Every Man His Own Art Critic by Patrick Geddes ~ Full Audiobook
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Introduction to Every Man His Own Art Critic at the Manchester Exhibition, 1887 by Patrick Geddes The Aspects of Art The lover of art, slowly working his way through the marvellous paradise of pictures by which the present Manchester Exhibition will longest be remembered, must often be struck by the varied comments and criticisms he hears as the more rapid throng of sightseers flows by.

it is strangely painful indeed to stand before some great picture some everlasting source of possible delight to the sons of men and yet to be made to feel how little one person sees and how inaccurately another how that man must be positively colour-blind and this one practically blind to colour

"'It is hard to hear the next spectator, "'perhaps demolishing alike the priceless record "'of some rarely beautiful effect, "'and the subtle rendering of an everyday object "'with the sweeping assertion that this is not natural, "'that he never saw anything like that in nature, "'and yet refrain from quoting to him "'Turner's fierce rejoinder in like circumstances. "'Don't you wish you could?'

another onlooker seems to be more hopeful until you see him pounce down upon some trifling error real or imaginary with an exultant buzz of delight at his own sagacity thereafter of course seeing no more of the real excellences of the picture than would a bluebottle in similar circumstances

or again you are favoured by a remark which betokens indeed some knowledge of this or that technical quality of the painting yet perhaps shows as the rueful artist would tell you no more feeling than a brick

The great majority of spectators happily are hardly critical at all, and so far perhaps well. Yet the constant way in which people will first look at the catalogue to see what the picture is called, instead of looking first to see what it really is, is only one of the most obvious tokens of the prevalence of an essentially literary interest in pictures, rather than a genuine artistic one. That is, in reading or hearing the story of the picture,

rather than in seeing it with one's own eyes. People's interests, too, are curiously limited by their everyday experience. In that passing family, the child notices only the horses or cattle, the dogs or sheep. The mother passes the landscapes unnoticed, but lingers with fade over some simple story of domestic pathos, while her husband hurries her on to shake with laughter over one of Erskine Nicholl's Irish jokes.

Truly, the eye sees only what it brings with it, the power of seeing, and thus it becomes easier to understand how Turner or the Pre-Raphaelites were simply unintelligible, not only to the public, but even to the established critics and painters of their day, or how, more recently, the Impressionists like Mr. Whistler on the one hand, or the Decorative School on the other, had no easy fight to gain recognition.

Or how, again, to name obvious examples, the peculiar manner and meaning of Rossetti or of Burne-Jones must needs to many people seem simply affected, the solemn parables of Watts unintelligible, or the characteristic pathos of Walker or of Mason pass unnoticed altogether, and if one leaves the gallery to see what has been written about it, one finds essentially the same confusion.

Too much, of course, is not criticism at all, but mere more or less childish explanation of the purely literary sort. How in this picture there is a nice little girl being worshipped by her dog. How in the next one, home they bring her warrior dead, and so forth. Mere verbal paraphrase every word. Some more distinctly artistic criticism there is, of course, and one critic is wise if another be wooden.

such criticism is indeed often keen with insight and crowded with good things yet to profit by this one must know something already constantly the best judgments are more instinctive than rational and thus often puzzle as much as instructs the beginner

One critic, too, we find is an enthusiast mainly of brushwork, of technique, another of colour or tone, a third of drawing and composition, of light and shadow, and thus becomes necessarily more or less the advocate of this or the other school. And even when we get down to first principles, we find things are no better. Would we take counsel from a traditional expert, and entrust ourselves to the guidance of Mr. Ruskin?'

Straightway, one of the younger generation of critics mercilessly exposes his rather threadbare metaphysics. Another protests against his obtrusive love of geological and botanical science, while a third denounces his too eagerly dogmatic morals, crying, "'Art for art's sake!'

yet if you were to follow any one of these newer prophets the others would all fall upon him and rend him in turn and hence it is little wonder that men in all ages have fallen back upon the hopeless maxim of degustibus there is no accounting for taste art criticism moreover has far too often been mere gibberish of collectors and connoisseurs and were this all people would belittle the poorer for leaving it alone

yet matters cannot always remain thus new attempts at the exposition and popularisation of art can never cease to be made for when a man has once truly learned to know pictures when he really feels how each gallery is a noble treasure-house and each true picture a new revelation

when he comes to it as a fresh sacrament of beauty and carries away from it a new element into life. He must needs seek to share his pleasures, even were it only to increase them. Science too can nowadays be successfully popularized so that the very simplest mind can follow the physicist as he watches the marvelous dance of atoms or the naturalist as he probes the secrets of life.

and why should not art too become again as it once was the everyday possession of the people why should we not borrow the secret of science armed with its own powers of analysis and comparison every man might indeed become his own art critic no longer asking how do you like this but what does this painter mean to show

We might thus go forth and take far fuller possession of the exhibition, and carry picture after picture away safely stored in the galleries of memory. We would learn to see the picturesque in everything for ourselves. Nay, we might come nearer that secret of art education, that power of creating beauty which our age, so rich in mechanism, has all but lost, and for the recovery of which the world of industry is now waiting.

The essential notion, therefore, which we have to borrow from science, and with which our criticism must start, is that of an expanding consciousness of the aspects and the order of the universe, which is being steadily added to by the fresh eye of each discoverer. Each addition, indeed, needs a new and active mind to seize, but when once set down for us, becomes a common and permanent possession, so that he that runs may read.

In this sense, for instance, Linnaeus has never died, nor Cuvier, nor Darwin, for in every naturalist is a Linnaeus when he collects and names his specimen, Cuvier when he dissects it, a Darwin when he deciphers the story of its evolution. Nor is it otherwise in literature. Burns has brought back for us the poetry of simple human life and love, and Scott has revived the past for us.

Wordsworth leads us out to see some new beauty in every wayside, or Browning opens for us strange glimpses into the marvellous complexities which lie in every human soul. Each, in short, is building some contribution to the great whole of individual culture, is adding some new pipe or stop or swell to the organ of human life.

now this summation of not only the results but even the special faculties and powers of many men of genius for the strengthening and enrichment of the ordinary life although well recognised in science is too little appreciated in the study of literature and practically not at all in that of art yet the same idea holds good our painters are travelling on a road fully parallel to that of the men of science

The landscape painter and the naturalist are brethren of the same age and country, and represent, despite their frequent inability to understand each other's language, essentially the same awakening of the human mind. Like so many new discoverers, the great painters have come upon us, each opening out a new window into the universe, and showing us something that was before unseen.

and thus it is the first aspect of the galleries of a modern exhibition to render visible to us in new transcripts of earth and sea and sky new beauties hitherto unnoticed and undreamed

Or, leaving landscape, we see how one artist shows us the human figure in repose, and another sets forth its widely different beauty of action; how one painter opens for us a magic window into the long-buried past, and another, no less potent enchanter, confronts us with some vision of our own everyday lives.

or paints as a portrait from whose eyes the soul mutely proclaims all its strength and confesses all its weakness.

The first quality of painting we would criticise, and that in which our modern art ranges so far beyond all that preceded it, lies in this faculty of vision. And hence the best starting point for the beginner in art is to ask modestly from each new picture, what has the painter seen, what is this he would show?

As yet, however, we have no art in the highest sense. The painter must see and must imitate, but if this were all, a photograph would be often a better work of art than a picture, and might profitably supersede it, as many people indeed used to expect. Here a new secret comes in, that of arrangement. Colour must be not only true, but beautiful, rich in harmony and contrast."

light and shade must be at once broad and subtle contrasted and gradated line must be not only faithful but flowing and rhythmical from the first point of view that of sight the best picture is the best window but from the second that in which colour mass and line will best stand being looked at upside down

and without pausing to develop or to reconcile these two distinct aspects of pictorial art we have to notice a third one for what the painter has seen and how he has displayed it is always modified though in varying measure by his thought

the picture is in fact not only a window through which we look out into the world but one through which we may also look deep into the painter's soul and learn what manner of man he was how he looked into the world in what spirit he lived and laboured there

in this final field of judgment we learn to push our criticism more deeply than in the preceding two and so finally see beneath the imperfect vision and surely more imperfect rendering something of the unattainable ideal which consciously or half-consciously lay below

that thus art criticism comes to be a matter of indeed difficult yet definite measurement in each of these three directions, and that the results of these are expressed in positive gain of thought and knowledge and beauty, in gold and not in dross, must already become apparent. In short, it is clearly possible for each man to be his own art critic, and clearly profitable as well,

Let us see then how these three principles may be actually put in practice amid the galleries before us. End of introduction

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Chapter 1 of Every Man His Own Art Critic at the Manchester Exhibition, 1887, by Patrick Geddes. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Art of Seeing In the preceding pages we attempted to break up the distinct yet subtle and complex whole which we recognise as a painter's style into three elements, which may roughly be termed sight, arrangement and ideal.

we now need to show that the visitor even with little time and no special knowledge may in this way guide himself through this maze of pictures and form an intelligent notion of a great movement of modern art which they represent

really to take possession of the best types of these galleries, and see the manifold wonders their kaleidoscopic variety has to show, we have to substitute for the customary plan of taking the pictures in the usual way, pretty much as they happen to hang, or even painter by painter, the threefold plan proposed.

In the first place, then, let us take a simple interest in what and how much these painters' eyes have seen, and add this to our own experience of life and nature, to our own power of intelligent vision henceforward. Secondly, we have to make out something of how they have expressed and rearranged the impressions they took in, how they have made their colour photographs of the world into these works of art.

but only when these two things are done and we understand our painters as observers and workmen shall we be in a fair way to understand them in their third capacity that is in so far as they are poets and philosophers humorists or satirists optimists or pessimists

Placing ourselves, then, to begin with, in the centre of the expanding field of sight, we have a true standpoint for appreciating the progress not only of our own Victorian art, but of the vaster history which lies behind and around it.

we can watch man as the growing child of nature slowly gaining acquaintance with the world around him and joyfully seeking to express and represent to himself alike in colour and in words in poem and in science the new discoveries of each widening day

The story is often told of how prehistoric man has left us his pictures and carvings of wild beasts, the difficulties and risks of whose hunting first aroused him into conscious intelligence. What is at once the most primitive and childlike realm of art was one, and the Assyrian hunting sculptures and the modern animal painters have followed in due consequence to continue the same interests.

how the next steps were made, and how the Egyptian came not only to embody and conventionalise his ideal of deity, but to take cognisance of actual human personality, and even to represent the events of everyday life, is only now being spelt out for us. But we know better how these two elements of actual and imaginative vision, widened and deepened and refined in Greece, or narrowed, coarsened and dyed out in Rome,

The rude beginnings of Christian art next appear, and while this develops through the ages of faith, the interest in man and nature scarcely reawakens. This dates not from the revival of learning with its classic affectations, but essentially arises among the Dutch in the 16th and 17th centuries, the foremost people of Europe.

Their tremendous struggle for independence developed at once a nation of heroic and manly faces, and the desire of recording these, and so was won the strength and individuality of modern portraiture, while the generations of peacefully accumulating wealth and contemplative prosperity which followed their victorious struggles,

aroused and recorded the hitherto unrealised delightfulness of landscape, and awoke men to the endless beauty of the simplest scenes. The meadows and their cows, the canals and boats, the poplars and windmills, seemed suddenly transfigured, yet only because men's eyes had opened.

so these things rose from the utilitarian level to the artistic from being looked at merely as the apparatus of living to being rejoiced in for their beauty among the worthy ends of life this new-found sense of beauty and power of rendering it spread everywhere kitchen pots glowed with a new lustre and apple-parings curled with a hitherto unsuspected grace chasing each other as they lay through a lovely arabesque of line

the poor old wrinkled dame sitting among these had at last found her devoted admirer the bores at the public-house were laboured on with a greater earnestness of interest than any philanthropist nowadays would dream for the painter at length was free with all the world before him and open eyes to see it nothing therefore seemed any longer common or unclean

How he remained limited and prosaic, and thus necessarily became debased, does not at present concern us. It is sufficient to note that at any rate from our present standpoint, the most living, real and natural movement underlying our own, in portraiture and landscape, and not merely in genre and still life alone, is that of the Dutch school.

How the learning, the refinements and conventions of the Renaissance painters were also continued, especially through France and England, we need only note at present as an element of unrealism, for it is the weakness and not the strength in the splendid portraits of Gainsborough and Sir Joshua that the subjects are indeed beautiful English types, but hardly well-characterised individual men and women,

And this is one of the most effective lessons of the present exhibition, which shows better than any past or future one will do, how this unrealism in portraiture, continued and exaggerated through two generations of academicians, came to culminate in the pitiable effigies of royal dolls, which cut so quaint a figure throughout the galleries, especially in contrast with the splendid realities we owe to Watts or Millais,

olus or hall. In the same way with landscape, the pillared ruin, the reposing shepherds, the brown tree and other stock properties of the Renaissance masters make a hard fight for existence against the live Dutch boars and actual working windmills, as a glance round the early watercolour room well shows.

how wilkie took the manly aside and still more how turner secured the victory of naturalism over classicism utterly throwing aside the one and extending the boundaries of the other are tales of achievement which will one day rank beside the history of the great discoveries and successful inventions of which the age is so proud

For, what with all its manifold faults and shortcomings, is still the greatest art book yet written. Modern Painters claims to be little more than the explanatory chorus of Turner's saga, that manifold fading record of solitary, all-observant wanderings through new and vaster realms of beauty than had before been visible to human eyes.

With art once liberated from imprisonment within prescribed rounds of academic subjects to roam through the universe, the painters sally forth eagerly to seek their fortunes. Weary of well-known scenes, they scatter everywhere in search of fresh ones, the unconscious vanguard of the coming army of modern tourists.

Prout roams over Europe, making those priceless records of antique cities long since shattered in the name of progress. Holland settles in Venice, and Roberts wanders through Italy, or with Lewis to the Holy Land. Fielding takes full possession of the English Downs, or Stanfield makes a laudable, if not altogether successful, effort to paint the sea.

Cressick delineates the peaceful pleasantness of English meadows, and Cooper sets himself down through endless afternoons of sunshine to smooth and tend his beloved herd of cows. William Hunt teaches us the loveliness of plums and oranges, of birds' nests and hawthorn bloom, while David Cox rises to a breadth and sanity of grasp of living atmospheric landscape, like the earlier period of Turner.

how far these simple painters knew what they were doing does not in the least matter they were all opening new windows for us educating us in many ways and now with these compare the later generation

look for instance at the sea-pitches upon the walls until you can carry them away and see them at will as windows through the dullest work-room walls and go roaming along hook's breezy shores bright with pebble and seaweed until one comes to graham's sad heavy waves swinging against the misty cliffs

turning away chilled from these cullen hunter will show us how the surface water may be bright and glowing like molten opal or mccallum let us gaze into the deep translucent green through which the mediterranean coral-fishes dive

through brett's vast windows we may look long over the lovely expanse of shimmering placid blue or finally on the canvases of henry moore realise the noblest aspects of ocean yet discerned or recorded

whether your sense of natural landscape needs to be developed altogether or to be recovered from beneath the dullness of many years of city life or only to be freshened and brightened you cannot do better than gaze long into some of these pictures follow linnell over his waving cornfields

go back again and again from millet's fringe of the moor to graham's spate in the highlands and see what nature's moods are really like and you will thus get not indeed a knowledge of art but the fundamental preparation for it sincere delight in nature

No better instances could in fact be found of this characteristic way in which the modern painter no longer aims at producing great works of art by merely devising more and more refined combinations of old impressions, but by opening new windows into reality, by seizing above all things a wealth of new impressions, and thereafter arranging them with such artfulness as he can.

In this, of course, lay the soul of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, itself only the most clearly accented proclamation of a change which was in progress throughout the world, the artistic reflex of the new renaissance in which the book of nature replaces the writings of the ancients.

in fact a european current upon which the handful of young pre-raphaelites with their artistic botany of weeds and ivy leaves were but so many straws

Thus, looking at animals, Landseer discovers that the placidity of Coype's or Cooper's cows and the horrid ferocity of Snyder's dogs were by no means exhaustive of their aspects or character, and so comes to produce those pictorial illustrations of canine virtue and intelligence, which were not so long ago the most popular results of British art.

this idea of sympathy between man and beast once gained reappears in truer and less exaggerated pathos with britain riviere and is now overflowing with true naturalist catholicity over the whole animal kingdom

Marx has for the time taken possession of the birds, but the zoological gardens are far from exhausted, and countless species are still awaiting their pictorial exponents, for the Egyptian beast-gods have, in a finer sense, all to come back to us again.

Yet that humanity, the climax of nature, must always be yet more clearly central in art, is perhaps the one maxim which no critic has ever disputed, and it is thus one of the most satisfactory evidences of art progress, that, despite Mr. Horsley and his British matron, a laborious discipline in drawing the human figure is becoming increasingly prevalent.

despite our ugly costume the beauty of the human form is thus being rediscovered and set forth in a spirit far more truly greek than was that of the renaissance as a glance at the sketches even of michael angelo or raphael will show

We have happily got rid of such anatomical pedantry, with its skinned and galvanized muscles, its soulless writhing giants, and instead of this we may trace Pointer's rising power and knowledge through years of labour to its exquisite climax of refined loveliness in the visit to Aesculapius, or of rare originality in vivid action in Atalanta's race.

or, leaving figure painting for the present, though in this relation it is impossible to avoid a glance at the noble statues of Leighton and Thornycroft, we come again to personal individuality, and note what a priceless record for future generations there lies in Watt's magnificent series of portraits, and on many another canvas round.

Note especially the developed power of vision, the fineness of observation and of insight. See, for instance, how the mingled genius and weakness of Burne-Jones speaks from his portraits, or how, in Millais' Gladstone, the right honourable gentleman has no longer any need to speak for six hours to set forth the elements of his complex mind.

how in fact the historian will yet base his central analysis of the character of this or that statesman far more surely on these historical documents of millais than on any written word portraiture then we have recovered though history-painting in the true sense the reflex of our own time in its greater moments we have none to know these greater moments when we see them would need the eye of more than a simple painter

Moreover, our times are too ugly, say the painters, and point to Frith's well-meant efforts in confirmation of this. Yet, from our present standpoint, there is some justification for even the accumulated hideousness of his Ramsgate Sands, since such uncompromising records will at any rate always be competed for by museums of anthropology.

are far more important, because as we shall see later, purposeful attempt at modern realism is Maddox Brown's work, or to take only a single minor instance among pictures of this kind, one may name Hull's Gone. Of course, where picturesque elements have survived from the past, this main difficulty is avoided. Witness the admirableness of the subject in Here Comes Last Muster.

Despite, however, the apparent neglect of it, this supremely difficult problem of thorough realism, of perfectly intelligent grasp and rendering of the facts of actual life around us, is really being worked out, not, perhaps, very consciously or intelligently, yet as the fashion of the age is, in manifold detail.

As we saw the landscape painter to be the analogue and contemporary of the naturalist, so the novelist who is working out for us in such infinite wealth of detail a widening consciousness of the complex drama of modern life, finds his analogue in the painters of the higher genre who are so well represented in the exhibition. In short, every type of life and every kind of situation is finding its illustrator.

"'Thus, while Mr. Phil Morris's babies are happily absent, "'we have admirable pictures of happy children, "'as those of Millais asleep and awake.'

The pure simplicity of English girlhood finds its appropriate and constant exponent in the younger Leslie, while the far more complex, mature and pathetic, yet also gently feminine interests of Marcus Stone follow her history up to its first crisis a few years later. A broader and homelier range is taken up by Fade, and with the accurate local colouring which comes through birth and breeding,

though Philip of Spain shows how faithfully the Scot abroad can still adopt a new nationality. Nicol, with his merry Irishman, has taken the place of lever and lover, while pictures like Fylde's Village Wedding give English art a real hold upon its own villages.

Orchardson, too, no longer takes refuge among last-century ways and costumes, but for the first time makes supreme pictures with a man in evening dress. Who shall say after that that our art is not overtaking reality? A rise of realistic power, of breadth of vision, is strikingly marked in our younger painters like Langley or Lugsdale.

waiting for the boats of the former venetian alfresco of the latter is each in its way on the highest line of advance and takes full rank beside the best contemporary descriptive novel-writing

but in no subject is the progress of Victorian art so obvious, so immediately apparent, as in that higher speciality of the greater body of R. A.s. of half a century ago, which they were pleased to call historical painting, and from which they were once loftily to look down upon landscape, genre, and every living form of contemporary art.

This simply amounted to book illustration, usually at the very lowest level of knowledge or imagination, not to speak its presence of design or colour.

the better work in this line was perhaps that of egg the most able and ambitious fertile and inventive though peculiarly unreal and ugly that of maclise the most imbecile probably on the whole that of horsley though at this end of the academy the competition has been crowded and keen

The respectable average is best maintained by Ward and Elmore, some of whose pictures are still worth notice, though especially for the light they throw on the history of the English school. Some of Millet's earlier pictures, like The Bride of Llamamore, show the influence of this traditional standpoint.

Yet the spirit of true and false historical painting cannot be better distinguished than by going back to a picture of any of the men just mentioned, after being seized by the terrific intensity of Millais' escaping heretic. Yet even pictures so far beyond the lay figures and old clothes of the historical painters, in the old sense, reach only to the confines of historical painting proper,

this nowadays has fully developed into the systematic and thorough resuscitation of the past the historical movement of which walter scott was the forerunner has not ended with those petty would-be illustrators of him

It has passed from the realms of romance into that of reality, and whether we open a volume of science or political economy, or enter a museum or an exhibition, we find that it differs from an earlier one essentially in this historical point of view. Of this historical spirit, Old Manchester, or indeed best of all, this Jubilee exhibition of paintings itself, is surely sufficiently obvious evidence.

Just as we saw, the naturalist and the landscape painter have long been on parallel lines. So it is now with the study of historical and social science.

it is a fact even yet far from being sufficiently recognised for instance that the consummate flower of classical scholarship and archaeology has to be sought not in the universities of oxford or berlin nor in all of the universities of the world put together but in the man alma

for while the whole race of academic pedants and schoolmasters have been pretending to take us back to Rome, and then generally only given us ten years' penal servitude in their schoolrooms, with hard labour over useless dog-latin exercises, we have but to look through these magic windows, and lo, we are already there.

And while these pictures are of course the central, they are by no means the solitary examples of this systematic revival of an historical period. Sir James Linton, for instance, is becoming, so to speak, a minor Alma-Tadema of the 15th and 16th centuries, and younger painters are taking possession of other and no less profitable fields.

In France, for instance, a frequent theme is afforded by prehistoric manners and life, nor could art and science be more happily associated. The field of possible sight is rapidly filling up, and from the completer illustration of the aspects of nature, modern art is working towards an equally exhaustive iconography of man.

The objection to pictures of this class is constantly made, that these are still too much mere puppets posed, that the tumult of action, the storm of history, the strife of soul with soul, are not yet given, and this must be no doubt largely, though not entirely conceded. Work, however, like some of Petit's and Sir John Gilbert's, show that the more dramatic elements need not be despaired of,

and when we look for this quality developed with the more serious and elaborate spirit of younger painters and later requirements we may take mr mitchell's hypatia as a particularly hopeful example

The enormous possibilities of such men in the revival of art at the highest level finds no better illustration than in this city, where a single painter, by no means of supreme, although assuredly sterling qualities, has rendered unique public service and example. We refer to Maddox Brown's frescoed History of Manchester in the Town Hall.

In comparison with public achievements of this kind, we see how naturally greater men like Alma Tadema, Petit and Orchardson, Poynter and Leighton, Watts and Burne-Jones, despite all their splendid labours and doubtless hundreds of good though less known men who hardly get work at all, are simply being lost to us and to themselves, neglected as almost unworked minds.

lost for the education of the community, for the raising of all the arts, for the very creation of untold commonwealth, for lack of similar public opportunities. Yet until at length we give them these, we shall never know what art is truly capable of, or even what science truly means. End of chapter 1

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$20 monthly promo credits applied over 36 months with a new line on unlimited welcome. In times of congestion, unlimited 5G and 4G LTE may be temporarily slower than other traffic. Domestic data roaming at 2G speeds. Additional terms apply. Part 3 of Every Man His Own Art Critic at the Manchester Exhibition, 1887 by Patrick Geddes. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 2. The Seeing of Art.

having now looked from the standpoints of science and utility and seen that pictures as much as nay more than books serve to enlarge our knowledge of nature and of man it is full time to begin the more difficult analysis of them as works of art

We must rise from the discernment of the true to the enjoyment of the beautiful. And having laid a solid foundation of fact and utility, it is time to forget this and remember how much truth there is in the aphorism, art for art's sake.

We must learn to look at pictures in the painter's way, to value them, that is, for and in proportion to their art, and not merely for the excellence of their record or the interest of their story, for their colour in short, apart from their pathos or their ideals. The average spectator is, of course, on his side deeply right. Nothing, he feels, is worth seeing but the facts of the world and of human life.

Nothing is worth thinking about save the conduct of life, and his ignorant yet often pungent criticism of art, however superficially flippant, always ultimately rests on that as much as did Carlyle's.

Yet the artist is also perfectly within his province in denouncing Carlyle and the mass of the public alike as unmitigated Philistines, in maintaining that the intrinsic excellence of his picture as a picture owes nothing to its subject and as little to its meaning, and in retorting to all our criticisms by silently turning his picture upside down and looking at it as complacently as before.

It is the object of these pages to reconcile this apparent contradiction by looking at art from all its sides, and seeing the truth in each. And this involves at once conceding to the painter that he is to be judged neither by the accuracy of his botany, nor the extent of his knowledge of costume, but by the beauty of his colour, the quality of his light and shadow, the rhythm of his line.

Like the musician or the poet, he has to be judged in the first place by the rules of his own art, and it is certainly neither in stating facts nor in preaching morals that the real qualities of music or poetry can be supposed to lie. Rhythm, variety, melody, harmony, these are standards of excellence in all arts alike, but away with your scientific encyclopedias, your moral and philosophic creeds.

The painter's workmanship, like all other, is a matter primarily neither of head nor heart, but of eye and hand, or else professors and parsons would be painters. Your royal academicians are no more academic than they are royal. Respectable artificer is all those coveted letters R.A. really mean, when indeed so much.

yet it is always a good plan to learn as much as you can from your british workman before you try to lecture him he knows enough to shut up a scientific brig whenever he sees him and feels a barrel organ is no better tuned although it creaks through the hundred and nineteenth psalm

it is of course not possible in this brief compass to supply any full introduction to the mysteries of pure painting or even offer so systematic an outline as is possible when scientific qualities are before us yet one thing may be done let us try to see what is meant by colour

Do you feel instinctively that this is the supreme distinction between a good painting and a bad, that this is fundamental absolutely as rhythm and melody to song, that a picture which has not colour, and there are many, might be an excellent engraving, but has no right to exist as a painting?

If so, you have no need to read further. But if, on the other hand, a glance at a nice devotional picture, like Mr. Cope's Contemplation, or at a pretty fancy like Sir Noel Paton's Uskuld and the Elmades, does not make you feel thoroughly pained, exactly as by a huge blot upon the wall, or a bedaubed engraving, it is time to realise that your colour sense is in a bad way, that in fact,

you are not in any true sense seeing pictures, and I, a degree less insensitive, will at once feel Maclise's Barron's Hall and St. Agnes's Eve as garish and ghastly, and so we might construct a scale of destructive criticism, but this, although a too common way, is not the right one.

The revival of the colour sense, dulled or paralysed by the unloveliness of Manchester, as of all modern life, must be through healthy exercise in reaching higher and higher possibilities of pleasure, not of pain. Look, for instance, at that passing girl among the spectators, with a warm golden sash upon her deep blue dress. There is one of the simplest of colour contrasts.

then see how goodall rebecca at the well avails himself of this then how logsdale and woods employ it in dressing their venetian women look up at mactaggart's message from the sea see how the brilliant blue of the sea is accented by the orange of the children

Then Scalantopetes, laird, notes the essential colour idea of the picture, vigorously given by the old man's coat and vest, and then see how this goes through the whole picture. There could be no better or simpler diagram of how a great colourist fuses colour into harmony than this affords. We shall begin to see after this what is meant by the paradox of equally beautiful upside down.

see how the rich mass of vest glows within its blue setting then how the corn takes up the harmony and the blue follows it everywhere with the contrast both running over the picture in exquisite ever-varying gradations like the same chord running up and down the piano

See how the purple of the handkerchief comes sharply in, and then is subtly greyed over the hills. How the colour of the road is gathered up into that of the dog, and so on. In this way we are learning to see colour, but the magical music which can be got out of blue, red and yellow is only beginning.

Then too we have seen blues and yellows, like goodalls or lugsdales, or even mactaggots, but never quite like those of pettis, transfigured into new colours like those of the laird, so rich and full, subtle and strong, and again in the very next picture, melting into the most delicate minor key in the gauzy plumage of the water-fly,

"'Trace the blues and yellows here gradated up and down the figure, and shimmering over the floor. "'Follow the sparkling and pearly greys from the gem neck-chain over everything, "'and you are getting towards the possession of a new treasure, "'which its lender gladly and wisely purchased for you, with a great price. "'There is no question of whether you care for Scotch lairds or water-flies in themselves,'

So far, all the better if you dislike the literary motive. Here is a great colourist making the old familiar red, blue and yellow of your garden plot into rich and new combinations, overflowing with possibility of healthy sensuous delight, exactly as a composer does with the old notes of the octave.

and there are reasons for thinking it's probably even a greater pity for people who do not see the one music than for those who cannot hear the other but the former are the commonest and their opportunities scarcer and so they go through the gallery and seldom find out that they have no eye at all look for a little at the possibilities of red

Begin with a comparatively simple and decorative painter like Marx, and try to enjoy the splendid plumage of his parrots here and there, as simply as you would have done when a child. Then see the artistic resources by which all these scattered points of interest are brought together by making the old ornithologist the brightest red pole of all.

"'This is good ordinary red and still common property, "'but pass to that of Millais, Cardinal Newman.'

Splendour like this is not only reserved for princes of the church to wear, but for the toilsome victories of princes of the arts to win, and it is worth gazing on with proportionate reverence, worth waiting beside and returning to, until you have had full audience with both princes, and seen how the spiritual glory of the one is established upon the opulence and power of the other.

in deeper hues again take petty's besieged and read not only its dramatic force but the gradations from left to right as they deepen towards the last expression of beaten hopelessness so much for blue and yellow and red as it were separately though of course they are never really separate altogether let us see what they can all do together

But first take a rest, cross to the collection of gems on the opposite side of the adjacent transept, and look at the opals especially. Enjoy their variety. Watch how blue and red and yellow here sparkle and blend, sometimes striking out in simple brightness, but generally more or less subdued and refined, through varying depths and qualities of pearly grey,

now come back to another petty his merry thought and look first simply at the great space of apparently plain colour at the bottom of the picture between the cabbage leaves and the edge of the frame

and if your pulse leaps and you see that this plain uninteresting sandy space is really a vast opal and that deep set in its pearliness all the colours of the picture are throbbing and flashing you are learning to see and enjoy colour at last if this is too subtle there is still hope

Look down to Seymour Lucas's Suspicious Guest on the wall below. A good picture, and convenient as would be a simpler petty. And, bother the story, see first the very obvious contrast of copperpot and cabbages in the corner, then the purple and yellow dancing through each other on both coat and vest.

Look more attentively all over the wall behind, until you can see all the blues and reds and yellows in it, and how they are gradated so as to reward the eye for travelling everywhere over its surface. Then, finally, how these colours crystallise out into the ornaments upon the mantel-shelf.

Or, finally, before your impressions of the opals fade, take another example of good colour, simpler too, and more obvious than Petty's, the opal Milestone in Britain Rivieres, his only friend.

and if you did not know before that milestones in this country were generally each made of one big opal you have only now to take a walk into the country of course before the good impressions of the gallery have all died away to see for yourself that this may be a visible fact of colour if not of mineralogy

and in this way the milestones may come to mark a new sort of progress into the world of colour, in which one sees that there is hardly a street or a house in great and lovely Manchester where one cannot see, if not the brilliant hues of opal, at any rate, the subdued opalescence of the pearly interior of a shell.

To analyse the vivid splendours of such a picture as the merry thought would far exceed the present's limits, and it is time to be passing to other questions.

But it cannot be too much insisted on that the essential fact alike about a picture, as about the image at the back of one's eye, is that it is entirely made up of gradated spaces of colour, of bits of colour mosaic as it were, and of these only, what we call form and outline being simply intellectual abstractions,

judgments acquired in infancy through the sense of touch and not the essential facts of sight which we generally think them at all.

Colours, lighter and darker, are all we see, but an infinitude of these, and the painter's business is, seizing from among these the essential from the accidental, to contrast and harmonise them into a beautiful whole, into a permanent source of sensuous delight, to the trained, i.e., observing eye. Good pictures thus vary in complexity, just as does the colour faculty of people to whom they appeal,

The matter is exactly parallel to that of music. A Scotch tune and a great opera are both good, but at different levels. You can trace this progress in some painters, though not in others. Thus, in the superabundant series of Leslie's, there is little or none, but in the two markers' stones, one sees how vast may be the reward in personal development of conscientious and thoughtful labour.

and even this is in many respects a stationary painter, for the growth in subtlety and refinement has not been accompanied by any proportionate development of colour resources or breadth of artistic range. We come now to another simple consideration of fundamental importance in seeing pictures as much as in painting them.

so great is the actual range between sunshine and darkness compared with our small practicable range between white or yellow and black paint that the brightest picture say one of brett's sea-pieces is but a faint reflection of the glorious reality

So the criticism one so often hears, "'Oh, these colours are too bright!' is either, and most probably, nonsense, or is a blundering way of saying that the contrasts are stronger than in one's dingy life one is accustomed to notice, or that the harmonies seem deficient, or the whole thing out of tone, assumptions that the critic would often find it hard to justify."

Millais, for instance, ranges from brightest vermilion to the deep tones of his somnambulist, or still further down to the glowing gloom of his Greenwich pensioners, and is a colourist all the while. Sir Noel Paton, on the other hand, passes from rainbow hues to night in his Osgold and the Elmades, and yet every inch one happens to look into seems sicklier and dirtier than all the others.

A convenient and easy example in colour discrimination is given by Hall's Gone, where the saddened purples, olives and greens of the poor women's dresses are crystallised out of their harmonising background, and it is a good exercise first to follow out the gradations and contrasts of the hues of each dress, and then to follow their lightened or deepened echoes till they die away in every corner of the picture.

The non-colourists will then be recognisable without search, as a glance at the absence of either richness, variety or gradation in a background of Coopers or even Lanciers will show. But the diminished number of pictures we can after this recognise as positively good will be far more than made up for by our keener enjoyment of them.

associated with the usual deficiency of colour appreciation and the constant substitution of judgments of form and outline in its place, as also with this ignorance of the limitations of the painter's art of which we have been speaking arises another grave misunderstanding, usually current. Thus compare two landscapes hanging side by side, leaders, with verdure clad, and fissures scotch hillside,

Most people like the former, few the latter, and this depends even more upon treatment than subject. Keeping of course to treatment only, the first pleases us with its accuracy in drawing and light and shade, and its precision of detail everywhere from foreground to distance. Hence we think it's natural, the other seems unnatural, too indefinite, unfinished and so forth.

but look at them again through half-closed eyes so as to blot out the sharpness of detail and see only the masses of the landscape now fisher's picture is absolutely right just as would seem the real scene through a window the road runs on and the hills are in the distance

while leda's picture becomes harsh and cold and meaningless fischer's picture has kept its tone bright by a certain sacrifice of detail leda's has gained its sharpness of drawing of light and shadow at the expense of a thorough sacrifice of tone

Look down now at the picture below, Petty's Sisters, to see what greys and green are really like, and behold, the meretricious effect of reality in the leader has vanished, and nothing but tinted engraving remains. Whereas, the longer you look at the picture of the more unpretentious artist, the better you will like it, the more you will see it would be the one to live with if you had your choice of the two.

We must return to this subject. It is one of the most important in art, especially just now. But note what there is of true and false in the popular objection to pictures looking unfinished. A picture expresses a moment of vision. You do not see everything at once. Thus, when you look at a figure, you are only vaguely conscious of the things behind, and the portrait painter's background is right in expressing the same indefiniteness.

The old method of subordinating the details, however, lay very much in painting them badly. Thus, in Goodall's Subsiding of the Nile, the palm trees are rightly intended to be subordinate. But this is no excuse for giving us the same palm twenty times, and this indeed, not a palm at all, but only a bunch of feathers tied upon a stick.

We don't want botanical details. That would have been pictorially far worse. But we do want some suggestion of the variety and mystery of living verdure. How beautifully this can be done is well shown in the shrubbery of the background of the adjacent picture by Marcus Stone, Il y en a toujours un autre.

Here the local truth is full and true in observation, yet, so far from becoming irrelevant or obtrusive, it furnishes one of the most noteworthy elements of the pictorial as well as the emotional success. But mark how this is by no means so perfectly true in his earlier picture. His observant faithfulness in painting foliage and accessories is by no means entirely an advantage to him.

He has at first to make sacrifices in concentration for what he is gaining in detail. And the explanation is simple. Art lies not in the richness of your material, but in the way you put it together. Yet the first thing you can do when you have gathered a whole armful of new treasures is to tumble them out more or less in a heap. And thus we are ready to understand the history of every great wave of progress, the continuous world-old tragedy.

How new and young observers pushed into some new field, and brought back a wealth which they could not at first completely manage. For the penalty of abandoning the established resources of art is that one has no longer the benefit of a long-accumulated experience in combining them. And so, the new beauties are not so evident as the unconventionality of their presentation.

the critics and the respectable artificers the scribes and the pharisees of culture see at a glance the offence against the letter of their law and with narrow pitiless conscientiousness denounce it the public at once take up the cry

The judges say, away with him, he is beaten with many stripes, has often literally to die the death, and, like the starved mile, he enters the pantheon only through the calvary of art.

and whether he thus perish before his prime or with turner he succeed in utter isolation in carrying out his ideals or whether with our own greatest yet meanest living english painter he accepts fame and fortune for abandoning them his example but discourages his whole generation of less ardent men

Whereas, had men but openness to new truth and charity in listening to it, they would be enriched by the whole life labour of the teachers of their own generation, and not alone by gathering up the surviving relics of the martyrdoms of the past. Take now the simplest idea of the Pre-Raphaelite brethren, their reflection of the contemporary naturalist movement through Turner and modern painters.

the glorious wealth upon every mossy stone, the marvellousness of the transparent interlacing grass-blades, pearled with dewdrop and golden with sun, the subtleness of faithfully foreshortened leaves, had all as yet no interpreter. They had not even been drawn since Dürer. That, of course, work of this sort did not make a picture was easy to see.

It was easy to compare this mode of viewing things with that of an inquisitive Beatle and so forth, especially if you were a middle-aged critic, a respectable artificer named Peter Bell or the like. But the Pre-Raphaelites have taken their way, and not only Holman Hunt's Strayed Sheep shows with what success, but, what is far more important, this fuller measure of accuracy soon came to influence other painters

and to bring with it a wealth of new resources artistic and expressional henceforth available to all men in that infinite world of life which the old orthodox school had contentedly symbolized by its smudgy grass and its brown trees but we are in no danger of failing to enjoy such detail granted our present difficulty lies quite the other way

We saw most people would at first prefer leaders' picture to fishers. It is the impressionist view of things which needs at present defenders and exponents. Look out of your windows, over the gardens if possible, and into the country, failing that, at any rate, down the street. You see the detail chiefly,

If you were to paint, you would draw those distant houses with all their windows, so that one could count them, and you expect your painters to do the same, and then think the picture will be true, but hold your left hand upright against the horizon, so that its lighted edge comes like the side of a picture frame and gives you a standard of tone.

Then notice your foreground, how comparatively strong. It is useful to close one eye and at first even to half blink through the other. Your middle distance, see how much fainter. The distance, how much fainter again. Your picture would be three main masses or belts of tone, would it not? Is it any longer possible to draw those windows with the same precision, without doing it with the sharpness which you must reserve for the foreground?

You are in a plain dilemma. You must either sacrifice the general truth of your picture or the unimportant details. Putting them in means hardness, that is, general untruth. Throw away these details, leaving distant houses windowless, but keep the general truth. Your resources admit of wholesale or retail, but not both at once. Here then lies the difference between Leder and Fisher already so fully discussed.

Of course, with increasing skill we can come nearer and nearer, reconciling these two aspects. Yet there has been no perfectly middle course, and, broadly speaking, our English landscapists tend to sacrifice tone, French ones to insist upon it at all costs. Hence the dissatisfaction people have with an impressionist picture is chiefly an intellectual one,

They want to see the windows of the distant house, nay, the very bricks which compose it, and this not because they care about subtlety, but mainly because they know they are there. They want an opera glass, a telescope for distance, and a microscope at hand, and cannot understand a French painter, though he may be truthful as a camera obscurer.

such effacement of trifling details must at first seem incomprehensible and such equally proportioned reduction of brightness dull how rapidly however the impressionistic influence is coming upon us a visit to any annual exhibition after this historic one will show

But what is wanted is, not violently, that is, ignorantly, to take a side, but to sympathise with both, remembering that truth is holy with neither, and rejoice as out of those contrasted schools the newer and fuller styles of the future arise. We have no space for the discussion of composition, but this the reader can make out more easily for himself.

"'Luke, for instance, to begin with, at the older pictures, the cows of Cooper, how neatly grouped, at the ships of Cook, or at the ship and windmill of Stanfield, see how the separate masses are united into larger ones, how their figures are built into pyramids. In MacLeese's Baron's Hall you will find them of all sorts and sizes.'

Compositions so simply triangular as all these are now chiefly employed in the decoration of chocolate boxes, yet they are often very good so far as they go, and are useful as leading up to the more subtle modern employments of the same principles. Begin with Moore and pass to Leighton, thence to Alma-Tadema, to see what figure composition really means, how each form and line is interwoven with all the rest,

"'Perhaps the simplest way will be to return to our old friends. "'See how, in Petty's Laird, "'the upward curve of the dog's tail points to the old man's sleeve, "'and so suggests the pyramid, "'how the lines of weed and field and wall lead up to the face, "'how we are carried into the distance not only by the path, "'but called thither by the distant white cottage "'and the blue figure rhyming faintly to the Laird's own.'

Take, in Breton Rivière's His Only Friend, an example of a simple perfection of harmonious form and line, then see how the figures of Petty's merry thought are bound together, or look at Orchardson's Mariage de Convenance, to see how the lamp and its reflection clasp the distant halves of the picture into one.

Try to follow up for the pictures of which the art pleases you most some such analysis, first for colour, and then for composition. And if you care to pursue the subject farther, there is in the Art Museum at Ancoats, which, however unappreciated, has in it more real because simple instructiveness than South Kensington and the British Museum put together, a set of excellent diagrams by Shields.

We must hurry on to the remaining way of interpreting pictures, the question of their thought. Yet before leaving the field of pure art, we would wish distinctly to say that progress in enjoyment, and that, moreover, incredibly rapid, is beyond no one's reach, however dull before, who will but begin to look, not for faults, that would be for ugliness, but for beauty."

To recover or develop the faculty of artistic vision, perhaps the central want of our modern industry, and of our pleasure, too, no nostrums of art schools and examinations are needed, but a healthy regimen alone, a daily life from which ugliness is steadily going out, and into which beauty, perceptibly, even if slowly, is coming in.

to look at pictures and from them to nature and life and thence back and back again alternately will do much and to correct purify and gradually refine the colour surroundings of one's own home will do far more that is nowadays the first condition of the asylum and the hospital

Simple, harmonious colour is turning out to be reposeful and curative, both for body and mind, far beyond anything that the most sanguine physicians used to dream. Someday soon, therefore, practical people will commence to discern that they need not let their own and their children's bodies and minds go quite so far wrong, before they begin to take some little care of them in this very simple and delightful way. End of part 3

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$20 monthly promo credits applied over 36 months with a new line on unlimited welcome. In times of congestion, unlimited 5G and 4G LTE may be temporarily slower than other traffic. Domestic data roaming at 2G speeds. Additional terms apply.

For a limited time at Verizon, you can get our best price ever for a single line. Just $45 per month when you bring your phone, which is less than you spend on too-tired-to-cook takeout every week. Get one line on unlimited welcome for $45 per month with AutoPay Plus taxes and fees. Visit your local LA Verizon store by April 2nd to save.

$20 monthly promo credits applied over 36 months with a new line on unlimited welcome. In times of congestion, unlimited 5G and 4G LTE may be temporarily slower than other traffic. Domestic data roaming at 2G speeds. Additional terms apply. Part 4 of Everyman His Own Arts Critic at the Manchester Exhibition, 1887 by Patrick Geddes. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 3 The Feeling of Art

Our examination of the complex whole we know as a painter's style, into its three elements, having now got so far on the lines of following the eager eye which sees, and watching the dexterous hand which renders and arranges, we may try finally whether we cannot also understand and sympathise a little with the head and heart which idealise.

In varying measure we see the true and enjoy the beautiful. Yet many say, when all is done, but who will show us any good? Nobody wants cheap dogmatic morals, nor pictures which preach at us. The very paintings of Cope and Paton which we noted, when speaking of colour as peculiarly objectionable, no doubt owe their unfortunate existence to the most praiseworthy motives.

Yet the only result of such inartistic pieties and allegories is to frighten really artistic men from venturing upon imaginative and ideal art at all. In the same way those feeble Aesthetes one sometimes still meets, or at whose caricatures, as the inner brotherhood of Postlethwaite saw the like, we have all laughed with Punch and the Comedians, have done boundless mischief.

Yet, without some element of the ideal, some tinge of emotion, some feeling at any rate, we have no true art at all, but only soulless photographs of nature or empty trickeries of technical skill. What, then, is this mysterious element of art which refuses to become materialised as its body, yet is indispensable as its soul? Let us begin again with the landscape painters or with the sea.

if those pictures were real windows people would choose bretts yet as pictures to live with they would soon prefer henry moore's the first choice would be because we all love sunshine rolling clouds and vast expanse of view

the second choice would be not so much for the artistic reason that the very success of this admirable and praiseworthy painter in putting more into a picture than ever there was before is necessarily outrunning his resources in arranging it as because in the other there is more of the mysterious feeling and associations of the sea

The one shows us a noble spectacle, Britannia's realm indeed, and all the glory of it, but the other makes us feel that we are ourselves of the race of Vikings, and that there is no path through life worth the swans. Against the sunny optimism of the first painter, too, that no man can help idealising somewhat, stands out the manlier recognition of the stormy possibilities of life in the other,

then see how differently the scotsmen look at the sea how the celtic melancholy incipient in graham's magnificent spate in the highlands becomes painful and hopeless in his repeated insistences upon the chill mist and the cruel foam at which the crofter of the western highlands sits helplessly gazing and even casts its shadow into the glowing canvas of colin hunter

or coming to land look attentively it only needs time to realise at two pictures by a w hunt leafy june and whitby morning and you will feel how over and above the wonderful transcripts of fact and nobly beautiful arrangements of colour there is something more how the first filled with the purest delight in nature is a true idyll of summer

while from the second comes to us as articulately as from Wordsworth, yet as deeply as from Beethoven, the still sad music of humanity. Having thus our third criterion of painting, and having passed from the fundamental criticisms of intellectual range and decorative faculty to that of poetic perception, we may go through the galleries once more.

But the question cannot help rising in our town-dulled minds. How far is all this emotion of colour, real and intrinsic, or imaginary? Are we not simply being urged to see in the pictures what, perhaps, after all, lies only in their literary exposition? Can colours mean anything in themselves? Let us see.

Take again Petty, whose work is always specially convenient for purposes of analysis, just because the painter is not a supreme one in any direction, but a good sensible artist, of special force and variety as a colourist, by no means affected by ideas to the extent of most of his contemporaries, but simply obeying his instincts.

in short, a naturally painting animal, whose comparative unconscious ways are therefore all the more instructive to watch.

"'Look how the laird's pensive contentment "'is sympathised with by the blue over gold of his picture, "'how the sweet little sisters are shining like pearls "'embosomed in an emerald wood, "'how the colour of the besieged deepens from blood into darkness, "'or how the sandbank and its scattered dainties "'and merry company are shining, gemmed and golden in the sun. "'Each of these colour schemes may be taken as equally right.'

Decoratively, therefore, on the upside-down principle, it would not matter though he had transposed them. But what would then have come of the emotion of each picture? That essentially depends upon the respective appropriateness of dark and day, of gloom and sun. That our colour emotions are no conventions, but perfectly organic elements of nature, may be traced everywhere through life.

Look at the ritual of the historic churches, and see how the colour of altar and vestments changes round the year with the appropriate emotions to each festival, from the white and gold of Easter to the black of Good Friday. How Christmas comes clad with joyous scarlet, and Advent with solemn purple. These might then be traced to the earlier polytheism, and then again, no doubt, to far earlier times.

the colour emotion then is elemental seasonal it arises with and expresses the changes of the year and day the joy of spring and of the morning the fading splendour of autumn and of sunset the awful solemnity of night how indeed could it be otherwise when it is solely as colour impressions that we become conscious of these at all

that with the blurred impressions and increasing unobservantness of most lives, this colour emotion diminishes or almost disappears, is only too true. Yet this all the more proves it to be organic. The artist is thus no unaccountable prodigy of genius, but simply a child who has retained and developed his natural delight in brightness and colour. And in happier conditions this might be less the exception than the rule.

Just as the decorative aspect of his art lies in arranging these pretty ways, so the feeling, the poetic quality of it, lies in his command of these elemental tones and feelings, and his power of composing them into music, rendered visible, lyric or love-song, idyll or epic, dirge or psalm.

How this is carried out we may follow into detail. In the simple case just before us, note how the red naturally glows under the soldier's armour, how the monk's robe suits his character of joviality, peeping through restraint, or how the jester's brilliant gaiety is tinged by a minor chord of sadness.

That the poetic value of a picture depends partly also upon other elements is shown by the very variable residuum which survives its translation into black and white. But we need not stop to measure those minor factors of expression so long as we do not ignore them. In seeking to appreciate these highest qualities of art, we shall soon find that they occur in no definite or constant proportion to the preceding ones of sight or skill.

hence it is in our day that men have at last gone back weary of the observant subtleties of the renaissance schools to delight in the works of comparatively ignorant and unskilful masters and read their divine comedy though written in the faded archaic character of the middle age

We should come then to have more comprehension of the Pre-Raphaelites and their contemporary representatives in Burne-Jones and his companions, and a more sympathy with their limitations, to forgive their timid shrinking from a sordid unintelligible everyday world, in reverent gratitude for the saintly vision of its spiritual ideals. Certainly the masters who reach the poetic level are often inferior in respect of sight and skill,

Nor does progress in either of these qualities alone necessarily involve the third, yet their relation is as in the other arts. Take, for instance, architecture, where, as the resources expand and the technical powers develop, there is some proportional possibility of higher expression, which, however, is far from reached by every master or school.

in more general terms a man's ideals should develop with his knowledge and his powers yet in too many of us they sadly fail to rise with these though in the best they keep hastening beyond

hence it is that the world's small wealth of idealized vision has come mostly from simple men in poor and quiet surroundings from ancient italian cloisters from barbizon village from poor engravers garrets and the like but little from the grand studios of modern capitals

your respectable artificers and the multitude of ambitious aspirants upon whom they sit can never have much of this for though living in a big house in london upon your youthful impressions of nature and going out to dinner as often as you can to sell them is an ideal certainly it is incompatible with many others

The deepest misfortune of the modern painter is that while the church has long ceased to keep the old ideals before him, out of the babel of modern literature he has scarcely yet begun to see the new ones emerge. The wonder then is that he has not even more utterly sunk down into the ordinary commercial world in which he must earn his bread, and what he still expresses to us shows how much more lies waiting to be aroused.

instead of this endless labour on little panels scattered hither and thither to flap idly upon rich men's walls grant any of these painters one continued task for his fellow-citizens old or young make him work for hall or school for street or square and see the result see how the dormant thoughts will flash into activity and the languid nerves be strung

give Alma Tadema his university and see him quadrupled, or give our friend Mr. Petty a city hall and see what a waking up there would be. But in this gallery of the past half-century of evil times for art, we must rejoice over such higher artistic life as we can find, and not too harshly judge its comparative absence.

And, however we may regret the scarcity of highest art, we must not fail praisefully to rejoice over that breadth of tender landscape, that wealth of domestic pathos, and that reverent presentation of pure womanhood which make up the chief wealth of our English school. We have already noted the achievements of the historical and the decorative painters.

A single picture, like Leighton's Daphnephoria, is enough to show that art is not wholly waiting for new ideals or social impulses and opportunities. In some ways, though we lose in public result, we may gain something in personal idiosyncrasy, for solitude and self-concentration have been needed to develop the singular personality of Rossetti or Burne-Jones.

The painter is left freer to express himself, although it be in a more limited way, and thus from his works we can decipher his life history and read his message to us with peculiar clearness. See in Rossetti how the first physical ideal of womanhood in the Blue Bower refines into that of the beloved the best work of the first period, and indeed, in purely artistic aspects, of all.

Then, when death strikes off half his life and leaves him brooding in melancholy, the new series of visions arises, and all those idealizations of lost love which comforted Dante of old come back and take new forms in verse and colour. But it is not needful to discuss examples so comparatively intelligible as these, and Watts and Burne-Jones soon yield their meaning to a little patient study.

Get into sympathy in the first place, and get rid of your prejudices, if you still have any, that these absurdly called aesthetic painters are so unreal. Begin with two pictures of chivalry. One, Gaston Defoy of the respectable Old Philistine School, appropriately, in fact, by a former president of the respectable artificers, the famous Sir Charles Eastlake, who only died in 1865.

In this wondrous art-treasure see the brown tree, the castle, the fair lady, best of all the knight in newly Japaned armour, who has appropriated and is endeavouring to conceal the sign of the American tin-shop where he bought it. Then from the academy turn to the Grosvenor, leave Philistia and enter Camelot, and look at Burne-Jones's Chant d'Amour, and you will soon understand its merits from every one of our three points of view.

Less obvious, perhaps, to begin with, are the idealisations of landscape. Here the intellectual presentation is far less clear and conscious, even to the painter's own mind, than with figure subjects. Yet even in these a man's mind and history may be written clearly, whether of progress or decline. This again may rouse scepticism, at least in those minds to which pictures are the mere chance fragments of a show.

Yet more accurately, what we should have said was not that a man's spiritual life history may be written in his art, but that it invariably is and must be. That character expresses itself in literature is not denied, in music even is not denied, in handicraft, in business, even in handwriting, are also mere commonplaces. How much more, therefore, is this one human occupation in which the faculties of all the rest unite?

what else determines range and choice of subject, what else selects mode of treatment, and what so unerringly measures and records the health alike of body and mind as this continuous sum of daily toil, this skill and style accumulating through life. A series of pictures comes, therefore, to be the truest of all possible autobiographies,

but what we want from these after all is to put character into the confessional and not simply follow individual incidents and here again the colour emotion is of a special value take for instance the landscapes of mller

See how the driving clouds, bending trees, the mingled rain and sun, most of all the marvellous water struggling through those twisted obstacles which recur in picture after picture, set before us the battle of a proud, passionate, strenuous, yet somewhat limited soul, struggling with every difficulty of art and life at once, as clearly as could a poem.

and thus few need be the sceptics who have to turn to his written words of bitterness upon the back of his main picture to confirm this. With more varied range and interest, too, is the same life tragedy told in the peculiarly notable series of works by Frederick Walker.

one picture there is the peaceful thames of golden afternoon yet well-nigh spent of richest autumn yet quiet and pensive of fair lithe youth yet languid and reposeful and around this in every picture the varying chords of pathos deepen in the old gate every figure and tree alike is suffused with sympathy or sadness

In the plough we have the fierce intensity of struggling labour that the field may be finished before the lurid splendour dies from the cloud and the cold stealing night has come. And we see that the plougher is the painter's eager soul and the toiling horses are his flagging strength. The woman speeding with her burden through the darkening snow tells the same story in the briefest way.

the harbour of refuge is but a fuller and bitterer version the old courtyard is the world with its order statue fixed its types of unlovely and ignoble age alone seem to survive

the young must live in solitude and perish in suffering for now the painter's self looks from the drooping face of the fair girl who will so soon meet the ominous grim mower on the one side and so at last part company with the grimmer crone who has taken fast hold of her upon the other and the same face looks at us once more in the delicate boy toiling along the bleak wet road with the heavy hard old hand upon his shoulder

and then the poor painter steps out of life the pathos here is deeper and truer if simpler than rosetti's and more pictorial if less symbolic here of course the prevailing note is one of pessimism often more bitter if less desolate than that which shines in cecil lawson's adjacent moonlight strayed or lies upon his haunted pool wet moon

yet optimism and pessimism are seen best by the reflective lights each cast upon the other thus walker is pessimist in the main for the night is coming fast and labour soon must stop unfinished yet the clouds are glorious while they last and every spot of earth glows with a strange beauty but pass now to mason whose works run on in lovely series on the next wall and with these too pinwell's water-colours should be looked into

finally also those of walker especially noting his own eager face these now constitute a small but well-marked school limited somewhat in range of subject without superlative intellectual or artistic faculty with admitted shortcomings in point of art yet subtle in observation and full of skilful care

their special eminence lies then essentially within our third category and this deep poetic feeling of theirs is genuinely pictorial not literary although much remains in their engravings it rests rightly upon the central artistic base that of the emotion of colour which on its pathetic side they have uniquely developed

And what is their theme? The very humblest. No piled-up magnificence of all things terrestrial and celestial into landscape like Turner's. No great men or stately ladies like the portrait painters. No encyclopedic knowledge of the classic past like Alma-Tadema. No Faust-like magic of Pointer or Leighton to bring its loveliest forms back from the shades.

What they have seen and limned and loved are only the common English waysides and the simple peasant folk they used to meet. Yet they have treated these in a new way, not brutalising them with the coarse old Dutch realism, which was not realism but vulgar caricature, nor idealising them with the silly old French sentiment, which was not sentiment but cheap millinery.

for these two points of view have passed away for thinking men since the French Revolution, though here and there, of course, your respectable artificer still turns a penny by continuing the manufacture of reflections of them.

nor do they treat their figures like the last generation of painters we may say universally that is as entirely characterless units to be herded or isolated employed or cast out as one's own temporary interest i e convenience taste requires though of course one must not quarrel with the average painter for looking at the people exactly as his patron did

"'exactly as did the politicians and the manufacturers and the public, "'with all their parsons and editors and political economists. "'In fact, as all Manchester was accustomed to do. "'For if a common man is only fit to carry a pick, "'and the most profitable use you can make of a woman "'is to employ her to weave calico or shawls, "'then the painter, of course, could do nothing more with either of them "'than to set the man picking with his back towards us in the ditch.'

and give the woman a petticoat and a red shawl to go down the road to the vanishing points.

But if the painter must not nowadays represent Hodge as fighting or intoxicated, nor yet in silk stockings and with a crook, and if even hedging and ditching is not good enough for him, and he is not simply to be regarded as a pawn of colour to be given employment to exactly where and when he contributes to your resources, what is the poor landscape painter with figures to do?'

his scanty capital is vanishing he has no more situations left there will be an insurrection directly those figures and a red flag a crowd or at best an explosion will be one's only remaining pictorial resource socialism is in the wind alas for the good old times

"'Had we not better be giving up nature, "'it does not pay any longer "'and be getting home to our clothes-chest and lay-figure, "'and so perhaps get a new historical idea. "'This is what the painters generally do, "'but there is no harm done. "'It is only their lay-figures they have been seeing all the time. "'They have been carrying them round, though they did not notice it.'"

But they are very clever people, the French, and have very clever artists too. And a century ago they found out that a peasant had rights, and a vote, and all sorts of things that you could talk about most beautifully, and even make a new religion out of. And then, two generations later, after they had dug up prehistoric man and knew all about him, one of their artists caught sight of a real-life peasant in the fields, and drew him, sewing and what not.

but they starved the discoverer to death because, he said, poor Jacques had a soul. And two or three English heretics, like Mason, came round to that opinion too, and there are some folks who fear such unsettling ways of thinking will spread. Mason, however, unlike most of these painters, is no pessimist, yet he never lacks the note of sadness.

the sun does not fully shine and even when it sets in glow the gathering clouds take sober colouring yet his morning was pleasant and his afternoon fair and soon the full moon will be shining the difficulties of life are not to be evaded even by the gentlest natures

the wind is on the wold yet though the hissing of that ill-tempered gander may indeed dismay us or that impracticable donkey refuse to come our way these are after all small sorrows soon we shall have a little rest among the trees and listen to robin's flute and dance and sing

these were the pastorals of our dead poet and what concerns us in their criticism to see is not a sham idealising of the real like the old pastorals but the discerning of that true ideal which lies within the real but you cannot see anything of this in english peasants he has no rejoinder again save turner's do you not wish you could

It is there, in those dull English rustics, the sparks of truest life and love and pathos still remain, and only waited those eyes to see, as they still wait other such souls to develop them. The first kind of seeing we have found was that of science, and the next of culture or skill, but this spiritual vision is the supreme beatitude, and comes only to the pure in heart.

As too rarely among the many collections of the present exhibition, we have the series of works culminating in a central and final one, The Harvest Moon. Happier than Millet, than Walker, than almost any indeed of our lost painters, we feel that this man has fulfilled his work in the world, has gathered up into a noble climax his life's happiness, experience, skill and thought.

Finally enriched by this picture then, let us leave these historic galleries. Come back another time to analyse it, to see for instance how the softness of the scene is rendered by the keen contrast of the scythe blades, their colour giving us the full value of the crossing lights of sun and moon, and their curves dominating the figures and echoing along the horizon and the trees.

But at present it is enough to rejoice in it, enough to see that in this fair vision of vanishing Arcadia and yet ideal of New Atlantis, we have found the Daphnephoria of the English people, perhaps the purest synthesis yet reached by modern painter of the good and beautiful and true. End of part 4. End of Every Man His Own Art Critic at the Manchester Exhibition, 1887. By Patrick Geddes.

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Part 1 of Every Man His Own Art Critic, Glasgow Exhibition, 1888. An Introduction to the Study of Pictures by Patrick Geddes. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Preferred Tree Note.

This little book, while complete in itself, as befits its immediate purpose, may also be read as a continuation of the writer's Everyman His Own Art Critic at the Manchester exhibition last year. The same simple principles of criticism are again stated and applied to the pictures, yet these have been in some measure chosen so as to raise questions not previously discussed. Introduction The Aspects of Art

Although there is no special department of this collection of paintings which may not have been surpassed within comparatively recent experience, the present Glasgow exhibition may claim pre-eminence for its variety and multiplicity of interest.

Though less important in its representation of English, and indeed almost of Scottish art, than the Manchester exhibition last year, or in its collection of foreign masters than that of Edinburgh the year before, it notwithstanding offers a fuller idea of the present state and immediate possibilities of modern art than any of its predecessors.

However disappointing, therefore, in this or that respect to the student, it is of peculiar interest and richness for the majority of visitors. Conscientiously to do the pictures, laboriously to make conversation about them, has been indeed as much a matter of course in every well-regulated Glasgow household this summer as for a decade past in the corresponding London one. So here no doubt rise hopes for art, but also fears.

this throng of sight-seers this flood of gossip has in it no doubt the stuff of art criticism but as yet sadly diluted and confused

thus from the general agreement as to the sins of the hanging committee one sees that the careful grouping at manchester last year has popularised a higher standard in this respect while the interest in the collection of sculpture is sufficient to justify the hopes of its promoters and show that a new departure in public taste is here being made

Moreover, almost the simplest visitor has been finding his favourite picture. And what is more important, every painter is finding his proper public, who are not slow to extol his peculiar virtues, or vices, as the case may be.

warm discussions thus arise and all the great art questions are raised truly enough but for want of any agreement about first principles the convitants can make little impression upon each other and fall back sooner or later upon no better compromise than that of the well-worn platitudes tastes differ no accounting for them and so forth

platitudes notwithstanding, this definite common-sense basis of art criticism really does exist. Secondly, it is in some measure speedily attainable by all, that is, all who will bring to art such patience and open-mindedness as they would bring to any other subject with which they desire better acquaintance.

these at any rate are the two postulates of the present paper they are implied in the proposition of its title every man may be something of an art critic and that intelligently he may not only enjoy as heretofore the choice of his own natural artistic taste but may analyse it and know what he is getting

He may examine too what are the new and strange dainties offered him by others, and so not only purify his table, but enrich and vary it far beyond his present limits. For he who is most fully his own art critic gets most good out of life. What then are these simple principles of art criticism, and what price must we pay to learn them?

Price is, indeed, for some a hopeless initial difficulty. It involves the sacrifice of our own personal infallibility, always a hard matter to the would-be critic.

We must abjure these hasty conversational estimates in which we distribute praise and blame simply according to our own likings, like a base autocrat, as every man naturally is to begin with, and keep silence until we have honestly tried to know the case as becomes that rare product even of democratic culture, an honest judge.

This proposal being simply to try the picture first, and only hang it if need be afterwards, is of course familiar enough in our theory, however revolutionary it might be in practice. So we may take the ascent from throne towards judgment seat for granted, and inquire into the laws of criticism by which we are to bind ourselves to judge.

If we give up our own personal unit of measure, as good and bad, as like and dislike, we must speedily find others. What are these to be? Good or bad, as applied to a work of art, must thereupon be measured in each of these qualities separately, and finally, as the sum of all the qualities taken together. We thus ask, what are these qualities? Which are we to reckon most important?

Straightway, the painters and critics answer in a perfect babel of tongues, and confusion seems worse confounded. Hence it is that at this point people are so commonly frightened back to their own likings and dislikings again. Taking heart, however, we shall find these apparently so numerous qualities of a work of art falling under a few very distinct categories.

we find all judgments of good and bad varying first of all we may say as most commonly and popularly with the nature of the subject thereafter but quite distinctly secondly with the artistic qualities of its presentment thereafter once more thirdly with the personality or mood of the artist himself which his choice of subject and mode of treatment alike help us to interpret

hence the differences of popular taste are far less perplexing than they seem novelty of scene will always be delightful familiarity of incident interesting other things equal therefore the best pictures would be as many people indeed think simply the farthest-fetched photographs and the homeliest ones among these finally the truest to literal fact

but the other things are not equal beauty of colour or line intensity of light and shadow each specially fascinates some of us and such qualities of a picture are independent of its particular subject while no two painters however closely agreeing in these two aspects in other words of the same school have these in quite the same proportion and degree

The subject of our picture we must of course apprehend and discuss with the intellect, whereas our appreciation of treatment is primarily a question of the senses and so depends upon their natural delicacy and subsequent training, as in the appreciation of the bouquet of a wine or the tone of an instrument. There is no disputing about taste, certainly, but it is because the expert knows and the tyro doesn't, and there is no more to be said.

whole debating societies cannot help us so it is that these points of view come so largely to be separated the intellect runs away with the subject and the senses never get leave to enjoy the picture at all

Thus, by the most rapid of tests, you can tell how small a proportion of the visitors in a gallery have learned to see the pictures other than as a kind of illustrated newspaper, by noticing how they begin, in almost every case, by looking up their catalogue to see what it is called. They never dream of beginning with the picture first, and looking at it quietly till they are ready to mark on their catalogue what it is.

This has been the making of the literary painter. Only concoct a title with a pun in it, or turn up a happy quotation from Longfellow. Give us half a page of Scott, a good pathetic sermonising, or a dog that plays funny tricks, and an engraving of your picture shall adorn the British drawing-room. You are safe to become an R.A. You stand a fair chance of being knighted.

if a german the choice of subjects is more limited a broad practical joke one or more saints in a state of levitation princely spike helmets and imperial jack-boots best of all a battle-piece with plenty of little copper-coloured fiends in french uniforms running away any of these will do for the new berlin national gallery

if on the other hand it is to cut a figure in the salon you want you cannot do better than to go in for the ghastly or the indecent but happiest of all the man whose assiduously cultured imagination combines the perfection of both these qualities then like mr van beers he may become an exhibition by and in himself

seen treatment and idealization these then are the elements of every picture the three dimensions in which we have to measure them simple categories and as distinguishable as our length breadth and thickness yet like these all varying independently and so giving us an infinite variety and possibility of forms

head, hand and heart, sight, skill and feeling, these make up alike the man and his picture. But no two men have ever exactly the same amount and proportions of each, nay, not even any two pictures, for the very course of health and circumstances constantly changing, and our scene, our treatment and our ideals must accordingly be affected less or more with these. But of far deeper importance is the course of individual life,

In youth the artist is observing with keen, fresh, eager eyes, hungry for new impressions as those of infancy. In the pictures of this period, the scene and subject is necessarily uppermost. To record or reproduce some fact, or at best to imagine it as it might precisely have occurred, is our highest aim. Truth, in the sense of fact, is what we are seeking above all things.

but the accumulation of old impressions gradually becomes more and more ponderous, and openness to new ones also diminishes with the approach of maturity. In compensation, however, our power of expression and arrangement has increased, our style has become developed. We are henceforth less of students, but more of craftsmen, and thus the observer and the transcriber gradually passes into the developed artist."

beyond the more literal truth or fact of aspect he sees the essential and permanent truth the beauty of aspect and if he speaks of ideals it is in the sense of aiming at this essential visual aspect beyond all things art is no longer for fact's sake she is indignant with the very thought of being a sort of handmaid of science henceforth she is free

at length we have art for art's sake fuller and fuller expression of the sensuous beauty of nature or humanity is reached with advancing technical mastership here at length the painter has come into his kingdom and here he would fain abide in jubilant energy of rule but here also we have no continuing city the very eyes soon grow dim by six and forty at any rate we have mostly all to put on our spectacles

the aspect of things henceforth changes steadily minute details and their rendering alike weary us yet we may see mass and tone all the better and so only lose the smaller for the larger truth even with this all some change of style would be inevitable but beyond the physical approach of age the course of life has been working silently upon the inner nature of the man

The great root passions of love and hunger, in all their forms and outcomes, have passed their first crudeness, their first intensity. Yet the emotional life is not only rich in reminiscences of these, but still has these root motives subtly transmuted into maturer forms. Then too, the mystery and majesty of the universe affect us more profoundly, if more calmly, than in youth.

the joy of light the awful sublimity of darkness the depth and infinitude of atmosphere and sea this or that great general aspect now increasingly impresses the ageing man and as his early labours in delineation become subservient to his maturer skill of composition and colour so now even this also becomes absorbed in turn into a new task

that of rendering this emotion of nature, this ideal aspect under which the long-sought and protean truth has been finally revealed. So with the human side of art, the figure painter begins with historical efforts, for the most part groups of costume or its best conscientiously literal studies of his models or likenesses of his sitters.

later he learns to seize the elements of beauty of form or colour which unite in loveliness or linger in ruin upon every human face and so graduates as a painter

But only in the final progress of his life he paints for us the body as the soul made visible, its lifelong action and passion embodied in mingled retribution and reward, its very gesture heavy with sorrow or throbbing with happiness, instinct with energy or serene in peace. Landscapist and figure painter alike tend to pass through these three levels of attainment,

this is indeed often noted of individual painters the three periods of turner being probably the standard instance these are happily illustrated in the series of three pictures hanging side by side in room number two boats carrying out anchors and cables wreck of the minotaur and falls of clyde

The first is mainly a wooden representation of an uninteresting fact, a piece of documentary evidence from a particular stage of Turner's studies. The second, despite the fading of its colour, will always remain one of the world's towering masterpieces of composition in every line and light and mass, while the third is, above all things, a glimpse of the marvellous, luminous dreamland of the master's later years.

Footnote For examples with which the reader is more certain to sympathise, he should consult the beautiful series of Turner watercolours, in which loveliness of scene and skill of composition, while still subordinated to their idealisation, are not obscured by extreme insistence upon this, hence the unique value and perfection of this series of works. End of footnote

Beside this idealised landscape, note the next picture, its figures seeming as if emerging from this haze of light. Here are, as it were, the human ideals arising from amid natural ones, for this is also an idealisation by a great master in his final stage, Watts's Love and Life, of which we shall see more anon.

while these three qualities of pictorial style therefore broadly correspond to the three stages of individual life youth maturity and age there are many apparent exceptions like too many other men however long they live our painters may never fully reach even maturity and have even their unduly prolonged youth but poorly developed while few even have those who mature into full manhood ripen into the final stage

On the other hand, the young men may see visions as well as the old men dream dreams. Some painters are precocious and early reach, not only like Bastien-Lepage, the stage of technical mastership, but, like Cecil Lawson, like Frederick Walker, that of imagination and emotion in the most marked degree. Strongly noticeable, however, in such cases is the association of early death

it would seem as if the life-cycle like that of keats has been lived through too rapidly as if the spirit of maturity and age had been hastened into brief perfection in association with the rapid decay of the physical frame yet in no mean compensation for this also we do not think those the happiest flowers which have to wait their chance of blossoming till autumn so far the outline of our three categories

Let us now proceed to the elucidation of each in turn, using as far as possible pictures which are either already well known or deserve to be.

We may thus seize the good of each of the contemporary schools of art criticism, endeavouring to appreciate sensuous and executive qualities of excellence, yet without sneering with the aesthetic specialist at the final qualities of idealisation, of suggestion or symbolism, vague or definite, in virtue of which the painter's art rises beyond the simple decorators to the level of the musicians or the poets.

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Part 2 of Every Man His Own Art Critic, Glasgow Exhibition, 1888, by Patrick Geddes. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 1. The Art of Seeing They are like children, lately come into this wonderful world, some of these simplest visitors in a picture gallery. Here is a big man, and there is a little girl, and over there, oh joy, a white horse, a black dog, a red cow,

We may smile at these simple experiences, but must not forget that our wider knowledge of the aspects of the world is also small compared with its infinite variety. While we are indeed in the rarest health, if each new addition to our experience gives us anything of the same fresh happiness.

age may indeed have withered or rather foolish custom staled this but the painter or the naturalist in any sense knows himself still a child whom nature is leading on from joy to joy it is here in this matter of subject as every one knows that there lies the greatest difference between a gallery of old masters and a modern exhibition

one of the best of our few moral teachers has very lately insisted on this and usefully emphasised some of its main details

The old painter, he tells us truly, painted what was simple, familiar, noble, traditional and beautiful, while he laments bitterly and with much justice over the subjects which modern painters have adopted instead of these. Everyone must agree with his strong language about exhibitions themselves and their general jumble, as well as about mercantile advertisements, storytelling, sensational pictures or the like.

He must agree too with the useful statement of the painter's necessary limitations, that the picture must be confined to one moment, that it cannot inform or explain or take the place of words, and admits that the recognition of these would not only do much to purify both art production and art criticism, but is indispensable and urgent.

Yet the reader is apt to be somewhat driven into the painter's defence, partly perhaps by the very energy of this criticism, partly also by the moral severity of its tone. And so he complains that this leaves one with the impression that Mr. Harrison would have pictures too much like sermonettes, at any rate that he does not sufficiently allow that a picture may adorn a tale without pointing a moral.

He complains that the critic is not in sufficient sympathy with simple beauty, and scoffingly asks, if pictures become preachy as well as novels, at what rate shall we become good and they ugly? Again he asks, is it the painter's fault if his works do not yet express the intellectual or religious ideals of the age?

he hardly knows what these are or at any rate how to paint them even if he has ever grasped that the age has any beyond hopelessly inartistic ones mr harrison would reply and with a certain amount of justice that that is the painter's own fault that these ideals of the age have been by this time definitely enough expressed in its best books at any rate in very great measure

but painters are not reading men and they cannot be expected to be far in advance of the world around them seeing it as alike fundamental to their nature and their craft to reflect this the thinker and moralist has first the difficult task of educating them as the churchman did of old before he can expect them to do very much towards educating us

such an impression of mr harrison's article so far as it is justifiable is no doubt due only to a negative defect rather than to any positive one for the modern painter needs our hearty congratulations our warmest sympathy with his widened range of subjects

Our criticism of his undeniable faults and failings may indeed do well to be angry, yet must not fail of a brotherly sorrow over these, as the disasters incident on his recent entry upon untrodden paths. These may undo indeed sorely mar his progress, yet also mark it. With suddenly gained freedom, there is too often also at first an outbreak of license.

Their escape from academic conventions into air and liberty has intoxicated the weaker painters, and bewildered even the strong. But this happily cannot last. At Manchester last year we saw the growth of landscape, the progress in portraiture, in a word, the steadily increasing range and grasp of all the aspects of life and nature.

the beauty of nature so long seen only in glimpses even by the most fortunate through the glass of literature and travel becomes at length felt to be omnipresent with atmosphere and sun every place therefore seems paintable the painter also feels himself a man among men to whom nothing human is foreign nothing henceforth common or unclean

the painter will not be behind his scientific brother in his resolute inquiry into all things visible and seeing that the most prominent and popular figure in french or indeed in european science is our foremost expert in putrefaction and utmost horrors of contagious disease m pasteur

and the most prominent figure in contemporary literature, the specialist in moral putrefaction and contagion, Monsieur Zola. The wonder is that even more painters should not choose kindred themes of material and spiritual loathsomeness. Still, we are getting the good out of this uncompromising realism. Much that is highest in modern science, literature and art is called forth and strengthened by its very contrast with this.

synthesis and poetry and moral enthusiasm are arising fast in reaction to a generation of too much analysis of too prosaic literalism of widespread moral decay for there is in human as in natural history a strange alternation of generations

moreover through all these stirrings and soundings of hitherto evaded depths of rottenness we are rapidly determining the conditions of healthy life on all sides material moral and aesthetic and may now more surely devise our measures of overcoming all this evil with good in rational confidence of not only survival in the contest but victory

we may thus adopt mr harrison's criticisms as alike useful and timely but in hopeful not pessimistic mood it is a great period though not a final one this phase of realism it may be necessary thus to prove all things before we can fully hold fast the good

At Manchester we had a special opportunity for seeing the details of this expanding consciousness of the universe, and saw how the modern painter was the most generous of magicians, never weary of opening to us new windows everywhere into that marvellous phantasmagoria which we call the universe. Despite all his faults and failings, therefore, the painter is not far behind his fellows in science and literature,

for him as for them the whole present world is well-nigh become a possession the past not only is coming back with unexpected completeness but is becoming peculiarly his invisible imagery

and soon, even before leaving the gallery, we shall see him not only mirroring for us much that is best of past and present, but casting aside the curtains of the future, and imaging for us upon his magic window the unending drama of the ascent of man.

CHAPTER II. THE SEEING OF ART. Coming now to the second problem, that of art, it is for many reasons needful, as we saw at Manchester, to begin with colour. For though we need not again pause to demonstrate it, this is the essential element of painting, the one which primarily constitutes a picture good or otherwise.

yet in our modern world this colour sense has become perhaps the rarest of all possessions certainly the one least associated with education in other ways it is difficult to tell your well-educated friend your equal or superior in other respects as he gaily criticises his way in literary wise around the galleries that he is worse than ignorant

permit me however gentle reader to reach him less directly by confiding the secret to you reckon among the members of the learned professions or mistresses of every accomplishment whom you have known how many if you spoke to them about seeing colour would even attach a meaning to so unfamiliar a phrase

and if you have any further doubts as to the thorough modern dissociation of intellectual culture from artistic feeling step out of the galleries and gaze a moment reflectively upon that shining robe newly devised for the doctors of science of our metropolitan university lamp of our modern athens

For whoso has read Sartor es Artos will see that it is not trivial or accidental, but fitly symbolic, that this culminating reward of official learning should thus hideously bedaub its wearer, not in barbaric splendour, that were high praise, but in the most rudely developed contrast which the constitution of the universe has rendered possible. It is an old story that in winning knowledge man becomes an outcast from beauty.

nor need we look for colour among our craftsmen as the artisan section hard by too plainly shows even those who live by colouring the house painters the very dyers are no better as the bit of work they have surely most tried to put their hearts into so clearly proves the pea-green and magenta mottoed banners of their joyless holiday processions

if we go to the exhibits of our one town which has any recent tradition of artistic product and from whose cottage looms there used to come draperies rich in oriental colour we find now only the infantile trophies representing with a million reels the colossal thread-facturers which have replaced them shall we then go to the east for colour where once we would have been so sure of finding it

Alas, it needs only the first oriental stall to suggest what the costly collection of royal jubilee presents so hopelessly confirms, that eastern art is now stricken to the death with the same western blight.

There is nothing better than to return to our own contemporary picture galleries, for despite all the crudeness or ugliness of our modern industry, we shall see more and more springing up among us the germs of new schools of colour, here subtler and there richer than either Old East or West could ever show. But how shall we recover the colour sense sufficiently to appreciate these?

by actively taking thought by any amount of reading and thinking about it by studying art and passing examinations that certainly has been the method of the past generation but we have had enough of it

The limited number of instructive exceptions who have avoided this course include those who have either produced art or recognized it, and we now know the majority to have been following idols of the intellect, and only these exceptions, the healthy guidance of the senses. Hence the living art teacher is now everywhere struggling to return to the latter course.

this too stands open to all men not one but began on it in infancy and hence the most fashionable of ladies or the most pedantic of educationists need not be despaired of not even the most wizened of lawyers or most abstract of theologians each or all might any day awake rich with a long-lost sense of beauty since this means after all only discerning the real aspects of the surrounding world

In a word, one's business is not to think, but to see. Look at the tramway cars outside. Anyone can more or less see their ugliness. But a far more searching test of artistic progress is the measure in which we can see positive beauty. Nothing in the range of human experience promises less than these big red and yellow boxes with their advertisements.

yet set them running up and down the rails and watch how the strong foreground colour and mass of the nearest one instantly brings out the perspective of the street through all its misty distance. Before it has gone two or three hundred yards, you see its colour is surely somewhat changed. In a few more, you see how it is softening as it recedes, and can verify this by watching another emerge from mist into crudeness.

they are playing for us the game of colour these ugly cars and with the artist we may daily find them beguile for us the dismalness of our formal street in the same way the hoarding with its bills needs only distance to refine it

Indeed, as Ruskin tells us somewhere, these are now well nigh our only source of street effect. No doubt fitly so, since the exchange of public decorator for bill-sticker, dignified, of course, as advertising contractor, is only the most obvious artistic feature of our progress in the arts. Test now your colour sense upon the passing figures. Say which are the more picturesque, the more intrinsically beautiful.

those gentlemen with frock coats and tall shiny hats those fine ladies with new dresses so tightly stretched and strangely humped over a rudely idealized figure built outside their own or that poor woman with baby wrapped in her faded shawl and the ragged urchin turning somersaults behind the group of little girls sitting on the curbstone

you prefer the former perhaps but if so assuredly from an associative reason alone prosperity naturally pleases us more than poverty yet these find their only literal artistic rendering in the doll-like fashion plates in the tailor's and dressmaker's windows while the latter are full of interest and suggestion for the painter even as they stand

look at these well-worn garments how natural and characteristic in every fold watch the sun flash upon that faded red petticoat until you see its gradations as rich and subtle as the heart of a rose

Or if the associations of wretchedness be too much for you, look at that magnificent Highland gamekeeper striding along the street, his weather-worn brown coat lighting up to orange, his old vest glancing with all manner of subtle greens, and you will not always prefer new clothes to old ones.

best of all look out for the masons who are hewing red stone for the new house yonder as they are coming home in the evening sunlight for it is from sights like these one learns that to reach the paradise of colour what one essentially needs is not to go to naples or to the louvre but just as for any other paradise to get one's eyes rubbed open at home

leaving the study of pictures like those of israel's or even of cameron herkimer and many others or the contrast of madrazo's grisette and billet's fisher girls avant la piche to confirm this let us begin with simpler delightfulnesses of pure colour enjoyment

for this flower-pieces are of course obviously useful say those of vincelay or diaz or in a more sombre key those of miss swan then rapidly note the absence of colour in landseer in peyton in not a few of our fashionable painters

Next, the beginning of it, though in a harsh and crude form, in the vehement brightness of an early pre-Raphaelite picture, Hughes's Elaine, from which the progress to Holman Hunt's Christ in the Temple may be noted. Such pictures, however, are rather experiments than examples in colour. A real decorator's command over his materials, the power of working familiar hues into new combinations, is always rare.

The present collection is fortunate in having a number of studies by Sir Frederick Leighton which admirably illustrate the simpler principles of colour arrangement. Take for instance his New York ceiling. See how in the middle panel blue preponderates, flanked by red and yellow to left and right. But the red panel on the left is itself completed by help of orange and blue as its fellow with tints of rose and golden green.

then in the middle panel notes the blue brightened with a thin red line on its left-hand figure rhyming to the massive red drapery of that on the right and how the lightsome brilliance of the two small flying figures contrasts with the sober majesty of purple and olive drapery in the large centre one the composition here is almost inseparable from the colour and one resource after another of decorative contrast is employed

study the lines and masses of drapery and figure erect or in the dance in flight or massively enthroned and see how the tripods on each side of the central mass accents the variety and grace of the whole series complete the decorative conventionality and bind them into a whole draw again a triangle upon the cover of this book within its angles write red yellow blue and colour them so if you can

outside these in an outer triangle turn the other way as in a six-pointed star by mixing adjacent ones put your secondary colours orange green and purple outside by mixing these again will come the tertiaries citrine olive and russet the mixing of these again gives us citrine olive russet olive and citrine russet which we may again recompound into graver hues

each of these again may be mixed in any proportion with white and thus an infinite gradation of tints may be produced so at length we have the full decorator's palette with which this ceiling has been painted

the possible permutations and combinations of these are of course infinite yet no decorator masters very many even leighton having as we see his definite style that is his favourite methods and corresponding limitations much of this may be made out by further study of his weaving the wreath or andromache but it is better to begin with simpler schemes of colour

Those of Albert Moore are, of course, most obvious in their lovely perfection. Instead of Leighton's broader palette, a single beautiful chord of colour is selected and exquisitely wrought up through all its possible gradations of tint. A single note of keen and vivid contrast then gives point and brilliancy to the whole, and the colour scheme is complete.

no pictures can show more obviously too the exquisite development of the decorative sense in arrangement of pure pose and drapery nor is it trespassing too far on our next chapter to note how these masters of pure colour are also pure and simply poetic souls

as much now as in the days of memling and fra angelico they still see fair angelic visions and give us an enduring record of their gentle radiance and happy song as a decorative example engrave a key take burne jones's wood nymph note first the treatment of the foliage how beautifully conventionalised with little of the foreshortening of natural leaves yet free from the repetition of a wallpaper

no background could give a more exquisite setting to the figure note the drapery against the foliage and see how we have again the essentials of this without its natural accidents see again the delicate drawing of hands and feet against both

here are the three greatest decorative possibilities figure drapery and foliage free from all the luxurious accessories of furniture in which mr albert moore somewhat too obviously delights and thus it is well that the colour scheme should be peculiarly simple note however upon the prevailing olive not only the flesh but the value of the tiny handfuls of dark purple berries

from this it should need little effort to strangle the prejudice with which so many visitors approach the same painter's mermaid though this is intended to be hung as the central ornament of a noble chamber and is peculiarly unfortunate in its present position here instead of sombre olive and purple we have unusual splendour of red and blue though never without a graver under-note

the wealth of decorative resources here again closely wedded to the ideal qualities of the composition yet many of both these can readily be made out for example the contrast of the delicate modelling of the human portion of the figure and the simplicity of drawing but with iridescent colour of the fishy tail below

that of the strangely simplified waves and the exquisitely supple rippling of the floating locks of hair most of all of course the way in which the attendant gurnards emphasise the whole range of superiority of their mistress and tell us that she is at once the mightiest amid the wild deep-sea swimmers yet the most wistful and love-longing of all would-be human souls

but it may be said the decorative pictures are a kind apart from pictures proper too much so no doubt yet every colourist's picture has in it these decorative elements and this in a more subtle way just as a troop of dragoons does not lose its order any more than the individual figures of horse and man their symmetry when we view them passing at the charge instead of standing at attention and in full face

the study of decorative pictures is thus in many ways a preparatory one take as a conveniently simple although perhaps at first sight unpromising picture swans lioness and cubs note how the sphinx-like grandeur and repose of the mother with her well-contrasted kittens form a mass for which the sudden slope of ground in front affords as it were the pedestal

the form and even outline as well as colour of the background masses completes their perfect setting of this central group yet note how the contrasting olive vegetation of the bank shows glimpses of the sandy yellow of the earth below and so repeats the tawny hides just as these in turn have rhyming depths of sombre shadow

the fading orange of the disappearing sunset has also not only its local contrasts but its repeats most obvious for instance in the dance of the last withered leaves to the right

this bush emphasizes not only the massiveness of the central mass but the simple darkness of the ground on the left side through which there sweeps only a great line echoing that of the lioness's tail and thus again giving additional mass and weight to the central group the masses of the picture are thus fully ordered but some concentration not simply of idea and sentiment but of colour is still needed

this is given by the deep orange-red tongue of the lioness who is licking her cub the whole action and emotion of the picture are thus expressed by what is also technically its keystone and the picture thus remains a picture and in no wise falls into the vulgarism of mere literary genre

a good contrast between mere literary and true pictorial interest is that afforded by the famous relief of lucknow and woodsey's adjacent bargaining for an old master the pictorial interest is that with which we are here alone concerned and in this picture we have exuberant wealth and variety of colour yet fully under control with a pleasing infinitude of artistic devices

suppose we begin with the old man at his stall sharply brought out by the screen behind him and gaining at once solidity and subtlety from the flat japanese figure upon it while this with the rags beyond serves also to connect him with the next group that of the girl and baby

but she herself is only the side of a larger group which partly mimics partly contrasts and completes her while the varied wealth of pots and pans above is too complex for verbal analysis

again the brightly dressed girls on the left in every way contrasted with the chaffering buyer balance the flags and other masses of primary colour on the right and the blue and umber of the fading canvas on the ground run up and down through the whole picture here and there with sharper echoes but finally suffused through the colour of the street and walls

The apparent chance medley of old rubbish turns out, the more we analyse it, to be a well-ordered scheme of beauty. The apparent chaos is really a cosmos in which it is only the fault of our own limitations if we mistake complexity for disorder. Sir James Linton's pictures are well adapted for our present purposes of study, their analysis being similarly not complicated by the presence of any disturbing elements of an emotional kind.

His pictures, despite all their magnificence, are yet prosaic and unimaginative, characteristic of that modern spirit which, as in a Shakespearean play, needs costume and scenery to be carried to the utmost perfection, because it has lost that grain of childish make-believe on which the spirit of the whole depends.

yet these pictures deserve attention and respect when we cease to ask from them what they cannot give us but seek only to study the elaborate composition the rich and careful workmanship the skilful rendering and combination of every texture copper and marble velvet and brocade ermine and steel

all these may be studied in his benediction, and better in his banquet, while the whole treatment is admirably rich and skilful, dignified and decorative, in the stately arrangement of the design, and the festal lightness and brightness of the scheme of colour, we must admit a certain monotony of type and dullness of expression in the figures, a want of real action in the dancer, and so on,

yet note not only the innumerable detailed beauties of the picture but the unostentatious skill with which the whole vast canvas is kept from any risk of breaking up into a mere conjury of little ones here of course the splendid canopy in which the crimson and pale rose of the dancer's garments are so richly interwoven takes a leading part

despite the height of this the shadow on the upper portion sends the eye to the lower of which the brilliance is enhanced by the blue-grey coat of arms this conspicuously throws into relief the prince and princess yet it is none the less the hero on their right side who is the central figure of the whole

his white rough and dark tippet his blue ribbon with its golden badge being all perfectly adjusted to their surroundings to seize and hold the eye from this picture we may pass to ximenez's antechamber of a minister

rising however far beyond the learned coldness the somewhat dull and dogmatic precision of such an intellectual painter with whom we must also class alma-tadema pointer and in considerable measure even leighton we have the work of the colourists proper subtler in sense as well as finer in fancy

"'Petty, of whom we saw so much at Manchester, "'is not by any means so well represented here, "'and his work cannot be compared with the preceding "'without partial injustice to one or other. "'What we really wish is something "'which shall have the elaborateness and discipline of the one, "'yet the subtly instinctive colour richness of the other. "'Skillful combination, yet flashing insight. "'In a word, patient intelligence "'kindled by the flash of genius.'

in none of our british artists do we find so near an approximation to this union of qualities as in orchardson albeit he still lingers on the prosaic side and he happily is well represented here in picture after picture we have an exquisite scheme of colour a peculiar loveliness of line and balanced symmetry of composition of which the mannerism can never wholly overpower the freshness

this device of balanced symmetry is well seen in the venetian fruit-cellar in which each half of the picture has its arching lines and verticals around its figure while the greens of the water the red and cream colour of the walls are first obviously gathered into the fruit-boat but then sleep and dance and intermingle in more than jewelled richness upon the breast of the watching girl

in the scene from peveril of the peak this symmetrical principle is more fully carried out the daintily composed groups having every device of contrast wrought out yet so as all the more perfectly to balance each other the motive indeed is so far a literary one the puritan group with its shrinking and clinging girls and manly central figure are in most obvious contrast to the sneering cavaliers in mock obeisance

yet the picture is in no risk of becoming a mere book illustration like the adjacent hopelessly literary puritan and cavalier subjects of marcus stone the second group is naturally light against a dark background and the first dark against light its massive whole and flowing outline are well brought out by the erectness of the puritan's figure and the sharp angularity of his collar and doublet

while the supple grace of the bowing cavaliers finds its rectilinear and angular contrasts in the lines of their costume their ribbons and draperies central symmetry and compensatory curve again are given to these by the parallel ellipses of the broad hat swept downwards in derision

Leaving the means employed for uniting these, as well as the colour scheme to the reader's own observation, we may pass to that one of the painter's works, which is most distinctly caviar to the general, as the hearty exclamations you hear from half the passing spectators will show, his master-baby.

you may not like black and yellow but you cannot honestly look at them here without growing interest and a feeling that surely so much was never made of them before the picture is one obviously painted for the artist's own pleasure and that of his fellows not for ours but in some respects the colour is all the more exquisite

follow for instance the deepening gradations of the yellow from the cushion under the baby's head over the plaited cane work of the sofa and thence over the mother's hair and dress do not let disapproval of dishevelled hair in general prevent your seeing the value of this in relieving the precision of the basket work and leading us down to the dress over which we have to follow the yellow note finally dying away

but these are not the only colours note the delicate tinge of the uplifted fan deepening to the blanket and its fringe and lastly to the screen behind

Start again with the delicate blue-greens of the underside of the cushion, see them separately in the pot of palm, and thence delicately grade in union behind the basket-work and upon the whole wall above, while the depth and relief of the picture are got by the contrast of the almost atmospheric coolness of the background with the warm crimson footstool in front.

or finally the device of composition already so familiar may be noticed in the central value of the baby's legs and the mother's hand and ring in this way we may gain increasing experience of those technical qualities with which the painter is necessarily so much concerned and see how great the temptation becomes of at last painting pictures from the point of view of attaining technical complexity and mastering difficulties alone

see for instance how despite its vulgarity of feeling gregory's dawn commands respect for its pictorial qualities and rewards the closest examination of its management of the mixed lights of gas and dawn and how the technical experience thus gained has been utilised in the old gentleman's portrait

As our attempts to understand the painter as craftsman make progress, we come to distinguish how we really see from how we merely think we see. The badness of popular judgment and popular painting depends upon the latter standard being adopted. It is easy to admit that the right way is to paint what we see, the wrong to paint what we think we ought to see.

unfortunately the latter picture is usually preferred for the serpent of knowledge is never weary of beguiling us and can even deceive our very eyes see the labour which has been spent upon fade's whopping shore the elaborate tameness of the light and shade on each figure might indeed be possible in a carefully lighted studio but the omnipresent brightness of the open air is forgotten altogether

passed from this to a picture typically academic a representative of the once established historical school mr p r morris's king edward and his baby in search of a purchaser as we may fairly call it

Note here not simply the colourless imbecility of all the figures, or the lack even of that very faint degree of imagination or humour needed to see the absurdity of holding the poor little naked princeling close against the cold breastplate, unless one had really wished to depict it stopping the auction with its struggles and squeals.

but the difficulty does not lie in seeing these defects but in understanding the essential unreality of this brightly finished work as a mere rendering of aspects that is what we think we see whereas the comparative strangeness of roach's shepherdess hard by or laverie's marriott's langside dawn depends on its real resemblance to what we do see

yet that these latter are true historical pictures and no longer a mere grouping of models must surely grow increasingly manifest for the one is thrilling with those voices of nature and the spirit which are calling the little shepherd lass to be joan of arc as they will one day lead her to victory while in the other also we have true vision of its facts dishevelled faded beauty in hopeless defeat unfailing yet unavailing loyalty

the expiring ashes the dreary dawn and sombre forest all heavy with bodings of a yet more evil day but this superiority of imaginative emotion and yet in strictness irrelevant is only insisted on for the sake of pointing out the far fuller and more literal truth and the altogether higher technical skill of the last two painters

if these are not at once and clearly felt there is happily in the next room a picture which may settle the difficulty bastien le page's parmesh here is a fairly representative work of a painter who although unfortunately dying too young for his final emotional development has yet been all the greater an influence and example among modern painters by the extraordinary development of his perceptive and technical powers

For him, the impression of a scene is not only seized with an accuracy and fullness of vision far more than photographic, but selected and unified with the firmest artistic hand. The greatest of young painters, if also the youngest of really great ones, his genius is thus peculiarly representative of the power and limitation of our most representative contemporary art.

Returning now to the good and bad pictures of our own young school, we are in a position to understand and judge them more fairly. Note the other kindred landscapes upon the walls, and see if the promise be not at any rate as obvious as the defects. For these pictures all express a new return to nature upon a principle wholly contrasted to that of the pre-Raphaelites, a generation before.

these attempted in scientific fashion to reach a perfect whole through laboriously accurate compilation of its details whereas nowadays we are trying to get the general truths right first thereafter as much detail as may be harmonious and desirable the intellect knows that old wall in our foreground to be built out of a million separate pieces

the pre-raphaelites and mr ruskin did good service in making us see that no two of these are of exactly the same colour and making us enjoy the delightful variety of weathered surface with its grey lichen and golden moss

The insufficient way in which the old masters would have treated this became henceforth impossible, yet it is needful in turn to reassert their essential principle that the wall, not being the end in itself, but a mere unit of the picture, has a certain general colour and relation which we must broadly render, first of all, on pain not only of failure, but of positive falsehood.

all this loveliness of detail viewed from the right distance only serves faintly though also of course subtly to gradeate and qualify these it is good to learn to botanise with the pre-raphaelite but the primroses do not make the woodland nor even the grass-blades the field this hill that field is primarily a space a mass a tone

as a definite element of a larger whole it is simple in the first place however complex thereafter in the second our generation has mostly lost the power of seeing this it is the price we have paid for our newly increased knowledge of detail

just so the botanist before goethe before darwin had lost the power of seeing the unity of his floral world he was so absorbed in the needful preliminary recognition of its separate plants and parts

Now, however, his whole multifarious sea of verdure is coming again to form a far vaster and higher unity than ever poet or philosopher had dreamed before, amid all variety, one in principle and one in actual descent, one in inextricable complexity of living interests, even with the animal world, nay, breathing with this a common life.

from the first then the naturalist could delight in the lovely representation of familiar detail the beauty of william hunt's fruit or hawthorn blossom but he needs this wider scientific standpoint to see rousseau's forest scenes at the right level for here is this reunited nature-world painted in the highest way one vast existence yet of infinite variety and unresting change through all the seasons of the day and year

in a word both painter and naturalist had to break with the past cast aside the old conventions and seek new views of nature for themselves but this involved a thorough re-examination of details nature thus disappeared and a myriad of new objects and new aspects crowded museums and sketch-books instead now however again these results of analysis are coming together

the ascending spiral is well-nigh complete and we begin again to contemplate truth and beauty in their entirety we come again as of old to walk with nature and this upon higher levels here then is the importance of these young impressionists using the word in its largest sense

we will do well to look at their small and scattered canvases not only with interest but respect slight indeed they are for the most part beginnings among which we may find every fault yet beginnings all the same of this young glasgow school it would be premature to make any personal prognostications at any rate from the scanty and ill-assorted representation before us

Yet here, if we take in 350 and 353 from the next room, and add also their few watercolours hard by, there is enough to show that we have to do with the most important contemporary movement in Scottish, perhaps even British, art. But our younger painters are in evil case. They have, except in so far as fleeing abroad for an education, had only the Scottish Academy to help them.

an institution which if necessarily of less pompous vulgarity and vanity than the corresponding london guild has even surpassed this in the feebleness of its example the sordid narrowness of its corporate inaction and the smallness of its artistic aims

and now the average buyer after wasting his money for twenty years upon hall-marked rubbish mere vulgar furniture with a too scanty admixture of better pictures is indiscriminately deserting the good native painter with the bad and fleeing for safety to the netherlands and france so far well an importation of sterling foreign work will be most useful

Glasgow has, however, here an opportunity of becoming a great centre of art such as no city has had for many years.

but this would have to be brought about not by merely varying her young artist's lives in the usual way of mixing a little exceptional patronage and petting to make up for the everyday neglect, but through a few judicious citizens quietly administering some steady employment, as far as possible, of a public and permanently decorative kind, in halls and schools especially, and at modest but sufficient and uniform payments.

but it is too much to expect this as yet to come to pass it is true that the city would in this way not only begin to have some imperishable wealth but her craftsmen through all her industries would feel the impulse of this highest and central order of technical education

However, being a people peculiarly conservative, in mental attitude if not political label, we speak of wealth, of higher education, only in the established technical senses, the one as meaning plenty of money for lucky individuals at whatever waste or neglect of money's worth for all, and the other as confined to the sending up of more storks to college. End of part 3

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$20 monthly promo credits applied over 36 months with a new line on unlimited welcome. In times of congestion, unlimited 5G and 4G LTE may be temporarily slower than other traffic. Domestic data roaming at 2G speeds. Additional terms apply. You're listening to Classic Audiobook Collection. Give us five stars and share with a friend who likes free audiobooks as much as we do. Now back to the show. Part 4 of Every Man His Own Art Critic Glasgow Exhibition 1888 by Patrick Geddes

chapter three the feeling of art in entering upon the third division of our subject that of artistic ideals we cannot do better than first consider what manner of man the artist himself is

In a recent paper, Mr Whistler's Ten O'Clock, Chateau and Windus, have real value and interest from the standpoints of our last chapter, but in which deep artistic feeling is grievously alloyed with no little professional vanity and superciliousness, and in which wit and wisdom are confused with the freest misrendering of history. Mr Whistler has claimed that the artist is a type of man who has nothing in common with his fellows, nor they with him,

save perchance in meaner qualities for him the artist is descended from some poor phaneon who stayed at home from the hunting with the women of the tribe to scratch decorative patterns upon their water gourds

There may no doubt have been such an archetype of the genus Possilthwaite, of those multitudinous artistic triflers of Mr Whistler's Belgravian experience, but we may safely reckon that by a healthy consensus of public opinion he was promptly speared as an unproductive idler when the hunting party got home. Happily we know both from past races and present ones a very different story of the evolution of the artist than this.

Upon the memory of the wild hunter, as he lay in ambush clutching his arrows, the great scenes of the day became photographed, the shaggy mammoth crashing through the coppice, the great elk at brows, so that when he sat by the cave fire and told the tale, it came vividly back upon his memory, and he must needs nervously seize an arrow splinter and scratch a rude picture upon the slain creature's tusk or horn.

"'Thus he found a new happiness, "'and on those many idle days which followed before hunger "'next forced him to go a-hunting, "'he would turn over and over these recollections, "'and as he felt the help of the scratchings on the bone in recalling them, "'he would try how he could make the helpful picture fuller and better. "'But there was one piece of urgent work to do. "'The old bone-dirk had been snapped in the death-struggle, "'and a new one must be fashioned.'

here was ready to his hand the very horn he had been scratching he would sharpen this to a point but the picture looked better than ever the new weapon was not only bright and white beside the dull blood-stained haft of the old one but had an interest the former never had was better worth taking care of the engraving lovingly retouched and deepened came at last to have a slight relief and the art of carving might next be consciously developed

The enriched weapon was thus a souvenir, not only for the musings of an idle hour, but nerving the man as he gripped it in the moment of a new effort by its reminder of old exploits. Thus it became his inseparable companion, his most cherished piece of personal property, and when he died, his son buried it with him or kept it with a dim feeling of awe.

it had now become an ancestral fetish and its ornament was thus the natural one to imitate and simplify that is conventionalise in those old days in short every man was his own artist his own decorator

and as it is the central reason of these pages that no man even nowadays but is capable of some artistic feeling in his passive moods some appreciation of those vivid sense impressions those influences of beauty which come before his eyes

So it is the central fact of industry, the eternal law of labour, that every producer seeks to give his product, no matter how humble or utilitarian its purpose, some stamp of beauty, some subordinate aesthetic function, in addition to its practical one. From ancient museum or modern exhibition we can alike learn this.

what mr whistler would rightly call the woeful ugliness of two-thirds of the industrial products exhibited outside this art gallery is due to the very labour wasted upon the would-be beautifying of them by hands which have lost their old savage cunning without becoming truly civilised for since the earliest division of labour arose every worker has sought thus to satisfy his senses to give out some of the beauty he has taken in

the highest artist has always been simply the master workman in those needful crafts in which the material and the purpose admitted of giving the fullest scope to this need of expression of which the humblest tyro already feels the germ

True, the artist has of late strayed apart from his craft brethren, and so these, always hitherto, in some measure truly artistic, have fallen into modern ugliness, while he sits alone, at best absorbed in his own dreamland, more often contriving mere vanities for sale. Postlethwaite too has arisen to persuade him that this state of things is quite right, that it has existed from the beginning.

but the pity and wonder is that he should believe these foolish flatteries and thus utterly abandon his fellows in their struggles to realise beauty in modern production without the guidance of such as he they are producing with all their labour only a modern town or at best the transient glitter of an international exhibition

and we see that he knows little of how the old master workmen whom he so reverences were wont to lead and teach this american craftsman who would fain revive for artists the worst pretensions of an aristocracy nay make them a petty priesthood but in considering what manner of man the artist is we may not only look at him historically but in the flesh at any rate in his own portraits

in the young wilkie see the look of eager incessant observation and boy-like wonder of perplexed thoughtfulness yet gathering practical power or the rugged and strenuous yet sensuous and sensitive face of sam buff opposite from these two one also sees how the painter inevitably somewhat idealises

these are more than simple portraits for the one might stand for youth entering upon life the other for manhood at battle there for good portrait painting is not as people popularly think mere imitation with perhaps a tinge of flattery errors apart its inevitable slight departure from the everyday average feature and expression depends on the way in which some elements of character are emphasised

see for instance the two members of parliament the substantial tory squire somewhat over-complacent in his prosperity and the careworn radical deep in meditation not however of an altogether spiritual kind

here as again in this or that successful joint stock director or fine clothes wearing lady who need hardly be particularised one can seldom miss a touch of this tell-tale idealisation this faint spice of subtlest because wholly unintended caricature again although the painter's calling keeps him from ever losing his interest in life it is rare nowadays that he keeps that freshness which our two portraits of him showed

thus mactaggart's exquisite little sketch of boy bathers has an element of idyllic joyousness we too rarely see in j t ross's sunny day-dreams we have another thoroughly natural phase of being in which thought is just awakening but without as yet disturbing joy

in walker's bathers too the artist's keen sympathy with young life and delight in its beauty is less tinged by the pensiveness of coming evening than in any other of his pictures but such pictures are rare and pessimism is more rife

The sombre Carlisle is in a far more frequent key, while the painful tragedy of J.R. Reid's shipwreck, or at least the more restrained pathos of Israel's shipwrecked mariner, are also characteristically modern. Healthier and nobler, however, are some of the other pictures of this master, whose representations of the domestic life of his people give him enduring rank, alike among painters and poets.

and without pausing to analyse the richness and subtlety of the treatment of the painter we cannot but feel increasingly moved by the poet and this the more deeply since his pictures never wholly lose this modern note of world sadness

thus the sleeping child the frugal meal or even the happy family are all tinged by the same solemn hues and we feel the happiest hours of home overcast by some shadow of their coming close in a landscape when we get beyond the simple prose of pure delineation this personal quality this individuality of the painter straightway reappears

see it rising in the pictures of horatio mcculloch to his kilthorn castle or more fully in such a picture as linnell's english pastoral for fresh breezy enjoyment of the country of the weather as it comes and goes through sun and wind and shower there is nothing like the robust simplicity of david cox

well worthy of notice also are the landscapes of our own a w fraser as not only full of natural artistic grace and of peculiar wealth of colour see how his barncluith stands not unworthily between a gainsborough and a constable and even the slight recent sketch but as singularly expressive of this thorough enjoyment of nature this landscape painting which has love of her far above every other motive

far more subjective in their poetry are landscapes like parsons sunset hunts from peak to peak in cloudland or watts island of cos deepest however in this untranslatable emotion of landscape are the landscapes of cecil lawson in which the contrast of near and far the vastness of loneliness and depth of solemn distance the climax of sky mystery must be read by each of us in his own way

but most marked of all in their individual qualities are the great foreign masters in whose work gallery number four is happily so rich the resplendent glow of monticelli has indeed almost a suggestion of delirium behind it and the strange mist of matthew maris may repel as well as attract our sympathy

but the kindred strangeness of his brothers, Montmartre, can hardly fail to yield elements not only of perplexity but charm. If this does not please, take his healthier pictures on Rotterdam Canal and work up to the magnificent Dordrecht, a consummate rendering of one of the noblest scenes within the range of European art.

or start again from the homeliest scenes in rousseau's little mill noting its jasper-like richness and wealth of interest thence through his mighty forest scene to his climax in the marvellous sunset

work too through troyant and jacques noting the latter's autumn evening his retour de troupeau and especially his moonlight a singularly perfect picture since freshness and interest of scene breadth and completeness of treatment and gentle unforced naturalness of emotion are all in thorough unison such as we rarely see

from this to the far stronger and deeper but less balanced and more pessimistic mile the transition need hardly be traced but how shall we interpret corot to the beginner who has not yet felt the subtlety of his gentle spell

we must begin with something far more obvious rise perhaps first into the warm and fiery opalescence of mestarch's splendid sky krepuskul and then pass to the contrasted calm and coolness of daubigny's

begin now say with corot's lake but bring it to the changeful opal of the one picture and the subdued pearl of the other and you will find here more than the subtlest beauty of both these pictures rendered for us without help either of the glory of sunset or the peace of dusk but in the light of common day all is quiet enough there is no attempt to select any remarkable scene or even emphasise any of the features of an everyday one

but the delicate plume-like foliage seems to be breathing into the sky which the lake mirrors naturally enough yet with a delicacy of reflection a harmony of shimmering light and silvery colour more fair than had ever revealed itself before to painters eyes the series of corots is a rich one and will reward examination

but it may help to a better idea of his characteristics to compare his twilight with those of jacques his mont la joly with that of daubigny and his woodcutters as an idealisation of simple life and toil with the labour pictures of millet especially the famous going to work

For Millet, the world is never without its element of purgatorial gloom, but for Corot, pain and sorrow and storms seem to have passed away forever, and left the saddened earth to smile again, into a paradise of peaceful joy.

at times indeed this rises to positive exaltation as in the dance of nymphs or in the great kindred landscape which may mark the culminating point of the master and with him of poetic landscape indeed it may be of the poetic interpretation of nature in any way in his highest moments wordsworth exultantly sings how beauty

waits upon my steps, pitches her tents before me as I move, an hourly neighbour, but this is true of the poet only in his higher moments. It is the special glory of the painter to have realised this beauty throughout a long life's daily labour, and to have seized and shown it forth, as in sober reality, a simple produce of the common day.

as the artistic rendering of nature rises from simple delineation into this world of poetic ideals so must it also be with the artistic treatment of humanity we have seen that even the portrait painter could not help idealising somewhat but in these days we have little respect for ideals of any kind

the last hundred years have dealt sorely with the old order of things whether social or religious and the high hopes of better days with which each of its three generations began of the revolution the romantic revival the industrial peace have none of them been fulfilled

hence men have lost not only faith but even hope in all things and the real life of most whatever be their outward profession has hence practically shrunk down into criticism alone which incapable of constructing any ideals for itself finds no activity save in shattering the attempts of others

hence the practical disappearance of sculpture which is nothing if not ideal the almost complete disappearance too of ideal painting yet art is immortal though we renew our theory of things altogether and exchange the old doctrine of the supremacy of love for the new one of the supremacy of competition she will still idealise that

and now instead of the madonna we shall have our reviving sculpture offer us the marvellous group of maddened runners bouchers au bout which is placed in unconscious but all the deeper and more symbolic appropriateness as the foremost object in these galleries to this sole prevailing modern ideal that of victory through force unidealists as we otherwise are there is no lack of devout homage

hence alike the puerile prince and elephant scene which enlivens the screen in room three and the gigantic berlinese blasphemy in livid daub herr gentz's crown prince entering jerusalem which usurps the place of honour in the very gallery where we have just seen the masterpieces of all that is most really sacred in modern art

hosannas then to personal ideals of some sort we shall not lack if it be only to the negative ones for the artist like any other producer supplies exactly what we demand we may thus see how the worshippers of less popular forms of the ideal during the past generation needed to live alone in isolation like rossetti in fellowship with the ancient painters like burne-jones

This no doubt evinces a certain element of weakness, but when we reflect how Watts, by far the strongest among modern idealists, has had to withhold himself from contemporary patronage to paint with sublime faith the best national treasures of his half-century, we see how needful for such work some sort of isolation is.

Rather than enter upon the interpretation of more or less frankly symbolic or philosophic pictures like Burne-Jones's Fortune's Wheel or Pan and Psyche, we may more easily begin with the central and the traditional method and problem of the ideal treatment of humanity in art, the idealisation of woman. On the simplest physical plane of soft, rosy shapeliness, we have of course Etty as a kind of minor English Rubens.

From this point we must either vulgarise or refine, and the foreign sale gallery bears a specially tragic witness of every phase of the descending progress from the first tinge of unchivalrousness and vulgarity in younger painters to the almost insane inventions of moral putrescence in older ones. In the other galleries happily better things are more rife,

yet with few exceptions the younger school of whom we have just seen such good reason for high hopes are still strangely deficient here in four hundred and sixty and four hundred and three we have indeed true sympathy with and insight into girlhood joyous and grave

but the clever painter of number four hundred has not seen so far into his girl subject as he does into her cat while the genuinely decorative child described as white rose must surely have had some kind of incipient or at least vegetable soul under her petals from stuffed dresses in the modern style to beautifully arranged drapery in the antique is no doubt a great progress though still insufficient

hence it is that no one cares for alma tadema's women or remembers his pictures by them we feel that they are essentially lay figures at best only feebly stirring to life far less prosaic indeed always refined and frequently of lovely purity and gentle pathos are the women of sir frederick leighton but their waxiness is too remote from flesh and blood to win or keep any permanent place in art

those of albert moore again although more obviously decorative are by no means as simply so as they seem they are genuine flesh and blood idealized indeed but this time not idealized away since the greek sculptor dropped his chisel we have had many types of beauty tinged with the divine but none save a rare madonna more simply and directly human

Absorbed in the pursuit of the possible loveliness of the soul, the ancient idealist forgot and despised the body. Discerning only the loveliness of the body, the Renaissance painter lost that of the soul, and speedily therefore of the body also. While in his keen interest in character as he finds it, the modern realist has well-nigh forgotten the ideals of body and soul alike.

these tendencies to high development on one side at the expense of both the others do not end with these characteristic schools but are in the nature of the case perpetual biases

Hence the etherealised beauty of the Christian age, the materialised beauty of the Renaissance, and the individualistic realism of the present are struggling for mastery in every gallery, and we shall see their intensest modern contrast in Paris next year.

each however has to bring its lesson for he who would paint truly the blossom of the race must find again the lily of purity yet keep the rose of health and labour on beyond his youth until with fully developed vision he discerns and with mature skill can render the never-repeated personalities in which they culminate queen lily and rose in one

it is in this direction that this painter's pictures are progressing, and hence their value becomes no longer decorative merely, but ideal.

across the stirring turbid currents of thought and art which hurry us hither and thither we begin to have enduring presentiment of what was but lately visible only in transient glimpses to the most poetic eyes the lovely shapes of a brighter hellas arising anew from serener waves once more as in the noble landscapes we have the new beginnings of sacred art

At the outset we saw the painter gazing eagerly into the unresting phantasmagoria of the present, and striving to mirror all its tumultuous wealth. But as yet there seems no place for her, no longer any sacredness save in the past, no shelter save amid its ruined fanes, no comfort save from their fading images.

Little wonder then that she should at first think only of the literal restoration of these, and should fondly hope to recall them once more to life and power, and so for a season all Dusseldorf, and many an isolated studio throughout the world, is lighted up with devout aspirations, of which the last flickering rays are still before us, in the gentle pietism of Karl Müller,

The unspiritualised painters, whether as uncompromising realists or as Aesthetes pure and simple, clearly see the failure of this and say, We have done with sacred art for ever, our skill is alone availing, and our fame only shall prevail. So henceforth Carlyle shall have his vivid record of historic faces and places, Swinburne and Whistler, their art for art's sake.

but the reign of sacred symbolism has ended with the superstitions which gave its birth. But the stronger idealists work on in silent patience, till, from the translation of their poetic model, they rise to the same language and wield the same imagery. As Dante after Virgil, so Rossetti after Dante first walks in his master's footsteps and finally transcends his song.

Hence the greatest picture of this renaissance idealism, Rossetti's Dante's Dream, is no mere illustration of literature, but the great verse becomes henceforth rather an illustration of it. It is through the same experience of life, through the same depth of sorrow, that the painter has risen to this poetic height. The arrow points to his own heart, and only the angel's lips may now touch his departed love.

but the shaft is wreathed with sanguine blossom and hope and memory ever gently lift the pall and so the blessed soul floats up through the light-filled sky and beside its forget-me-not and thorn the chamber is strewn with the peaceful gifts of sleep few as yet though are the idealists the study of their works would far exceed these limits nor is this the right exhibition in which to attempt it

The works of Burne-Jones, for instance, are of more complex interest than those of Rossetti, but it is not our present task to analyse them. Their less intense vitality and personality, but wider and more varied basis of culture, their less self-centred and deeper thoughtfulness, are expressed through many moods, now of melancholy and again of aspiration, but never without nobleness.

If, with a little patience, therefore, we do not find amid these pictures some thought phase which appeals to us, the fault must lie in ourselves. It is a saying commonly ascribed to this painter, and at any rate a true one, that Scotland has produced many good painters, as regards sight and skill, but as yet no single artist, in his sense of idealist.

while watts has more lately bitterly complained that while all poetry is filled with metaphor nay everyday language made of little else the painter whose symbolism is metaphor made visible as yet fails of getting even understanding much less sympathy from the public

No doubt this may be due to the retention of archaisms of style which the spectator blames as mere affectations, though we have seen that considering how they became burned into the painter's very being in his period of early struggle and inspiration, the wonder is that he escaped that absolute enslavement by them which might have befallen our own less powerful natures had they risen to share his needs and his experience at all.

in popular language there is only one sort of blindness but artist and thinker have always been telling us that there are yet two other kinds to which it is the exceptions that are rare in piercing beyond the mere facts of sense to the perception and selection of their sensuous beauty we have already sufficiently considered the way of emergence from the first of these

and thus far, all save the most incompetent of academicians can give us a helpful lesson.

but as regards the ultimate blindness, that a vision in the deepest sense, the modern artist is too frequently as unconscious as are his public, it is much if a dim feeling of its possibility leads him, like Mr. Whistler, loudly to assure us that nothing of the kind can possibly exist, but as the poet may rise from the mere sensuous perfection of representation to the discernment of deeper meanings and higher harmonies,

So, albeit later and with more difficulty, yet at length even more fully and profoundly, Mayan does the artist. Indeed, it is only in this highest sense that he fully becomes an artist, for we must not always be narrowing the word into its limited sense with Whistler, and never deepening it with Burne-Jones.

but how shall we interpret these symbolic paintings there is no literal or final interpretation to take the symbol as perfect or permanent whatever seems to us its fitness is the essence of all idolatry albeit as yet the most perennial vice of human mind

With thoughtful criticism indeed, we may place ourselves in some measure at the seer's standpoint. Yet we must also read his message independently from our own. Thus it is that the new master in his turn rises to fresh creation, and that the school founded by each retains life, only so long as it ventures to vary its initial thoughts.

and thus too we prosaic laymen poor cadmans who can as little paint as sing may not only find our own best thought and life symbolized for us but if we would not have the symbols either vanish from us or enslave us we may also deepen and hallow them for ourselves each with his own voluntary of personal thought

A brief example of a personal reading of these idealist painters, such as each must make for himself, let us look at them from a standpoint which seems wholly out of their way, if not as remote and ignoble as its popular caricatures would have it, that of the speculative naturalist. Yet for him, peculiarly, these maidens of Albert Moore rise from the simply decorative aspects in which they are commonly looked at to the truly idealist level.

for the naturalist knows more fully perhaps than even the painter that the glorious beauty asleep upon her throne midsummer is no mere childish fiction of the past revived to decorate some one's withdrawing-room from his own prosaic present

but is a supreme visible rendering of what is, in physiological phrase, the organic ideal of the sex, that waxing potential energy of life in repose, which is the female principle alike in flower or bee, and of which maidenhood and motherhood are but the highest bud and blossom, around and for which all humbler being waits.

and thus the fairy tale is science yet science despite her new strange language is better than the tale for the fairy fancy has sprung into universal reality no spot on earth but is the enchanted palace where one half of being waits its awakening with the other's kiss

it must be peculiarly obvious again that we may fairly claim burne-jones's fortune as the symbolic version of what is at once the ultimate postulate and result of science that there is no fickle goddess of chance but only the mighty and uniform march and cycle of inexorable law of his pan and psyche there may be various readings even without leaving our naturalist standpoint

Shall we remember that although Great Pan is dead, his latest and most literal avatar was but slately with us to link anew the life of man and beast and grass? Or shall we listen as he did to the complex piping of the old woodland pan with an ear which strives to know its many notes and changeful melodies? Or shall our souls ever be lifted from the hurrying stream of vicissitude into the presence of the all?

Here there are too many possible issues. Let us pass to Watts, still keeping our simple human and naturalist standpoints. At once the judgment of Paris rises before us, and no picture better emphasises the difference between the modern idealist and the materialistic renderings of the Renaissance painters for whom this was such a hackneyed theme.

here there is no paris you say you are yourself paris and must inevitably repeat the same choice for love must triumph over wisdom as action is ever moved by feeling however thought would rule it otherwise and rightly so

We have already seen the accepted modern gospel, the theory alike of modern life and recent science, frankly and forcibly idealized for us in Boucher's group of runners at the goal. Oh boo! Competition of the keenest, progress of the swiftest is manifestly here. But love? Out of the question, of course.

this clash of acquired self-assertion thrills only with unrestrained clamourous jealousy mother of hate watts alone sees otherwise at least with clearness enough to paint for us he thinks little of our competition our progress this painter who lives only for the future and in it

yet he too paints life love and life but the level sword of the runners is changed for an unending edge of cliff rising midway between abyss and heaven it is rough and hard for the foot and brightened save by scanty strewing of the humblest flower

Life too is no longer symbolized by the energy of masculine struggle, but with far deeper insight by the slow and faltering steps of weary womanhood, now fully awakened to hunger, toil and pain. Progress indeed is still manifestly here, but now as pilgrimage, and life must ever climb alone, save for love, nay, only with his help and for his sake.

We have thus risen from the primarily physical ideal of more to a primarily spiritual one, and we thus see how the sculptor and painter, without, of course, by any means losing their purely aesthetic mastery, nay, deepening and increasing it, take up their final places. The sculptor is doubtless still simply a symbol-maker, and even as that, not wholly conscious of his relation to his age.

but this painter at least deeply knows himself to be reblazoning the standards of his fellows in the age-long battle of thought, that between contrasted theories of the universe, once in the schools of philosophy, next amid rival faiths and heresies, or again between opposing doctrines of evolution, the same essential strife runs ever on.

and however the artist may resolve to silence his own questionings, and worship solely within the temple of the beautiful, he can never wholly refrain his sympathies, and hence even his purest votive offerings are sooner or later claimed by one or the other side. Our brief flight through the seemingly so peaceful dreamlands of art thus lands us once more in the actual modern world, and this necessarily so,

Our higher vision was not wholly made of clouds and stars, but primarily of our own world, so differing from that of common eyes only in its vaster horizon, its sublimer point of view. As coming to our aesthetic studies we tried to look at the colour aspects and aerial perspectives of our modern city through purely painter's eyes. So we may now return to it with something of the thinker's perception also.

Not only have the picture and statue galleries a new interest, a new canon of criticism, but we may apply this also everywhere without.

In the one mood we shall see more and more of visible facts, feel more and more of their sensuous beauty, and so live again in the delightfulness of the Hellenic world, the joyous freedom of the Renaissance, in that healthy rehabilitation of the flesh, that magic rejuvenescence of the world, which has been the achievement of the art and science of our century.

yet in the second mood again when we let the world of facts fully confront us and face the ideals of life and death to which these sooner or later tend we feel once more the iron grasp of hebraism we are drawn once more within cathedral shadows we hear again hamlet in soliloquy we watch with sartor from his tower

Follow now both these great impulses of Hellenism and Hebraism through the ages. Trace their unended growth and elaboration, despite recurrent waves of rise and fall. And thus at length we have won entrance to the philosophy of art, which is the philosophy of history, which is the philosophy of life.

It is only after grasping the Hellenic and Hebraic altitudes of mind, their undying historic influence, their perennial re-manifestation, and varying preponderance in individual minds, that we can fully interpret a single picture, a single edifice, a single man. Art critic, biographer, historian, are now united as students of one and the same process of evolution,

Then why, the artist constantly asks them, this astounding contrast between the loveliness or sublimity of artistic ideals and the sordidness of the social world out of which you say, away from which I say, they crystallise? Must it not be false, this assumed connection between life and art? Footnote. See F. Whistler, 10 o'clock again. End of footnote.

And here stands the controversy at present. The artist cannot historically disprove this unity, yet he cannot fully credit it, unless the contrast be satisfactorily accounted for. The solution, however, is less difficult and perplexing than it may seem. To comprehend these noblest ideal pictures, we have to follow the Hellenic and Hebraic spirit working upwards towards reconciliation upon higher and higher planes.

hence the enthusiastic recognition of the pre-raphaelite painters by our modern idealists as their true predecessors since the effort to rise beyond sensuous to imaginative beauty was not only the essential aim of all that was highest in mediaeval art but died out with it

hence too while fairly deriding that weird cult of kensington which will have none save sandro botticelli and burne jones upon its halters we shall do ill to forget that such fanaticism so far from being derived from error is only the passing intoxication of every new draught from the well of truth but these reconciliations of hellenic and hebraic ideas have been of brief endurance

Their practical contest, on the other hand, has been unending, and the accumulating nemesis of this has pressed both down to lower and lower levels in each successive age. From Hellene and Hebrew, in their contrasted sublimity and their contrasted limitations, down to Cavalier and Puritan, in their contrasted tragedies of failure, is sad enough.

But even here, much of the old joy of actual life which ennobled the one, or of the aspiration towards an ideal life which redeemed the other, yet remained. The strife had still to fall to its present level in the hardly human abjection of our modern city, to use only our gentlest accurate critic's word. Never, certainly, in history, did we hear so little of the strife as now.

A peaceful compromise has been arranged. The claims of both parties have been adjusted. They no longer recognize their old differences, nor indeed any other save those of wealth. Surely, therefore, they shall be happy and prosperous ever after. But on what basis?

the claims to the life and enjoyment of the senses successfully starved by the puritan on every higher plane have now victoriously reasserted their irrepressible vitality upon the lowest animal one hence the prosperous labour only for domestic comfort in the sense of upholstery and long dinners while the unprosperous again labour primarily for drink probably with a deeper if briefer satisfaction

Yet the claims of the ideal are also unescapable. What shall we do for them? Happy solution! These may now be reverently redefined in terms strictly supernatural, and so have no longer any detailed relation to the getting and spending of our weekday lives.

Comfortable in this compromise, a new confidence in our prosperity is inspired by our material wealth and the unquestionable depth of our social foundations, and we have at once a basis for practical life, so long, of course, as this can be limited to the exercise of our newfound mechanical powers.

Thus the modern city arises as by enchantment, its streets of dreary slum and public house, of drearier factories and dreariest mansions, all appropriately copied from the stiffened skeleton which alone remains of the once sensuous Renaissance. Its churches, its colleges, cenotaphs of the spiritual power, be dizzened as fitly in the exhumed cerements of medievalism.

between these arises our exhibition in evanescent promise of better things industrial and ideal alike it commemorates the past hundred years of industry and social thought as becomes the city of smith and watt where both have pre-eminently taken rise it gathers also the best skill and thought of living workers and through them is scattering new seed over the death-rich soil

at first this hope of the new blossoming of life and labour found expression only through the poets in shelley's and wordsworth's brief ecstasy of song their inspiration next passed to the ideal painter so gaining not indeed as yet reality or even fulness yet a concreteness and permanence beyond that of words

now his brethren of all humbler industries are rejoining the artist they too will work no longer for sale only but for perfection for truer mutual service and so muster their labour under his into an industrial wappenshaw or exhibition

Possibilities of new action are thus nearing us. Every man may be more than merely his own art critic, but something of his own artist also, for an ideal is returning to animate the labour of his own weary brain and hand. Already he disputes abundantly of how to bring in a better order of things, in politics and social life, in industry or education.

But he still does not learn his small yet infinite part in these, till he has viewed them from the higher level of the modern idealist, for whom the truth and beauty of Hebraism and Hellenism, of Medievalism and the Renaissance, are fusing in the crucible of thought with those of modern art and science and philosophy into a new and vaster whole. End of part 4

End of Every Man His Own Art Critic, Glasgow Exhibition, 1888.

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