BOOKS.
MR. QUILTER'S "PREFERENCES."*
A VIRTUE of Mr. Quilter's that his worst enemy would allow him is outspokenness ; it is a quality of his own writing to which he accustomed the readers of this paper for many years ; and be would have just cause for resentment if, now that he directly challenges judgment upon his critical record, he were himself less plainly dealt with here than he was wont to deal with others. From the preface, we gather that this book is put forth as an apology for the writer's opinions,— documents brought into the court of public opinion against the charges of those critics who, he tells us, have devoted to him twenty pounds'-worth of abuse, as estimated by Messrs. Romeike and Cnrtice. We are to ask, then, whether Mr. Quilter has a case.
The attacks and charges have been notorious enough. A Quilter of legend has been the creation of one wit, and the butt of many; and the real Quilter appeals for a hearing. There is a good-humour about the appeal that is preposses- sing, but of humour perhaps too little, and of volume in the pleadings both too little and too much. The book is a large one, one of the largest on record, running the Post-Office Directory hard, and there is a great deal of matter in it,—a whole picture- gallery of illustrations of all degrees of merit, the most in. teresting, and some of the most beautiful, of them attached to some essays on pre-Raphaelitism, various pieces of journalism, and, finally, extracts from criticisms on painting published for many years in this paper and others. But of direct dealing with the enemy there is nothing. The record is a selection, and is incomplete in the essential parts, the passages on which the attack was founded being omitted. Put it thus : Mr. Quilter comes into Court to complain of libellous charges. These charges may be perfectly frivolous and untrue ; but if he comes into Court at all, his business is to tackle them. What is, at bottom, the charge? It is that, like a greater writer, Mr. Ruskin, he was blind to the merits of one of the biggest artists he had the chance or duty, as a critic, of dealing with ; that the line he took made, in this matter, for stupidity and Philistinism. It is hard, perhaps, that one blunder should count so heavily, and in Mr. Quilter's case it appears to have amounted to a half-hearted appreciation of the pictures, and a theoretical boggling at their titles. But this was the point, and he blinks it. For what the book gives us is a mass of literature about other people. You have been wrong, it is contended, about one case, and that a crucial case. I have been right, is the reply, about quite a number of others. The question, therefore, returns in this form. Does it make up for having admired Mr. Whistler very little, to have ad- mired Frank Holl a great deal ?
It is a test which will sooner or later be applied to all of us who set up for being critics, that of having to pass judgment on the new man, the artist whose procedures and effects do not fit into the arrangements we have made for pigeon-holing the familiar. By his success in perceiving, in spite of theory, the new thing, and his courage in enlarging his theory accordingly, the permanent rank of a critic is determined, and smaller successes are apt to weigh lightly against a supreme blunder. Now when Mr. Quilter found himself before Mr. Whistler's work, his perception was not strong enough to make him say,—This is admirable painting, and if my theories do not allow for it, so much the worse for them. What he did was to shirk the painting and discuss the titles, constructing a theory to account for them, and dismissing it as untenable, while all the time there was before his eyes conclusive evidence that the work was right, and that, therefore, it must have a logic. In the case of Mr.
• Preferences in Art, Life, and Literature. By Harry Qnilter, M.A., Trinity College, Cambridge, of the Inner Temple, Esq., Banister•at-Law. London: Swan Sonnensehein and Co. 1t95.
Whistler's portrait of his mother, Mr. Quitter honestly owns up that, after some years, he sees the beauties of it. But at the outset he was clearly put off by a title; and could not recognise in a picture, called an "arrangement," one of the tenderest humanities ever expressed in beautiful paint. The same is the case when he attempts to deal with the Impres- sionists. There is no evidence that he had looked at their works, but he had heard the nickname, and out of it constructed a theory of what they must be ; and the theory is absurd enough. It does not fit the facts, and therefore his opinion does not touch the pictures.
Mr. Quilter then seems to let judgment go by default on this main count. He does not fight the point, and in the instance referred to already, and in the criticism he reprc- duces on the Lady Archibald Campbell (the only other passage relating to Mr. Whistler), he praises with a reserva- tion which be does not expound. But if we pass from this main ground of contention, and run through these current- criticisms, asking, with the advantage of time, how far they were capable and just, it is only fair to say that Mr. Quilter- was usually on the right side. The haste of production, the lack of perspective, the assurance of tone, the didactic- manner, the doubtful reasons summoned to support pre- ferences, are all apt to obscure this fact ; but it is the fact that Mr. Quilter, more frequently than most, picked out the- good stuff and condemned the bad. He treated artists like. Mr. Hook, Mr. Henry Moore, Mr. Albert Moore, as different in kind from the ruck of exhibitors, and was staunch in his advocacy of their merits ; he singled out Mr. Alfred Gilbert on his first appearance with no hesitating praise, and other- instances might be given where his estimates differed in appre- ciation and warmth from the hedging style of notice custo- mary in the press. Nor did he follow the multitude to do• evil by praising the popular bad painters of the Academy.. He was dazzled for a time by the ingenious industry of Mr. Brett, but repented, and he was sound on Highland land- scape. On the general academical question he made, as we must think, one mistake in policy,—a mistake that most writers- fall into on first considering the subject. He treated the Academy as a body to be improved by minor reforms, and by pressing for the admission into the ranks of this or that artist.. Now, no reform is of any use short of the abolition of the• academic status for painters, and a beginning will be made towards that when one or two good painters have the courage to refuse an invitation to enter a body so ill constructed, so- ill conducted, so compromising in its traditions, and so• damaging in its effects.
Besides the array of individual judgments that he submits to us, Mr. Quilter invites attention to the general principle& he has applied to the criticism of pictures, so a few remarks may be added on these, as far as it is possible to define them. As the leading principle, he ranks the belief " that the power. and beauty of Art are intimately connected with its relation to life, and to the great passions, desires, sufferings, and joys of humanity." The proposition reminds one of the Words- worthian way of speaking about poetry, and invites the same criticism. Either it is a truism, so wide in its application as- to- have no definite meaning, or it is an attempt, under the guise of a general principle, to limit the meaning of life and the range• of poetry or painting, as the case may be. Mr. Quilter laments that Mr. Ruskin, the one Englishman who might have enforced the above truth, narrowed its application by & theological bias. But a moral or intellectual bias will do the mischief with equal effect ; and Mr. Quitter's own avowed pre- ference for " cheery " or " robust " painting, and his dislike-of the painting he calls " morbid," show what the principle prac- tically amounts to in his hands. A second rather elusive principle is that landscape pictures should never be with- out human interest. By this is not meant the actual' presence of human beings, for, if we remember right, Mr. Quilter gave in his original exposition the example of a sea-piece with no sign of life, but with the title, " The Black Sea before the passage of the British Fleet.' Here, again, the principle is so wide as to include any- thing, and in the application a title supplied the required sentiment, which there was nothing in the picture to suggest.. A third position, to which Mr. Quilter recurs, is the necessity of maintaining a "national" English art. "It must be ouw- selves by ourselves which shall form the foundation of our future art. Englishmen painted by Bavarians, Americans, or
Belgians, will never have a truly national life. " The appeal to facts does not bear this out. A German, Holbein, drew Englishmen as they had not been drawn before, and have not been drawn since; a Fleming, Vandyck, painted Englishmen so that he became the founder of our English school. Take it the other way, which is more to the purpose. Sir Joshua Reynolds formed himself on foreign models, and so learned to paint, and thereby to paint Englishmen ; Hogarth was a Dutch painter by schooling, and none the less a painter of Englishmen ; Turner and Constable learned to paint landscape from foreign masters, and painted England the better for that. " Nationality " in painting, reduces itself to one of two things,—either that the subject is English (or French), as the case may be, or that the manner of seeing is -originated by an Englishman (or Frenchman), as the case may be. Now, other things being equal, the man who knows a subject best will paint it best; but no one has yet established the proposition that ways of looking at colour and form can be traced to a " national " root ; or if any one thinks he has, a little study of the like superstition in the matter of music may be recommended to him. These things are discovered by accident here and there, and are associated for a time with the place of their birth ; but there is no Mainleyism possible in them any more than in ideas. Our Anglo-Saxon fore- fathers were lucky enough to have their crabbed dialect fertilised by the French. The history of our literature is a perpetual history of translation; so with our painting.
A familiar corollary to this patriotic-seeming proposition is an extravagant estimate of English watercolours. We English had the chief inventor and master of the art in Turner, but that is no reason for putting his predecessors and followers out of critical perspective. Nor is the familiar complaint in this matter against the National Gallery quite reasonable. The Tarners are not in a " cellar ;" they are in a well-lighted basement, and the other watercolourists are dis- played in only too rich abundance at Kensington.
Perspective and proportion are difficult qualities to hit in journalistic criticism ; but they may be demanded of a writer who collects and revises his journalism. They are somewhat hasd to seek in this book. It was, perhaps, explicable that a warm friend of Mr. Wilkie Collins should see his literary merit out of all proportion at the time of his death, and even make the astonishing demand that he should be commemorated in the Abbey ; but in a critical mind, time and reflection ought to have corrected so over-generous a view. The same thing holds in the matter of the painting criticism. Things are seen too near. The "pre-Raphaelite Movement" is taken at the estimate of the amount of talk it has occasioned. Mr. Quilter, in some particulars, hits the facts. He gives due credit to Mr. Madox Brown, and singles out Rossetti as the man of ideas, who imposed himself for a time on Mr. Holman Hunt and Mr. Millais, and he points out bow little he had to do with the various programmes assigned to the " movement " by Mr. Ruskin and others, or acted out by Mr. Hunt. He bad only to go a step further to see that it was not a " movement " on the scale or in the direction supposed. Art did not leave a house of bondage and artifice for Nature with the pre-Raphaelites. It was a blossoming of one bed in the garden, a personal turn given to the ever-shifting kaleidoscope in which art shuffles nature. An artist, Roe setti, vivified and varied one conven-• tion ; an equally great or a greater artist might have vivified and varied another with just as much Nature in it or more. There happened to be a number of dull painters painting at the time, and discrediting the styles they attempted ; but if a genius bad been articled to Leslie or MacRae, instead of to Mr. Madox Brown, the return to Nature might have taken another route, and the return to art, which is the real difficulty, have been just as striking. There are many ways back to Nature; the pre-Raphaelite has no more the only clue than the Wordsworthian. An artist emerges and saunters along one of them. Straightway a flock of dull plodders exclaim that this is the only high road, and the char-a-bane and the dray grind it into dust. This is called a movement, and the
spirit and number of the followers is called in to explain the departure of the master. But to return to Mr.
Quilter. The want of a sense of proportion tells, also, in the accumulation of a good deal of trivial gossip about the pre-Raphaelites,—how, for example, Mr. Holman Hunt used to draw Miss on the office-windows, or hew Rossetti was keen
at a bargain, or the fact that Sir John Millais has a large house. What have we to do with all this ? The same triviality marks some of the other essays, like Ccelebs at Hanle. Mr. Quilter seems to hope that its Bohemianism will offend Mrs. Grundy. It is not very convincing in that respect, but he con- trives to offend good taste considerably.
But, to end with a good word, there is a practical suggestion that deserves backing. Mr. Madox Brown, the veteran of the pre-Raphaelites, is, it appears, spending his old age in the honourable poverty to which his devotion to his ideal has committed him. He has escaped the vulgar title of Academician, but be has received no such mark of public esteem as he well deserves. It is not clear whether a pension would be welcome; but it would be graceful to offer it to one who is not only an artist of considerable gifts, but has fought a good fight without lapse and without ostentation.
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