ordinary facts of living) with these deficiencies of the arts, were it not for certain people who have not thought deeply on the subject, though they may have thought very deeply in metaphysics or in science or in morals. Properly speaking, these deficiencies are the honour of the arts, because they make really a full picture of the world as it is, without preju- dice. In them are gathered not only these ab- stract ideas that we distinguish and draw out, but NOTES AND MEMORANDA 257 all the supplementary ideas, all the supplementary facts of this world; and none of us can tell how much weight the unimportant and the accidental may have how necessary to the Providence of the world are the innumerable unexplainable con- ditions, the small facts which seem to contra- dict, the great things that deny, and the use- less, cumbersome filling in of the entire universe. Hence, the Japanese who looks at our work, and who himself, with his Chinese studies, has developed the relations of what art should rep- resent and can represent best is troubled by our allegorical and metaphysical representations in art. He understands them as far as they make a beautiful brocade or a beautiful ornament, or are clothed in fine human form ; but to him they are not thinkable. He cannot see why Liberty an abstract idea should hold a torch. An abstract idea holding a torch, and so lighting the world, is to him absurd. The figure is fine, let us say; as a figure holding a torch he doesn't object to it; but as an idea it is small not great. 258 APPENDIX He, on the contrary, resembles the Greek, who considered that there were essences or beings who were properly in charge, and influentially power- ful in the ordering of the world and in taking care of its many divisions, divisions of thought ; divisions of feeling ; divisions of physical existence. These he understands. My Japanese friend under- stands Minerva ; he understands the gods of his own religion ; he understands our saints our mediaeval feeling for the saints; but he cannot understand the abstract representation of the kingdom of science or of moral quality. Memorandum of lesson to Miss . This point to note : in a composition in which the cadence of a number of movements ends suddenly with a return of line upon itself, the sensation will be of an accumulation of move- ment at the end which will prevent this end being quiet or in repose, even if intended to be so. NOTES AND MEMORANDA 259 In a subject of pure composition in which the story is told by the arrangement of lines and figures, and by the truth of their motions, the background must necessarily be very carefully studied, as the least thing may throw the main lines off the equilibrium. Hence, naturally, the artificiality of backgrounds, hence often their comparative unimportance, meaning by that absence of detail, so as to reach the same end as a very successfully arranged composition of background, based on realities. Hence again the undesirability of introducing, as in one of the subjects criticised, an accidental naturalistic dis- tance of trees and rocks, such as a Central Park landscape; not only because its accidental lines may clash, but because in its very essence of having no excuse for itself, except that it was true, it clashes with the whole idea of the figure composition, which has no pretence to having really happened ; on the contrary, insists upon its being a well-selected artifice. Our imitative means are so limited that we not only cannot weaken them, but are obliged 260 APPENDIX to reinforce them. Hence, for instance, in paint- ing, the wisdom of reinforcing the sentiment of the picture by its general impression of colour or of light and dark. Hence the musical accom- paniment of a song which is in the direction of the meaning of the words. This is true in art in nature, it happens rarely. Whatever our own feelings may be, whatever tragedy we may be suffering from, even if it afflicted the entire human race with- out exception, the sky above might be more smiling even than usual, and no actual picture of the scene would give any idea of what it really meant. It is only by art that these con- tradictions are disentangled. If on the stage reality were represented, the voice of the actor in its most agonizing moments, in the tenderest passages, should be interrupted, should be wiped out by accidental noises, them- selves just as necessary as his such as, we would say, the passing of omnibuses, the creak- ing of doors, the talk of indifferent people. Hence in your composition of Narcissus, his NOTES AND MEMORANDA 261 being in an open field, in midday, with the nymphs coming up to him, is so much against the mystery of his retiring within himself to admire himself. Your figure, which rests, does not rest long enough. In the story it is a sort of contempla- tion, at any rate, a looking-down into water as a mirror, and cannot be a momentary, quick recognition, such as we get from a looking-glass which makes a perfect reflection, and which we are sure to get again easily. In the South Seas, the girls ponder very long over their reflections in the moving mirror, which is all they have. The same objection might apply in your com- position of the judgment of Paris, where all the figures stand in too open a pasture ; that is to say, too open as you have represented it, because it is more natural than the figures, and I am obliged to accept it as it is painted. Apart from the story as it is given us, it seems unreasonable, at least in fairy-land, that these goddesses should expose themselves to be seen 262 APPENDIX by any accidental passer-by who crosses those meadows that I feel are behind the trees. And if you tell me that they can appear and disappear at will, then I must feel that also in their make, their looks. In the old story, Homer, who knew them very well, seems to imply that they took great care of their dresses and adornments ; in fact, that they were very much like ourselves, only a great deal more so. As to the studies from nature : you are making a study out of your window on this very grey, rainy, monotonous-looking day, and as I sit down, taking your place by the window, I am not at first struck by the fact that your grey sky is too monotonous, more so than the brick wall which you are also copying. You have transferred to the brick wall the sense of colour that it gives you, and you have given to the sky the dreari- ness that one may feel by being rained on ; but now, as I sit here a little bit longer, I notice that the real sky is full of innumerable move- ments movements of shade, of form, of colour, NOTES AND MEMORANDA 263 of light, of transparency, many more million varieties than in all the many-coloured bricks of that wall. I own that one does not notice it at first, and that it seems difficult to prove when one looks at that big, wet sheet of cloud seen through the panes. But then what makes it so living, and the wall so dead? Why, simply that there is such infinite detail flooded in light that you cannot quite detect it. See, through the rain we at length notice two clouds of the sky moving past. They have been there all the time, but have come nearer to us, and at length we see them. I mean that we now see what their shape really is, but we have seen them all the time ; and now that we recognize them, we can discern the existence of many, many others far back towards the hori- zon. These last are hidden by the rain, or vapour further back in the distance, and behind them, made indistinct by vapour, spreads higher up a great mass of cloud. In front of everything is a veil of rain and vapour. So that this appar- ently dull, flat surface of sky is in reality ex- 264 APPENDIX tremely modelled and complicated. In fact, if you will reflect a moment, there is more model- ling in the sky than there can be in all the rest of the things you are painting, that brick wall, the old chimney, and the roof-tops. You see that they all look from wher$ we are perpendicular, if I may so say, compared to the sky, which curves over and which is staged back, below, in infinite gradations. Now you will see why so many paintings of the modern school make the sky look like a veil hung behind the landscape, as if the sky were on the same plane as the sides of the buildings that rise into it, and it had no other extension. If you go up to the Museum, you will see why the skies of Corot look like skies; you will see why the skies of the good Dutch painters curve over and are wrapped around the landscape, so that you see the clouds hang over you. The sky is a place in which the picture is. It is not something behind the picture. The fact that all these transitions and modellings are very delicate, far from the eye, usually not NOTES AND MEMORANDA 265 modelled by light and dark, but by transitions of colour, is what makes them difficult to render. You will again recognize in the Corots these variations of colour in what are called his greys, which his imitators render by some kind of mixt- ure qf black and white. The sky that we are now looking at is not only modelled by what we call light and shade, so delicate that we find it difficult to trace, but it is modelled by varieties of colour. As you will see, towards the horizon, I mean our horizon, because the tops of the houses are over our horizon, it is a little yellower. The clouds that float in it, of which we mainly see the shadows, are more violet; the upper sky, where the clouds are thinner, is greener, mean- ing that there is the faintest suggestion of blue, and, if you will watch a little, you will notice that all this mass of low cloud where it is thicker and makes shadows as it comes nearer to the brick buildings, seems to harmonize with them and you feel that there is a little pink or rosy hue, more or less everywhere. 266 APPENDIX Were the sky to appear suddenly, you might see these fog-clouds those that are low down, at least, look reddish. But as you have no con- trast to help you, your eye is not very sensitive to this. Only if you do not feel it, and give some suggestion of it, you keep wondering why your painted sky is so cold and tea-boardy. For notice again, that properly there is more colour in this grey sky, dull as it is, than in the red brick wall against it. This is the way you can detect it. Give me your palette. As you have it arranged, you have yellows and greens over to one side, and on the extreme other side you have violets and blues. In the centre you have dull reds and browns. Now as I mix the paints, you will notice that the sky tones are made from the fullest ex- tremes, the light yellows and pinks mixed with the violets and blues. It is true that they are blended, and make what we call greys. But the brick wall is represented by a very small space of colour on your palette. Let us say a couple of octaves, the distance between the NOTES AND MEMORANDA 267 others being enormous. You will see, therefore, that it is merely a dulness of vision that pre- vents our recognizing this extraordinary wealth of colour in the grey. And now I wish to speak to you about something which I will take up at odd moments later. Do not confuse paint and colour. Strictly con- sidered, all these colours on your palette, and any combination you wish to make of them, are vari- eties of any one colour in the key of which you wish to paint. Your palette can be looked at as a variety of blues, or a variety of reds. It is in the tone that you assume your painting in, that you will find the harmony of all these pigments. Should you, for instance, paint a large mass of any one pigment on your canvas without reference to any reality, and then insist that everything you paint from your palette shall be in harmony with that mass, and then you wipe it out, its influence will have coloured every stitch of paint or so-called colour that you have put in your painting. The result will be coloured, no matter how few the pigments you have used. 268 APPENDIX Theme upon studies from the nude. Necessity of a greater synthesis for the division of light and shade so as to make the general con- struction appear more evident, as it is with figures at a distance. Answer to a question in lesson to Miss . So you will teach me the tricks of the trade? Yes and no. My special point is to make you distinguish what is a trick of the trade, and what is a principle of art, especially the art of painting. That is the result that one comes to from the comparative study of many works of art, such as is afforded by museums. Many artists and almost all young ones confuse the means and the end. It is perhaps impossible that that should not be, as the great point of the worker in art is that execution should become almost instinctive with him; nor can he be easily a thinker. I think that I am unnecessarily taxed by those I am teaching by having to explain to them the ANSWER TO A QUESTION 269 use, advantages or disadvantages of ordinary materials, brushes, canvases, oils, mediums, etc. All these they ought to work up without me, and I can give them my experience, and that of others, about it. If we consider it from a serious point of view, as would be required from such a course as this, it might take at least " several tens " of lectures, so that it must prac- tically lie out of our scheme except as helping to explain occasionally, and ease the difficulties of a student. For example, there have been painters modern painters to whom the use of bitumen was so important as a help that with- out understanding this fact and its connections, we have no adequate explanation of their paint- ings, and of how they came to see bitumen in nature because it was convenient. Just as to-day a great many people see white lead, which does not exist in the atmosphere, any more than bitu- men. Remember and remember again, and when- ever you are in doubt, remember that pigments are not colours, nor light, nor air, nor shade, nor distance, nor atmosphere. 270 APPENDIX Remark to another pupil in connection with this. Pupil. " I can't help painting very white and the flowers look very white to me. I don't see how they can be whiter. But I think the frame doesn't suit. It leaves the picture flat and the flowers don't go back." Answer. " Let me see the frame off from the picture. Now please notice that when I put it in front of the flowers which you are copying, they seem to keep their place just the same and do not stick out of the frame. I think it safer to assume that the picture is wrong and the white lead also. In fact, it is because they are white-lead colour and not white-flower colour, which is a very different thing, that they refuse to take their place behind the frame." A NEW AND ENLARGED EDITION. PEN DRAWING AND PEN DRAUGHTSMEN. THEIR WORK AND THEIR METHODS. A STUDY OF THE ART TO-DAY WITH TECHNICAL SUGGESTIONS By JOSEPH PENNELL. With over 400 Illustrations, including many Examples from Original Drawings by Sir F. LEIGHTON, Sir J. E. MILLAIS, Sir E. BURNE-JONES, F. SANDYS, F. SHIELDS, E. PINWELL, W. SMALL, F. WALKER, MAHONEY W. NORTH, E. A. ABBEY, HOLMAN HUNT, A. PARSONS. Demy 4to. Bound in Buckram. $15.00. " One can hardly turn the leaves of this sumptuous volume without giving vent to repeated exclamations of surprised delight. It is a treasury of faithful specimens of the work and the methods of the artistic wielders of the pen, and a study of the art to-day, with abounding technical suggestions." Boston Courier. " It is indispensable to the artist and almost indispensable to the man who loves books." Commercial Advertiser. "As representing pen illustrative art it stands unique and alone." Boston Transcript. THE MACMILLAN COMPANY, 66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK. This book is 01' > l Mt J~>* stamped bdow 'ART. LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY Los Angeles This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. QLDE UCLA-Art Library ND1150L13C L 006 248 495 1 A 001 231 360 UNIVERSITY of CALIFORN1 AT LOS AAGELES LIBRARY