LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
'THE DIFFERENCE IN AIM OF ENGLISH AND FRENCH ART.
(TO THE EDITOR OF THE SPECTATOR.1
Sta,—My paper in the Nineteenth. Century seems to have had a peculiarly irritating effect upon your art-critic. Will you allow me to express in your paper my sincere regret that such should have been the case, feeling, as I do, much sympathy and admiration for many of his art criticisms, and not in any way .confounding them with the thoughtless, ignorant criticism which, I maintain, is very common. I made a collection of the newspaper criticisms on the Grosvenor Gallery last year, and I repeat that, with one or two exceptions, the Spectator article being by far the most brilliant exception, "anything funnier 'than the way" in which the poetic ideas of the two greatest painters whose work was exhibited there was unappreciated and misrepresented can hardly be imagined. Perhaps I was wrong in referring in vaguer terms to the capable than to the careless and ignorant, but the harm done by these last was brought to me in a very forcible way. It is so easy to write a few supercilious or satirical sentences about what we do not understand, so diffi- cult to labour through the utterance of a poetical idea in art, to conquer the many stubborn mechanical difficulties of the work ; so depressing to compare what the painter wants the picture to be with what it turns out to be on canvas. that I cannot but feel that any one having the opportunity of viewing the subject all the way round, would keenly sympathise with the poet- -natures whose work is translated to the public by such writing. Such treatment must tend to isolate the sympathies of our great artists, and make them indifferent to the opinion of a large portion of their fellow-creatures. But the object of my article was not to take the side of artists versus critics, but the side of true Art, which is that which developes beauty of all kinds versus false art, —a ground which all true artists and all true critics ought to have in common. Surely your critic cannot have given all the time, thought, and subtle investigation, be- sides rare gifts of taste and sympathy, the results of which appear in so much of his writing, particularly, I think, in articles which appeared last summer, and not heartily sympa- thise with all who wish to confine Art criticism to the capable. My paper having had such an irritating effect upon him, he has perhaps omitted noticing a sentence which I was reminded of when I read his article in last week's Spec- tator. I said, "By all means let there be a profession of critics, men who make a livelihood by writing on Art, and spreading its right influence." Surely he wants neither more nor less than this.
But to come to the real point of my letter, which has reference to the latter part of your article. I deny any wish to "run down" any artists. The aims of certain schools lead to the development of true art in its largest, highest sense, whereas the aims of other schools tend, in my opinion, to the debasing of art into a mere plaything, a plaything of not a very wholesome character. I believe the aims of the French school tend to this last condition, and because M. Legros and M. Tissot are such powerful painters in this school, I mentioned them by name. My feeling about their work is that, considering the tours-de-force they are able to perform, what would they not achieve, if the aims of the school to which they belong were as worthy as their power of painting ? The value of cleverness to the world at large surely depends on the way it is used. I think if your critic will kindly read the passage more carefully which elicited the following severe remark, "But what can we think of the impartiality which contrasts a finished picture with a hurried study, exe- cuted for a special purpose ?" he will see I do not compare a finished picture with a hurried sketch," but I say in these, you see "in perfection the result of distinct aims in work, the dif- ference between a riddle solved and a poem created." Now the riddle could never grow into a poem, if M. Legros worked at it for years. It is, for the kind of thing, quite per- fect; he could not improve it. It is a typical specimen of the modern power in technical proficiency. We have had this winter ample opportunities of seeing sketches by the "Old Masters," many of which took, perhaps, less than the two hours M. Legros allows himself at the Slade School, but which, however, rival in true aim and poetry the Bellini Madonnas. Mr. Ruskin has always taught that speed for speed's sake is no worthy aim, and one in no one way recon- cilable with the development of a poet-nature. But the reason for my referring to M. Legros' studies (and it was these only I had mentioned when I said that "even their admirers cannot pretend that it is work which produces any food for thought or emotion, save that of admiration for technical skill "), and not to his pictures, was that the heads done before his students are, I think, his best work. Though incomplete as works of art, they are marvellous exhibitions of power, un- rivalled in their own line, though I maintain they mis- lead the aims of the students, who are fascinated by them. But his subject pictures, being still merely realistic conceptions, are, I think, still more misleading. I do not see any poetical sympathy in them towards the poverty and sad- ness they represent, and certainly no article in the Fortnightly Review, nor any other writing would convince me of the existence of qualities which the pictures themselves had failed to impress me with, my strongest feeling in this matter being that the only honest, true way of judging a picture is to let it speak for itself. If you allow yourself first to hear any eloquence on the sub- ject except that possessed by the picture itself, you can never be sure you have given it a fair chance of producing an original impression. Give time, trouble, and quiet leisure, exhaust its power of impressing you, if that be possible, be- fore forming an opinion on it, but 'never trust to anything but the picture for your impression of it. But to return to M. Legros, and his treatment of the "grey side" of life. There is no side of life so grey that the poet cannot light it by some ray, some warm hint at colour. If not by a feeling of heroic endurance or passionate yearning, still, by some tender, simple pathos, a ray can be made to creep through the prison-bars of the unalterably painful conditions which clog round so many lives, and immerse such thousands in squalor. Now it is this ray, surely, which art ought always to catch hold of and accen- tuate. If art is not always to be flowers and bright colours, if it is to tell the tales of the grey side of life, it must not tell them because it loves misery, poverty, and squalor, but because all these conditions can be lighted up by a rarer beauty than the bright colours even ; because such beauty, be it a human sympathy with the misery, or a strong endurance through it, can triumph over the misery, and make a work of art containing such a triumph wholesome food for "emotion and thought." Should there be, however, any grey spots in life unalleviated by any possible ray of poetry, in pity's sake for those whose feel- ings and sensibilities are really harrowed by misery, let art refrain from making useless realistic records of them. Surely it is not the province of art to present to us vividly the difficul- ties and mysteries of the pauper question ? A work of art is a monument to an idea, a permanent record of certain condi- tions, and I cannot think monuments to hopeless, faithless squalor are works of true art, any more than the battle- pieces in which the physical horrors are not made subser- vient to the heroic feelings. To quote from M. Renan's speech of the other day, "As for me, 1 have an invincible confidence in the goodness of the idea which made the Universe." I feel that the art which excuses itself for giving us painful, ignoble subjects, on the ground that misery exists, and all that is may be represented in art, provided the representation is clever, belongs to the "faithless coldness of the time ;" and that
if the school which encourages such art felt sensitively the misery they are able to realise so cleverly on canvas, it could not represent it without even one consoling ray of beauty. Now M. Legros does not harrow our feelings, as many French artists do, by bloodshed and horror, but neither does he console us by any ray of colour or sunshine in his grey view Of life. Take an ex- ample from the Grosvenor Gallery, of an old man dying alone by the road-side. Treated as the figure was, I think the old man was pitiable, but not pathetic. What was the "lead- ing thought" in this picture, for which all beauty and care in the background was sacrificed ? The landscape was neither in harmony with the sadness, nor did it, by contrast, enforce the dreariness of the fact; it was simply an tin- suggestive, careless background. It is very sad when poor old men die friendless and homeless, but surely more than the mere fact that such conditions exist should be got out of the sadness in a work of art. Our old friends the woodcuts of "Death the Friend" and "Death the Avenger," and Wordsworth's poem, "The Old Cumberland Beggar," come into one's mind, and leave one sorely dissatisfied with French realism. As long as the French school exercised its influence in France chiefly, it was not so necessary for us to find in what consisted its faults. It is never necessary to "run down" an artist's work in a per- sonal way; but now that a most remarkable French artist is at the head of one of the principal art schools in London, and. that his and M. Tissot's work take such prominent positions in one of the two most important exhibitions, it is necessary to make clear the difference between the aims of our own great poet-painters and those of the French school Students certainly cannot serve both masters. To state the dif- ference briefly, I believe it to be this :—Our poet-painters believe that art has done its best work in life by insist- ing on beauty, beauty which is not to be approached but with reverence; the French school insists on cleverness, independent of, often contrary to the idea of beauty.
Having a strong faith in my side of the question and in your art critic's power of sympathy towards the best art, I believe as well as hope that when he has been more than "four years" at the work, he will see more distinctly what I believe to be the " vraie verite " in the matter, look at the whole question in a larger way, and take more the view of the great artists whom he admires with such subtle insight and so cordial an apprecia-
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