ART.
THE ACADEMY.—II.
"SUBJECT-PICTURES," OR PICTORIAL IMAGINATION V. THE ILLUSTRATION OF NARRATIVE.
I MAINTAINED last week that the first condition of popularity in a picture was that the frame should be abolished, that the world of painting should compete with and be confounded with the world of reality. The second condition is that the natural procedure of the eye, on which painting rests, should be thwarted and contradicted, and that painting should abandon its own natural methods for a vain competition and confusion with those of literature.
There is no ambiguity more dear to stupid critics than the ambiguity that lurks in their expression, "subject-pictures." By this they do not mean pictures with a subject, since pictures without a subject are inconceivable. They mean by " subject," a svbject as it is treated in literature. They
cannot conceive that poetry exists apart from literature, that the eye may take its poetry directly from life, that painting may be an illustration of life from its own angle, not an illustration of literature ; that by the very laws of literature a subject, as treated by literature, is likely to be unfitted for painting. Listen now to the clamour. "There we have it," they exclaim. " Yon object to ideas in painting, to significance in painting, to poetry in painting." Not for a moment; but I refuse to confound poetry as expressed in literature, with poetry expressed in an art of a different structure, because I respect both arts too much. What I object to is that narrative and incident should be im- posed upon painting under the plea of poetry. These are the natural and characteristic forms for literature ; for painting, when they are not impossible, they are tedious and destructive. It is a mind weak in pictorial imagination that must rely on poetry ready-made in literature, and whose pictures beg, "Please think of this subject as you have read about it." It is a mind weak in pictorial intelligence that invents pictures Tinder the narrative or literary form.
Consider a moment. Literature exists as a stream of exposition, narrative as a sequence of incident, incident of action and speech. If you freeze this stream or sequence at one moment of its progress, depriving it of movement and silencing the voices, you lose the means of exposition, you are left with a link that by itself has little signi- ficance of the story sort, that is merely a puzzle. Even drama, which appeals to the eye as well as the ear, is subject to this law of exposition by movement and sequence. Now this ambiguous, puzzling, detached incident is all that a painting can give out of a narrative. Therefore, it is not with narrative that painting naturally concerns itself. It devotes itself to the pauses in action and speech, when the eye contemplates and enjoys the look of things in repose, and the mind speculates on their habitual non-incidental character. The attitude of the painter to a face is speculation upon it in stillness, because he cannot render and expound character in a sequence of expression and speech. But he has the emotional compensation that he renders to the eye directly what literature can only refer to, and therefore his image shares the inexhaustibility for thought and delight of the living thing, along with its less certain import.
I shall be challenged here. Surely, it will be said, a vast deal of fine painting has been an illustration of literature, of biblical and other narrative. That is perfectly true ; but see how the painter with a painter's instinct acts ! Having a well-known story to deal with, he does not attempt to tell it, which he cannot really do. He lifts the characters out of it, and poses them monumentally for their portraits; sets the Virgin on a throne, and groups her court about her with tranquil habitual expressions on their faces, not pursuing that will-o'-the-wisp, an expression of momentary feeling. It is in the infancy or decadence of painting that we find corrugated faces and contorted limbs urged to an expressive- ness beyond the art. The expression of the picture should be cherished,—is not this forced expression of its parts. The goggling and mouthing of figures in dumb-show is an ugly sight.
Now let us turn to our Academy with its cult of narrative incident. Notice first that those pictures rarely explain themselves, for all their efforts. The somewhat indifferent pleasure people take in them is that of puzzle, and unless the catalogue supplies an unmistakable clue, or the obliging Mr. Spielmann has been round the studios to inquire, the canvas keeps its ill-expressed intention to itself. I am not speaking of the shallowest feints of illustration, like a picture this year which practically says, " Please think of Kipling's Drums of the Fore and Aft, page so-and-so," and presents us with two improbable chubby choir-boys for the drummers. A man who knows his Kipling may be touched by a remembrance of the story, and fancy that the picture counts for something in his feeling. Kipling unread, he would receive no idea or emotion from the canvas.
Let us take rather the strongest man who has been infected with this vice of narrative illustration, of puzzle pictures, Sir John Millais. They tell us that "Speak, Speak," recalls St. Agnes' Eve. I think there is all the difference in world. Without knowing a line of Keats, I should be affected by that scene. It gives me the painter's poetry of a situation that need be no incident in a story,—a girl, beautiful and proud, pausing as she disrobes in the doubtful shadows of her chamber, and set among those shadows in effortless tranquillity. In the other case, I do not know, till Mr. Spiel- mann or another tells me, what I am intended to think or feel. Is the visitor a living intruder, or a welcome ghost ? What does the violent gesture of the man mean ? But stay—there is a stumble of white round the visitor which perhaps explains, This is a ghost; and the explanation, helping the mind a little, is ugly to the eye. Indeed, so vexed has the painter been with telling his tale, that he has forgotten his picture. Bat I will not insist on the failure of a man I must always respect for the beauty and passion that once inspired his work. His uncritical, easygoing mind has allowed the vice of illustration to play havoc with his art.
I will examine rather the picture of a very popular illustrator and story-teller, Mr. Dicksee. And I take him because he is one of the most capable craftsmen who follow this line, with a considerable aptitude for imitative painting in minor matters, and with a nature, as shown in his pictures, that is not actively repellent Many painters who have more pictorial intelligence than he, have a less pleasant taste for life. Let us take Mr. Dicksee's picture patiently for once, and first of all let us approach it as if the obliging Mr. Spielmann had not told us all about it, and we came upon it simply as a picture trying to express itself. All great pictures, and all good pictures in their degree, attract one by a disposition of spaces, a balance of lights and darks, a prevailing character of colour, that play upon the sense like music before the meaning of the scene is so much as guessed at. This is the art of painting—to upbear the interest and expressiveness of the objects represented on an architecture of form and colour. Thus the new Velazquez at the National Gallery catches one's breath with a solemn awe at the grandeur of its disposition before one is near enough to realise the action of the scene, and Velazquez, great artist that he is, relies less on minor details of expression in the actors than on this all- sustaining and inspiring picture-dignity to make his ceremony impressive. So in their degree do all good artists. With Mr. Dicksee, our distant impression is of an incoherence of forms awkwardly cutting on the canvas, and of a jam-like tone that fights with an ugly yellow. About half, then, of the pictorial resources are squandered already; unconciliated during our approach, we examine at closer quarters. We ask now,— What are we invited to look at in the picture ? We became aware of a brilliant lamp illuminating an interior. So brilliant an object introduced into a picture is the painter'a way of saying,—Look at me first, I am the key to the picture ; and this must be eminently so with a dazzling source of light. Ah then, we say, it is a lamplight effect we are to admire, a study of light falling on people and things in a room, and these people and things will all be sub- ordinated to this interest in a dazzle, as they must be when the eye looks at a dazzle. We shall be repaid by a study of the modulations of this light,—an interesting and beautiful thing to follow. Bat one trouble and another confronts us when we try on this reading of the picture. First of all, the lamplight does not act throughout; indeed, we discover it is not the only, or even the dominating, light. There is another fighting with it, and producing red lights and green shadows. in competition with its colder tone. A red source of light, ar. fire probably, is playing on the scene from a point in front of the picture. Now I am aware that it is considered advanced and modern to introduce into pictures these combats of- light. Some painters have had the insolence to make the- face of a portrait the battlefield for contending illuminations, and few Newlyn pictures are complete without a fire from one side and a daylight from the other, to make one cheek red and the other green. But I must take leave to doubt the wisdom of such a choice. The eye does not accept two. strong lights at once. It is by separate acts that it becomes. aware of them, it gives to one a predominating power. Any- way, I have never seen the picture in which finch effects did, not strike me as forced and false, and certainly ugly. The first thing then is to put out this fire, so as to give a unity of light to the picture, and rid us of the carefully and perhaps accurately worked-out jam and yellow combat. But a< second difficulty arises. We find a new source of competi- tion. Instead of the figures being subordinated to the dazzling lamp, they all assert themselves as much as they can against its predominance, and it dawns upon us that the picture is intended to centre, not on the interest of a lamp- light effect, but on the dramatic relations of the figures. Having put out the fire, we must now ring to have the lamp shifted to a table outside the picture. We remember now that Mr. Dicksee has a great reputation as a stage craftsman in pictures, and we are disappointed in him. Why did he dazzle us at the start with that lamp, and put us on a wrong track? It is common on the stage to illuminate the features of an actor with a special light when the actor has not the art, by presence, voice, and gesture, to claim and bold the attention. But the stage carpenter would not bring his source of light upon the scene, for no one would then see the actor. Still lees must this be done in a dramatic picture, since the painted figure can neither move nor speak, and must therefore the more undistractedly be indicated by the pointer-light. So we must send this elaborate lamp away. Then we are left with the three actors, and a fresh puzzle awaits us. Whose is the leading part P Are we invited to attend to a Man, a Lady, and a Ghost, or to a Lady, a Man, and a Ghost, or to a Ghost, a Lady, and a Man? They are all painted so as to attract equal attention,—the man by his scale and place, the lady by her illumination and definition, the ghost by her scale and the queerness of her being a ghost. We fall into an absolute puzzle as to the relations of the three, intensified by the fact that even so clever a painter as Mr. Dicksee has not been able to make the man and the ghost look at one another, and thus connect these two rather than another two. So hard are the simplest require- ments of drama in painting ! We are forced to fall back ignominiously on the catalogue and Mr. Spielmann and to learn that the ghost is the ghost of a lady that once sang the song the lady at the piano is now singing, and that she comes up to the mind of the man while the song is sung. Now at last we are free, having got the story elsewhere, to soak in the "imagination" of the picture. But, alas! in imagination it is least coherent. Why a ghost ? Memory is one thing, hallucination is another, and in this case it is memory that is supposed to be at work. The man listening to the song would see his wife in memory as she was, not the illusion of a ghost. But, it will be argued, if the woman were painted as she was in life, she would appear as a third living figure in the room ; this is a convention to tell us what the man is thinking about. Precisely. Explanation demands something that conflicts with the world of the picture. Painting can show bow a man's face looks when he is thinking ; it cannot show what he is thinking about, except by some absnrd con- trivance like this, of a transparent figure with a theatrical gesture. Painting deals with the seen, not with the unseen, except as it affects the expression of the seen. It is litera- ture that tells what passes in a man's head ; to introduce into a realistically painted world a symbolic explanation is to mix two worlds fatally; it is to spoil painting by attempting the work of literature. Painting can give us the look of a woman singing, and by the look of a, listener indicate the mood of the song. There the art stops, and lets the mind take up the infinite suggestion of such a group ; it cannot give the song. Or we may subordinate the singer, by illumina- tion, distance, definition, and take as our subject the listener's face; again, with infinite suggestion. To attempt more is to go beyond the expressiveness of this particular art, and to lose its proper emotion of the dumb presence and enigmatic look of things. It is as stupid as trying to bring the look of things exactly and fully before the eyes by "word-painting." The exposition of narrative incident in paint ends in puzzle
or fuss. D. S. M.
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