Without Prejudice Part 26

The Academy has survived Mr. Burne-Jones' desertion of his old a.s.sociates, as it would survive art itself. I for one should regret its disappearance. It is a whetstone for wit, like everything established and respectable. I am only sorry we have no Academy of Letters. It gives one such a standing not to be a member--almost as good a standing as to be one. If you are left out in the cold you loudly pity those asphyxiating in the heat, and if you have a cozy chair by the fireside you fall asleep and say nothing. This promotes happiness all round, and makes the literary man contented with his lot. In England authors have no Academy, and so have to fall back on the poor publishers: _Hinc illae lachrymae!_

[Sidenote: Portraits of Gentlemen]

Everybody paints the portrait of n.o.body. Imagine a great writer being called upon to produce a black-and-white picture of a man of no importance: Let us imagine, say Meredith, being offered a thousand pounds for a pen-and-ink portrait of a provincial mayor--being asked to devote his graphic art, his felicitous choice of words, his gifts of insight and sympathy, his genius, in a word, to the portrayal of a real live mayor--the same to be published in book-form, asked for at the libraries, and discussed at dinner-tables and in the reviews as a specimen of the season's art. Of course Meredith would tell the man to go and be hanged (in the Academy); but if he consented, see what would take place. The literary portrait involves, of course, both mind and body, and practically the work would have to take the shape of a biography. For some weeks the man would come to Meredith's study and give him talkings.

At the first talking Meredith would also make a sketch of the outside appearance of his subject. Here the resources of language far exceed those of colour. The happy euphemism of language permits a squint to be described as an ambidexterity of vision; it is even quite possible to omit an ill-regulated feature altogether. Suppose an artist paints a man without a nose--the defect _sauterait aux yeux_: it would be as plain as the nose not upon his face. But it is quite possible for the literary artist to omit a man's nose without attracting any attention. The reader's imagination supplies the nose, without even being conscious of its purveyorship. As for the psychological portion of the portrait, the author would be entirely dependent on the information given by the subject, so that provincial mayors would develop unsuspected virtues.

Where the difficulty would come in would be in the absence of darker qualities, which would make literary chiaroscuro impossible. It is quite likely, though, that as a result of the talkings the subject would unwittingly present the novelist with a real character who would appear in his next work of fiction, and be entirely unrecognized either by the reader of the biography or its subject.

[Sidenote: Photography and Realism]

No artist of the brush can afford to dispense with models; when he draws from his inner consciousness the composition is tame and the draughtsmanship wild. The novelist, though his object is not portraiture, but creation, can as little afford to keep aloof from real men and women.

When George Eliot ceased to draw from models and fell back on intuition and her library, she produced "Daniel Deronda." But I would demur altogether to the use of "photography" in literary criticism as synonymous with realism. The photograph is an utter misrepresentation of life, and this not merely because of its false shades and its lack of colour, but because the photographer is not content with literalness. He aspires to art. So far from being a realist, he is the greatest idealist of all. He not only puts you into poses you would never fall into naturally, he not only arranges you so as to hide your characteristic uglinesses, and bids you call up an expression you never use, but he touches up and tones down after you are gone, and treats his pictures, indeed, as though they were actors and he the dresser. And as each photographer has his own style, no two portraits are ever alike. My portraits of Annabel pa.s.s as a collection of pretty actresses. Still, if they are not like one another, they resemble one another in being unlike her. The only good photographs I have ever seen of myself were done by an amateur--most of the others might just as well have been taken in my absence. And there is always a painful neatness about photographs: my humble study was once photographed, and it looked like a princely library. Bags come out with artistic interstices, fustian gleams like satin. It is the true Platonic touch, glorifying and gilding everything.

Filth itself would come out like roses. No, no, let us hear no more about Zola's "photography."

[Sidenote: The Great Unhung]

What becomes of all the old pins is a problem that worries many simple souls. What becomes of all the rejected pictures is a question that seems to trouble n.o.body. And yet at every exhibition the ma.s.sacre of innocents is appalling. The Royal Academy of London, which is the most hospitable inst.i.tution in the world toward "wet paint," still turns away very many more canvases than it admits. Their departure is like the retreat of the Ten Thousand. Into the Salon one year six thousand eager frames crowded, but when the public came to see, only thirteen hundred were left to tell the tale--

All that was left of them, Left of six thousand.

More ruthless still was the slaughter in the New Salon, the Salon of the Champs de Mars, where the pictures were decimated. Out of two thousand seven hundred works sent in by outsiders, only three hundred survived. It is impossible to believe that ideal justice was done, especially when we consider that the jury took only one day to consider the outcome of so many aspirations, such manifold toil. The pictures were wheeled past them on gigantic easels, an interminable panorama. Even supposing that the gentlemen of the jury took a full working day of eight hours, with no allowance for dejeuner, the average time for examining a picture works out at something like ten seconds. In each minute of that fateful day the destiny of half a dozen pictures was decided. Verily, our picture-connoisseur seems to have elevated criticism into an instinct--he is the smoothest human mechanism on record. One wonders if the critic will ever be replaced by an automaton, something a.n.a.logous to the camera that has replaced the artist. Meantime, the point is--what becomes of the refused, those unwelcome revenants that return to lower the artist in the eyes of landladies and concierges? Sometimes, we know, the stone which the builders rejected becomes the corner-stone of the temple, and the proscribed painter lives to despise publicly the judges in the gate. But these revenges are rare, and for the poor bulk of mankind the whirligig of time revolves but emptily. The average artist rejected of one exhibition turns him to another, and the leavings of the Salon beat at the doors of Antwerp and Munich, where the annual of art blooms a little later in the spring.

Pitiful it is to follow a picture from refusal to refusal; one imagines the painter sublime amid the litter of secretarial notifications, gathering, Antaeus-like, fresh strength from every fall, and coming to a grim and gradual knowledge of the great cosmopolitan conspiracy. One year the rejected of the Academy were hung in London by an enterprising financier. It was the greatest lift-up the Academy had ever had. Even its enemies were silenced temporarily. But the rejected may console themselves. The accepted have scant advantage over them. To sell a picture is becoming rarer and rarer, and the dealer is no more respectful to the canvas that has achieved the honor of the catalogue than to that which has preserved the sequestration of the studio. Sometimes the unhung picture becomes the medium upon which another is painted (for a picture is always worth the canvas it is painted on), sometimes (if it is large) it is cut up and sold in bits, sometimes it adorns the family dining-room, or decorates the hall of a good-natured friend, and sometimes, after a variety of pecuniary adventures, it becomes the proud possession of a millionaire.

[Sidenote: The Abolition of Catalogues.]

The average Englishman takes his religion on Sundays and his Art in the spring. Influences that should permeate life are collected in chunks at particular seasons. This is sufficient to prove how little they are really felt or understood. The Academy headache is the due penalty of hypocrisy. It is the catalogue that is the greatest coadjutor of cant. If pictures, besides being hung, were treated like convicts in becoming merely numbers, without names either of painters or subjects, what a delightful confusion of critical tongues would ensue! But conceding that a picture should have the painter's name, for the sake of the artist (or his enemies), I would propose that everything else be abolished. It is not unfair to subject pictures to this severe test, because, of all forms of art, painting is the one whose appeal is instantaneous, simple and self-complete. If a picture cannot speak for itself, no amount of advocacy will save it. If it tells a story (which no good picture should), let it at least do so without invoking the aid of the rival art of literature. Literature does not ask the a.s.sistance of pictures to make its meaning clear. Nor, too, is anything gained by calling colours harmonies or symphonies. Let such pictures strike their own chords and blow their own trumpets. Catalogues of all kinds are but props to artistic inefficiency. If dumb-show plays did not rely on "books of the words," pantomime would have to become a finer art. If ballets had no thread of narrative attached to them, their constructors would be driven to achieve greater intelligibility, or to give up trying for it--which were the more gratifying alternative. So with the descriptions of symphonies we find in our programmes. Why should good music be translated into bad literature? Surely each art should be self-sufficient; developing its effects according to its own laws! A melody does not need to be painted, nor a picture to be set to music. The graceful evolutions of the dance are their own justification. The only case in which I would allow a t.i.tle to a picture is when it is a portrait. That is an obvious necessity. Portrait-painting is a branch of art which demands recognition.

[Sidenote: The Artistic Temperament]

There are two aspects of the artistic temperament--the active or creative side, and the pa.s.sive or receptive side. It is impossible to possess the power of creation without possessing also the power of appreciation; but it is quite possible to be very susceptible to artistic influences while dowered with little or no faculty of origination. On the one hand is the artist--poet, musician, or painter; on the other, the artistic person to whom the artist appeals. Between the two, in some arts, stands the artistic interpreter--the actor who embodies the aery conceptions of the poet, the violinist or pianist who makes audible the inspirations of the musician. But in so far as this artistic interpreter rises to greatness in his field, in so far he will be found soaring above the middle ground, away from the artistic person, and into the realm of the artist or creator. Joachim and De Reszke, Paderewski and Irving, put something of themselves into their work; apart from the fact that they could all do (in some cases have done) creative work on their own account. So that when the interpreter is worth considering at all, he may be considered in the creative category. Limiting ourselves, then, to these two main varieties of the artistic temperament, the active and the pa.s.sive, I should say that the latter is an unmixed blessing, and the former a mixed curse.

What, indeed, can be more delightful than to possess good aesthetic faculties--to be able to enjoy books, music, pictures, plays! This artistic sensibility is the one undoubted advantage of man over other animals, the extra octave in the gamut of life. Most enviable of mankind is the appreciative person, without a sc.r.a.p of originality? who has every temptation to enjoy, and none to create. He is the idle heir to treasures greater than India's mines can yield; the bee that sucks at every flower, and is not even asked to make honey. For him poets sing, and painters paint, and composers write. "_O fortunates nimium_," who not seldom yearn for the fatal gift of genius! For _this_ artistic temperament is a curse--a curse that lights on the n.o.blest and best of mankind! From the day of Prometheus to the days of his English laureate it has been a curse

To vary from the kindly race of men,

and the eagles have not ceased to peck at the liver of men's benefactors.

All great and high art is purchased by suffering--it is not the mechanical product of dexterous craftsmanship. This is one part of the meaning of that mysterious "Master Builder" of Ibsen's. "Then I saw plainly why G.o.d had taken my little children from me. It was that I should have nothing else to attach myself to. No such thing as love and happiness, you understand. I was to be only a master builder--nothing else." And the tense strings that give the highest and sweetest notes are most in danger of being overstrung.

But there are compensations. The creative artist is higher in the scale of existence than the man, as the man is higher than the beatified oyster for whose condition, as Aristotle pointed out, few would be tempted to barter the misery of human existence. The animal has consciousness, man self-consciousness, and the artist over-consciousness. Over-consciousness may be a curse, but, like the primitive curse--labour--there are many who would welcome it!

[Sidenote: Professional Ethics]

There's no knowing where the artistic temperament may break out. "I don't think that a person ought to come to the binder and just say to him, 'Bind that book for so much money.' I think the binder ought to say, 'Is the book worth binding?' and that if it were not he ought to refuse." The applications of this remarkable principle, enunciated by a bookbinder, are obvious. Applied universally it would reform the race. The tailor, when a man came to be measured, would say, "Yes, but are you worth measuring?" and if he was out of drawing would refuse to dress him, thus extruding deformity from the world and restoring the Olympian G.o.ds. The charwoman, inspired by George Herbert, would not only "sweep a room as by G.o.d's laws," but would inquire whether it was worth sweeping; the wine merchant would refuse wine to rich customers who did not deserve to drink it; and the doctors would certainly not devote their best energies to keeping gouty old n.o.blemen alive.

[Sidenote: Lay Confessors]

We writers, as Beaeonsfield said to his sovereign, are a good subst.i.tute for the confessional; we like to be allowed peeps into the secret chambers of the heart. The most miserable sinners may be as sure of our secrecy as of our absolution. The more terrible the crime the better we are pleased. So come and ease your labouring consciences, and pour your sorrows into our sympathetic shorthand books, and we will work you up the bare material of your lives so artistically that you are the veriest Philistines if you shall not be rather glad to have sinned and suffered.

For deep down in our hearts lurks the belief that, as Jerome wittily puts it, "G.o.d created the world to give the literary man something to write about!"

[Sidenote: Q. E. D. Novels]

A novel, like a metaphor, proves nothing: 't is merely a vivid pictorial presentation of a single case. I have just read one novel aspiring to prove that a couple who skip the marriage ceremony cannot be happy ever after, and another aspiring to prove that marriage is the one drawback to a happy union. In reality both novels prove the same thing--that the author is a fool. There is nothing I would not undertake to "prove" in a novel. You have only to take an exceptional case and treat it as if it were normal. Aesop's fables could easily be rewritten to prove exactly the opposite morals, just as there is no popular apothegm whose antidote may not be found in the same treasury of folk-wisdom: "Never put off till to-morrow what you can do to-day," and "Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof"; "Penny wise, pound foolish!" "Look after the pence and the pounds will take care of themselves."

In sooth I suffer from an inability to see the morals of stories--like the auditor who blunts the point of the drollest anecdote by inquiring "And what happened then?" Even the beautiful allegory of the three rings in "Nathan der Weise," always seems to me to throw considerable discredit on the father who set his sons wrangling over the imitation rings. And, inversely, nothing seems easier to me than to invent fables to prove wrong morals: _e.g._

[Sidenote: The Mouse Who Died]

A pretty gray mouse was in the habit of sauntering from its hole every evening to pick up the Crumbs in the Dining Boom. "What a pretty Mouse!"

said the Householder, and made more crumbs for Mousie to eat. So great a banquet was thus spread that the n.o.ble-hearted little Mouse cheeped the news to its Sisters and its Cousins and its Aunts, and they all came every evening in the Train of its Tail to regale themselves on the remains of the Repast. "Dear, dear!" cried the Householder in despair, "the house is overrun with a plague of Vermin." And he mixed poison with the crumbs, and the poor little pioneer Mouse perished in contortions of agony. Moral: Don't.

[Sidenote: Theologic Novels]

Usually the speculations that first reach the great public through the medium of the novel have been familiar _ad nauseam_ to the reading cla.s.ses for scores of years. Conceive Noah, aroused by the grating of the Ark upon the summit of Mount Ararat, looking out of the window and exclaiming, "Why, it's been raining!" Then imagine Mrs. Noah, catching an odd syllable of her husband's remark, writing a love story to prove that the barometer portended showers. Finally, picture the world looking in alarm for its umbrella, and you have an image of the inception and effect of the modern Mrs. Noah's theologic novel.

MUDIE MEASURE.

Ten lines make one page; Ten pages make one point; Two points make one chapter; Five chapters make one episode; Two episodes make one volume: Three volumes make one tired.