On the Old Road Volume I Part 20

78. Do not think I deny the greatness of Rembrandt. In mere technical power (none of his eulogists know that power better than I, nor declare it in more distinct terms) he might, if he had been educated in a true school, have taken rank with the Venetians themselves. But that type of distinction between t.i.tian's a.s.sumption, and Rembrandt's Dissection, will represent for you with sufficient significance the manner of choice in all their work; only it should be a.s.sociated with another characteristic example of the same opposition (which I have dwelt upon elsewhere) between Veronese and Rembrandt, in their conception of domestic life. Rembrandt's picture, at Dresden, of himself, with his wife sitting on his knee, a roasted peac.o.c.k on the table, and a gla.s.s of champagne in his hand, is the best work I know of all he has left; and it marks his speciality with entire decision. It is, of course, a dim candlelight; and the choice of the sensual pa.s.sions as the things specially and forever to be described and immortalized out of his own private life and love, is exactly that "painting the foulest thing by rushlight" which I have stated to be the enduring purpose of his mind.

And you will find this hold in all minor treatment; and that to the uttermost: for as by your broken rushlight you see little, and only corners and points of things, and those very corners and points ill and distortedly; so, although Rembrandt knows the human face and hand, and never fails in these, when they are ugly, and he chooses to take pains with them, he knows nothing else: the more pains he takes with even familiar animals, the worse they are (witness the horse in that plate of the Good Samaritan), and any attempts to finish the first scribbled energy of his imaginary lions and tigers, end always only in the loss of the fiendish power and rage which were all he could conceive in an animal.

79. His landscape, and foreground vegetation, I mean afterwards to examine in comparison with Durer's; but the real caliber and nature of the man are best to be understood by comparing the puny, ill-drawn, terrorless, helpless, beggarly skeleton in his "Youth Surprised by Death," with the figure behind the tree in Durer's plate (though it is quite one of Durer's feeblest) of the same subject. Absolutely ignorant of all natural phenomena and law; absolutely careless of all lovely living form, or growth, or structure; able only to render with some approach to veracity, what alone he had looked at with some approach to attention,--the p.a.w.nbroker's festering heaps of old clothes, and caps, and shoes--Rembrandt's execution is one grand evasion, and his temper the grim contempt of a strong and sullen animal in its defiled den, for the humanity with which it is at war, for the flowers which it tramples, and the light which it fears.

80. Again, do not let it be thought that when I call his execution evasive, I ignore the difference between his touch, on brow or lip, and a common workman's; but the whole school of etching which he founded, (and of painting, so far as it differs from Venetian work) is inherently loose and experimental. Etching is the very refuge and mask of sentimental uncertainty, and of vigorous ignorance. If you know anything clearly, and have a firm hand, depend upon it, you will draw it clearly; you will not care to hide it among scratches and burrs. And herein is the first grand distinction between etching and engraving--that in the etching needle you have an almost irresistible temptation to a wanton speed. There is, however, no real necessity for such a distinction; an etched line may have been just as steadily drawn, and seriously meant, as an engraved one; and for the moment, waiving consideration of this distinction, and opposing Rembrandt's work, considered merely as work of the black line, to Holbein's and Durer's, as work of the black line, I a.s.sert Rembrandt's to be inherently _evasive_. You cannot unite his manner with theirs; choice between them is sternly put to you, when first you touch the steel. Suppose, for instance, you have to engrave, or etch, or draw with pen and ink, a single head, and that the head is to be approximately half an inch in height more or less (there is a reason for a.s.signing this condition respecting size, which we will examine in due time): you have it in your power to do it in one of two ways. You may lay down some twenty or thirty entirely firm and visible lines, of which every one shall be absolutely right, and do the utmost a line can do. By their curvature they shall render contour; by their thickness, shade; by their place and form, every truth of expression, and every condition of design. The head of the soldier drawing his sword, in Durer's "Cannon," is about half an inch high, supposing the brow to be seen. The chin is drawn with three lines, the lower lip with two, the upper, including the shadow from the nose, with five. Three separate the cheek from the chin, giving the princ.i.p.al points of character. Six lines draw the cheek, and its incised traces of care; four are given to each of the eyes; one, with the outline, to the nose; three to the frown of the forehead. None of these touches could anywhere be altered--none removed, without instantly visible harm; and their result is a head as perfect in character as a portrait by Reynolds.

81. You may either do this--which, if you can, it will generally be very advisable to do--or, on the other hand, you may cover the face with innumerable scratches, and let your hand play with wanton freedom, until the graceful scrabble concentrates itself into shade. You may soften--efface--retouch--rebite--dot, and hatch, and redefine. If you are a great master, you will soon get your character, and probably keep it (Rembrandt often gets it at first, nearly as securely as Durer); but the design of it will be necessarily seen through loose work, and modified by accident (as you think) fortunate. The accidents which occur to a practiced hand are always at first pleasing--the details which can be hinted, however falsely, through the gathering mystery, are always seducing. You will find yourself gradually dwelling more and more on little meannesses of form and texture, and l.u.s.ters of surface: on cracks of skin, and films of fur and plume. You will lose your way, and then see two ways, and then many ways, and try to walk a little distance on all of them in turn, and so, back again. You will find yourself thinking of colors, and vexed because you cannot imitate them; next, struggling to render distances by indecision, which you cannot by tone. Presently you will be contending with finished pictures; laboring at the etching, as if it were a painting. You will leave off, after a whole day's work (after many days' work if you choose to give them), still unsatisfied.

For final result--if you are as great as Rembrandt--you will have most likely a heavy, black, cloudy stain, with less character in it than the first ten lines had. If you are not as great as Rembrandt, you will have a stain by no means cloudy; but sandy and broken,--instead of a face, a speckled phantom of a face, patched, blotched, discomfited in every texture and form--ugly, a.s.suredly; dull, probably; an unmanageable and manifold failure ill concealed by momentary, accidental, undelightful, ign.o.ble success.

Undelightful; note this especially, for it is the peculiar character of etching that it cannot render beauty. You may hatch and scratch your way to picturesqueness or to deformity--never to beauty. You can etch an old woman, or an ill-conditioned fellow. But you cannot etch a girl--nor, unless in his old age, or with very partial rendering of him, a gentleman.

82. And thus, as farther belonging to, and partly causative of, their choice of means, there is always a tendency in etchers to fasten on unlovely objects; and the whole scheme of modern rapid work of this kind is connected with a peculiar gloom which results from the confinement of men, partially informed, and wholly untrained, in the midst of foul and vicious cities. A sensitive and imaginative youth, early driven to get his living by his art, has to lodge, we will say, somewhere in the by-streets of Paris, and is left there, tutorless, to his own devices.

Suppose him also vicious or reckless, and there need be no talk of his work farther; he will certainly do nothing in a Dureresque manner. But suppose him self-denying, virtuous, full of gift and power--what are the elements of living study within his reach? All supreme beauty is confined to the higher salons. There are pretty faces in the streets, but no stateliness nor splendor of humanity; all pathos and grandeur is in suffering; no purity of nature is accessible, but only a terrible picturesqueness, mixed with ghastly, with ludicrous, with base concomitants. Huge walls and roofs, dark on the sunset sky, but plastered with advertis.e.m.e.nt bills, monstrous-figured, seen farther than ever Parthenon shaft, or spire of Sainte Chapelle. Interminable lines of ma.s.sy streets, wearisome with repet.i.tion of commonest design, and degraded by their gilded shops, wide-fuming, flaunting, glittering, with apparatus of eating or of dress. Splendor of palace-flank and goodly quay, insulted by floating c.u.mber of barge and bath, trivial, grotesque, indecent, as cleansing vessels in a royal reception room. Solemn avenues of blossomed trees, shading puppet-show and baby-play; glades of wild-wood, long withdrawn, purple with faded shadows of blood; sweet windings and reaches of river far among the brown vines and white orchards, checked here by the Ile Notre Dame, to receive their nightly sacrifice, and after playing with it among their eddies, to give it up again, in those quiet shapes that lie on the sloped slate tables of the square-built Temple of the Death-Sibyl, who presides here over spray of Seine, as yonder at Tiber over spray of Anio. Sibylline, indeed, in her secrecy, and her sealing of destinies, by the baptism of the quick water-drops which fall on each fading face, unrecognized, nameless in _this_ Baptism forever. Wreathed thus throughout, that Paris town, with beauty, and with unseemly sin, unseemlier death, as a fiend-city with fair eyes; forever letting fall her silken raiment so far as that one may "behold her bosom and half her side." Under whose whispered teaching, and subst.i.tution of "Contes Drolatiques" for the tales of the wood fairy, her children of Imagination will do, what Gerome and Gustave Dore are doing, and her whole world of lesser Art will sink into shadows of the street and of the boudoir-curtain, wherein the etching point may disport itself with freedom enough.[74]

83. Nor are we slack in our companionship in these courses. Our imagination is slower and clumsier than the French--rarer also, by far, in the average English mind. The only man of power equal to Dore's whom we have had lately among us, was William Blake, whose temper fortunately took another turn. But in the calamity and vulgarity of daily circ.u.mstance, in the horror of our streets, in the discordance of our thoughts, in the laborious looseness and ostentatious cleverness of our work, we are alike. And to French faults we add a stupidity of our own; for which, so far as I may in modesty take blame for anything, as resulting from my own teaching, I am more answerable than most men.

Having spoken earnestly against painting without thinking, I now find our exhibitions decorated with works of students who think without painting; and our books ill.u.s.trated by scratched wood-cuts, representing very ordinary people, who are presumed to be interesting in the picture, because the text tells a story about them. Of this least lively form of modern sensational work, however, I shall have to speak on other grounds; meantime, I am concerned only with its manner; its incontinence of line and method, a.s.sociated with the slightness of its real thought, and morbid acuteness of irregular sensation; ungoverned all, and one of the external and slight phases of that beautiful Liberty which we are proclaiming as essence of gospel to all the earth, and shall presently, I suppose, when we have had enough of it here, proclaim also to the stars, with invitation to them _out_ of their courses.

84. "But you asked us for 'free-heart' outlines, and told us not to be slaves, only thirty days ago."[75]

Inconsistent that I am! so I did. But as there are attractions, and attractions; originalities, and originalities, there are liberties, and liberties. Yonder torrent, crystal-clear, and arrow-swift, with its spray leaping into the air like white troops of fawns, is free, I think.

Lost, yonder, amidst bankless, boundless marsh--soaking in slow shallowness, as it will, hither and thither, listless, among the poisonous reeds and unresisting slime--it is free also. You may choose which liberty you will, and restraint of voiceful rock, or the dumb and edgeless sh.o.r.e of darkened sand. Of that evil liberty, which men are now glorifying,--and of its opposite continence--which is the clasp and [Greek: chrusee perone] of Aglaia's cestus--we will try to find out something in next chapter.[76]

FOOTNOTES:

[71] _Art Journal_, vol. iv., pp. 177-8. June 1865.--ED.

[72] Wornum's "Epochs of Painting." I have continual occasion to quarrel with my friend on these matters of critical question; but I have deep respect for his earnest and patient research, and we remain friends--on the condition that I am to learn much from him, and he (though it may be questionable whose fault that is) nothing from me.

[73] Prov. xx, 27.

[74] As I was preparing these sheets for press, I chanced on a pa.s.sage in a novel of Champfleury's, in which one young student is encouraging another in his contest with these and other such evils;--the evils are in this pa.s.sage accepted as necessities; the inevitable deadliness of the element is not seen, as it can hardly be except by those who live out of it. The encouragement, on such view, is good and right; the connection of the young etcher's power with his poverty is curiously ill.u.s.trative of the statements in the text, and the whole pa.s.sage, though long, is well worth such s.p.a.ce as it will ask here, in our small print.

"Cependant," dit Thomas, "on a vu des peintres de talent qui etaient partis de Paris apres avoir expose de bons tableaux et qui s'en revenaient cla.s.siquement ennuyeux. C'est done la faute de l'enseignement de l'Academie."

"Bah!" dit Gerard, "rien n'arrete le developpement d'un homme puisqu'il comprend l'art, pourquoi ne fait-il pas d'art?"

"Parce qu'il gagne a peu pres sa vie en faisant du commerce."

"On dirait que tu ne veux pas me comprendre, toi qui as justement pa.s.se par la. Comment faisais-tu quand tu etais compositeur d'une imprimerie?"

"Le soir," dit Thomas, "et le matin en hiver, a partir de quatre heures, je faisais des etudes a la lampe pendant deux heures, jusqu'au moment ou j'allais a l'atelier."

"Et tu ne vivais pas de la peinture?"

"Je ne gagnais pas un sou."

"Bon!" dit Gerard; "tu vois bien que tu faisais du commerce en dehors de l'art et que cependant tu etudiais. Quand tu es sorti de l'imprimerie comment as-tu vecu?"

"Je faisais cinq ou six pet.i.tes aquarelles par jour, que je vendais, sous les arcades de l'Inst.i.tut, six sous piece."

"Et tu en vivais; c'est encore du commerce. Tu vois done que ni l'imprimerie, ni les pet.i.ts dessins, a cinq sous, ni la privation, ni la misere ne t'ont empeche d'arriver."

"Je ne suis pas arrive."

"N'importe, tu arriveras certainement. . . . Si tu veux d'autres exemples qui prouvent que la misere et les autres pieges tendus sous nos pas ne doivent rien arreter, tu te rappelles bien ce pauvre garcon dont vous admiriez les eaux-fortes, que vous mettiez aussi haut que Rembrandt, et qui aurait ete lion, disiez-vous, s'il n'avait tant souffert de la faim. Qu'a-t-il fait le jour ou il lui est tombe un pet.i.t heritage du ciel?"

"Il est vrai," dit Thomas, embarra.s.se; "qu'il a perdu tout son sentiment."

"Ce n'etait pas cependant une de ces grosses fortunes qui tuent un homme, qui le rendent lourd, fier et insolent: il avait juste de quoi vivre, six cents francs de rentes, une fortune pour lui, qui vivait avec cinq francs par mois. Il a continue a travailler; mais ses eaux-fortes n'etaient plus supportables; tandis qu'avant, il vivait avec un morceau de pain et des legumes; alors il avait du talent. Cela, Thomas, doit te prouver que ni les mauvais enseignements, ni les influences, ni la misere, ni la faim, ni la maladie, ne peuvent corrompre une nature bien douee. Elle souffre; mais trouve moi un grand artiste qui n'ait pas souffert. Il n'y a pas un seul homme de denie heureux depuis que l'humanite existe."

"J'ai envie," dit Thomas, "de te faire cadeau d'une jolie cravate."

"Pourquoi?" dit Gerard.

"Parce que tu as bien parle."

[75] See _ante_, p. 343, - 73.--ED.

[76] Chapter VI., which is here omitted, having been already reprinted in _The Queen of the Air_ (-- 142-159), together with the last paragraph (somewhat altered) of the present chapter. After the publication of Chapter VI. the essays were discontinued until January 1866.--ED.

+----------------------------------------+ Transcriber's note: Chapter VI is missing from the original. +----------------------------------------+

CHAPTER VII.[77]

85. In recommencing this series of papers, I may perhaps take permission briefly to remind the reader of the special purpose which my desultory way of writing, (of so vast a subject I find it impossible to write otherwise than desultorily), may cause him sometimes to lose sight of; the ascertainment, namely, of some laws for present practice of Art in our schools, which may be admitted, if not with absolute, at least with a sufficient consent, by leading artists.

There are indeed many principles on which different men must ever be at variance; others, respecting which it may be impossible to obtain any practical consent in certain phases of particular schools. But there are a few, which, I think, in all times of meritorious Art, the leading painters would admit; and others which, by discussion, might be arrived at, as, at all events, the best discoverable for the time.

86. One of those which I suppose great workmen would always admit, is, that, whatever material we use, the virtues of that material are to be exhibited, and its defects frankly admitted; no effort being made to conquer those defects by such skill as may make the material resemble another. For instance, in the dispute so frequently revived by the public, touching the relative merits of oil color and water color; I do not think a great painter would ever consider it a merit in a water color to have the "force of oil." He would like it to have the peculiar delicacy, paleness, and transparency belonging specially to its own material. On the other hand, I think he would not like an oil painting to have the deadness or paleness of a water color. He would like it to have the deep shadows, and the rich glow, and crumbling and bossy touches which are alone attainable in oil color. And if he painted in fresco, he would neither aim at the transparency of water color, nor the richness of oil; but at luminous bloom of surface, and dignity of clearly visible form. I do not think that this principle would be disputed by artists of great power at any time, or in any country; though, if by mischance they had been compelled to work in one material, while desiring the qualities only attainable in another, they might strive, and meritoriously strive, for those better results, with what they had under their hand. The change of manner in William Hunt's work, in the later part of his life, was an example of this. As his art became more developed, he perceived in his subjects qualities which it was impossible to express in a transparent medium; and employed opaque white to draw with, when the finer forms of relieved light could not be otherwise followed. It was out of his power to do more than this, since in later life any attempt to learn the manipulation of oil color would have been unadvisable; and he obtained results of singular beauty; though their preciousness and completion would never, in a well-founded school of Art, have been trusted to the frail substance of water color.

87. But although I do not suppose that the abstract principle of doing with each material what it is best fitted to do, would be, in terms, anywhere denied; the practical question is always, not what should be done with this, or that, if everything were in our power; but what can be, or ought to be, accomplished with the means at our disposal, and in the circ.u.mstances under which we must necessarily work. Thus, in the question immediately before us, of the proper use of the black line--it is easy to establish the proper virtue of Line work, as essentially "De-Lineation," the expressing by outline the true limits of forms, which distinguish and part them from other forms; just as the virtue of brush work is essentially breadth, softness, and blending of forms. And, in the abstract, the point ought not to be used where the aim is not that of definition, nor the brush to be used where the aim is not that of breadth. Every painting in which the aim is primarily that of drawing, and every drawing in which the aim is primarily that of painting, must alike be in a measure erroneous. But it is one thing to determine what should be done with the black line, in a period of highly disciplined and widely practiced art, and quite another thing to say what should be done with it, at this present time, in England.

Especially, the increasing interest and usefulness of our ill.u.s.trated books render this an inquiry of very great social and educational importance. On the one side, the skill and felicity of the work spent upon them, and the advantage which young readers, if not those of all ages, _might_ derive from having examples of good drawing put familiarly before their eyes, cannot be overrated; yet, on the other side, neither the admirable skill nor free felicity of the work can ultimately be held a counterpoise for the want--if there be a want--of sterling excellence: while, farther, this increased power of obtaining examples of art for private possession, at an almost nominal price, has two accompanying evils: it prevents the proper use of what we have, by dividing the attention, and continually leading us restlessly to demand new subjects of interest, while the old are as yet not half exhausted; and it prevents us--satisfied with the multiplication of minor art in our own possession--from looking for a better satisfaction in great public works.

88. Observe, first, it prevents the proper use of what we have. I often endeavor, though with little success, to conceive what would have been the effect on my mind, when I was a boy, of having such a book given me as Watson's "Ill.u.s.trated Robinson Crusoe."[78] The edition I had was a small octavo one, in two volumes, printed at the _Chiswick Press_ in 1812. It has, in each volume, eight or ten very rude vignettes, about a couple of inches wide; cut in the simple, but legitimate, manner of Bewick, and, though wholly commonplace and devoid of beauty, yet, as far as they go, rightly done; and here and there sufficiently suggestive of plain facts. I am quite unable to say how far I wasted,--how far I spent to advantage,--the unaccountable hours during which I pored over these wood-cuts; receiving more real sensation of sympathetic terror from the drifting hair and fear-stricken face of Crusoe dashed against the rock, in the rude attempt at the representation of his escape from the wreck, than I can now from the highest art; though the rocks and water are alike cut only with a few twisted or curved lines, and there is not the slightest attempt at light and shade, or imitative resemblance. For one thing, I am quite sure that being forced to make all I could out of very little things, and to remain long contented with them, not only in great part formed the power of close a.n.a.lysis in my mind, and the habit of steady contemplation; but rendered the power of greater art over me, when I first saw it, as intense as that of magic; so that it appealed to me like a vision out of another world.

89. On the other hand this long contentment with inferior work, and the consequent acute enjoyment of whatever was the least suggestive of truth in a higher degree, rendered me long careless of the highest virtues of execution, and r.e.t.a.r.ded by many years the maturing and balancing of the general power of judgment. And I am now, as I said, quite unable to imagine what would have been the result upon me, of being enabled to study, instead of these coa.r.s.e vignettes, such lovely and expressive work as that of Watson; suppose, for instance, the vignette at p. 87, which would have been sure to have caught my fancy, because of the dog, with its head on Crusoe's knee, looking up and trying to understand what is the matter with his master. It remains to be seen, and can only be known by experience, what will actually be the effect of these treasures on the minds of children that possess them. The result must be in some sort different from anything yet known; no such art was ever yet attainable by the youth of any nation. Yet of this there can, as I have just said, be no reasonable doubt;--that it is not well to make the imagination indolent, or take its work out of its hands by supplying continual pictures of what might be sufficiently conceived without pictures.

90. Take, for instance, the preceding vignette, in the same book, "Crusoe looking at the first shoots of barley." Nothing can be more natural or successful as a representation; but, after all, whatever the importance of the moment in Crusoe's history, the picture can show us nothing more than a man in a white shirt and dark pantaloons, in an att.i.tude of surprise; and the imagination ought to be able to compa.s.s so much as this without help. And if so laborious aid be given, much more ought to be given. The virtue of Art, as of life, is that no line shall be in vain. Now the number of lines in this vignette, applied with full intention of thought in every touch, as they would have been by Holbein or Durer, are quite enough to have produced,--not a merely deceptive dash of local color, with evanescent background,--but an entirely perfect piece of chiaroscuro, with its lights all truly limited and gradated, and with every form of leaf and rock in the background entirely right, complete,--and full not of mere suggestion, but of accurate information, exactly such as the fancy by itself cannot furnish. A work so treated by any man of power and sentiment such as the designer of this vignette possesses, would be an eternal thing; ten in the volume, for real enduring and educational power, were worth two hundred in imperfect development, and would have been a perpetual possession to the reader; whereas one certain result of the multiplication of these lovely but imperfect drawings, is to increase the feverish thirst for excitement, and to weaken the power of attention by endless diversion and division. This volume, beautiful as it is, will be forgotten; the strength in it is, in final outcome, spent for naught; and others, and still others, following it, will "come like shadows, so depart."

91. There is, however, a quite different disadvantage, but no less grave, to be apprehended from this rich multiplication of private possession. The more we have of books, and cabinet pictures, and cabinet ornaments, and other such domestic objects of art, the less capable we shall become of understanding or enjoying the lofty character of work n.o.ble in scale, and intended for public service. The most practical and immediate distinction between the orders of "mean" and "high" Art, is that the first is private,--the second public; the first for the individual, the second for all. It may be that domestic Art is the only kind which is likely to flourish in a country of cold climate, and in the hands of a nation tempered as the English are; but it is necessary that we should at least understand the disadvantage under which we thus labor; and the duty of not allowing the untowardness of our circ.u.mstances, or the selfishness of our dispositions, to have unresisted and unchecked influence over the adopted style of our art.

But this part of the subject requires to be examined at length, and I must therefore reserve it for the following paper.

FOOTNOTES: