MAN IN ART.*
Mn. HaatunTox remarks somewhere in this book on the absence of the oyster from poetry. He forgets the English lolus classicus ; but his reader is irresistibly reminded of it. The time is come,' he must have said, like the Walrus, 'to talk of many things ; ' and sustained by the same large and uncommon sense of the a propos that marked the argument of the other, he gives his discourse the title Man in Art. Therein he gossips of a hundred things, not excluding man nor even art; whether angels have wings ; whether centaurs have two sets of lungs ; whether artists had better know Latin ; the Idea of Beauty—and Ary Scheffer ; Protestantism—and Rembrandt ; the Beard in Portrait ; the Soldier in Peace (why not, also, if one is to be so categorical, the Nursery- maid in War P),—three hundred and forty pages of bland bookmaking. Mr. Hamerton will very likely resent the *Man in Art : Studios in Religious and Historical Art, Portrait and Howe. lly Philip Gilbert 11amorton With 48 Plates in Lino-Engraving, Mezzotint, Photo- gravure, livolograplye, Etching', and Wood Engraving. ' London and Now York : Macmillan and Co. 1892. description, but how else is it possible to describe a book of which the scheme, the scale, and the opening are so ample and important, the execution so trivial, the logic so inconclusive, the end so gasping and accidental P It is not denied that several readable essays might be detached from the text, but why bury them in such a mass of apparatus and category? The attempt to give to a casual collection of pictures, and an equally casual collection of views, the form of a treatise with illustrations, only results in padding the essays into tedious- nese. Mr. Hamerton himself is uneasily aware of his position, and defends himself in a preface against the accusation that he writes his books round their illustrations. He establishes the fact that the connection between the argument of his text and the plates in this book is of the slightest ; but when he urges that a hook of costly plates must have type and text to match, he curiously misses the point at issue between the producer of the "art publication" and its reviewers. If there is type, it ought certainly to be handsome ; but why any, or why no much ? Perhaps it is impossible to edit a popular art journal without one's literary conscience getting blunted in the matter of combining letterpress with pictures.
Let us do justice to Mr. Hamerton's virtues. He is fair- minded, open-minded, sensible; in temper, amiable and urbane.; he has curiosity and industry, he has cultivated his taste assiduously ; he is candid in disposition, careful in statement, clear in exposition. He has something of the plausible and gentle air of reasonableness that allowed Mr. Matthew Arnold to make outrageous propositions with the effect of something natural and indisputable. What he lacks is a stronger wsthetic endowment, a surer sense,—an original want that cultivation and tolerance and anxiety and politeness can do nothing to make good. He is an embodiment of " culture ; " he can entertain and apprehend intellectually an Eesthetio point. He has all the "points of view," but he is liable to mistake their relative importance and not to see the thing from any of them, or to choose for this intellectual exercise objects that lend themselves to being viewed from points, but do not repay the trouble. " Protestantism —Rembrandt ; "- it is a possible point of view, no doubt, but no it would be te write on the effects of the Repeal of the Corn Laws on modern landscape-painting.
But let us take an example of how this want of instinct affects conviction and leads to trivial speculation. One of the ample and imposing sections of the book is entitled "Beauty," and begins with a chapter on "The Idea of Beauty." Its argument is that there is nothing positive and universally valid on which our judgments of beauty rest. There is only this man's sensation and that man's sensation, equally valid or invalid, since two men "of equal cultivation" may differ on a question of art. This appears at first sight to be the ordinary confusion that the universally valid must be the commonly perceived and accepted, as if a vote on the ques- tion must decide whether the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles ; and so, because "tastes differ," there is no such thing as good taste and bad. But Mr. Hamerton's idea is more mixed. His point is to confuse this common enough scepticism about the relative value of people's judgments in matters of beauty with quite another thing. He adduces as a reason for admitting this scepticism an elementary piece of psychology which, if it had any force at all in this connection, would make havoc of a great deal more than the reality of beauty. Beauty, he says, like colour, does not exist in the thing itself, but only in the mind of the person perceiving the thing. Therefore, a thing is not beautiful when no one is there who thinks it beautiful. Therefore, for ages, Greek statues were not beautiful ; and anything that is beautiful to-day may cease to be beautiful to.morrow., It is a pretty toy of thought ; but how childish is its application ! For exactly the same is true of mathe- matical perceptions. There are fifty palm-trees on an island. But the island is inhabited by savages who cannot count beyond five. Then, in exactly the same sense in which the beautiful thing ceases to be beautiful for want of some one with the necessary faculty to see it, the fifty palm-trees cease to be fifty for want of some one with the necessary faculty to count them. It makes no difference that the faculty of counting is "in wider commonalty spread" thau the sense for art. The faculty for perceiving the higher mathematical relations is as much wanting to the average man or to the average " cultivated " man as the sense for fine aesthetic relations; but that fact makes no difference of validity in either case. But Mr. Hamerton goes on to point out that not only does one man differ from another in. these perceptions, but differs from his own feeling at an earlier time. Precisely; the sense is capable of endless refine- ment, and every step in the refining process is a step towards community of judgment with those few who have possessed the sense in its greatest refinement. But, says Mr. Hamerton, what some of us call music—Beethoven's, for instance—is only noise to others. Just so ; but those others are note-deaf, as some are colour-blind. But there are races with a different kind of music which, to us, is dissonant ! Well, we had the same kind once, but we have got over it. But there are black people who think black people beautiful and not white ! If so, the white has the advantage, who sees the beauty of the black and also of the white. But I have a friend who calls good Burgundy sour ! No doubt, for there are people with- out palate. And I have another friend who cannot abide oysters, and one who sickens at musk ! Even so; there are people whose stomachs turn at turpentine, so that they never get so far as to see the picture. We all have to set up an oblivion for slaughter-house suggestions, before we can sit down to meat. More subtle is the doubt that this desperate sceptic insinuates when he asks,—How do I know that when we do seem to like the same thing, an oyster or a picture, it is really the same thing P Perhaps when I see red, you see blue ; when I taste oyster, you taste Burgundy! The awful doubt must stand unresolved here, but it is certainly no evidence that twenty painters will make twenty pictures of the "same" scene. For the so-called "same" scene has more than twenty pictures in it.
But not only is Mr. Hamerton's conviction of beauty thus uncertain, it is also curiously narrow in range. He applies the word to a very limited class of effects, and speaks as if the source of pleasure, in paintings going beyond it, were "in- terest," and not beauty. An " ugly " person, for instance, is painted. Well, what we call personal beauty means a per- son looked at is a particular abstraction, viz., the contour of the profile, the proportion of the features, and so forth. But if the painter takes, not that section through reality, but another, deals with the features in some other connection, there are endless ways of taking them in which they fall into their place in a beautiful scheme. An " ugly " fact—a crime, for instance—may be the subject of a " beautiful " speech ; and there are the like resources in a painter's treatment for a face that in some other connection is plain.
The same uncertainty and confusion that mark Mr. Hamer. ton's dealing with the general question, betray themselves at critical points of his closer dealing with his subject. Portrait is perhaps the most testing case for critics of painting, because to the outsider it must appear unimaginative,—a literal, a realistic, a copyist's art. There are traces of this attitude betrayed in passages like the following about por- traiture :—" It is a branch of art for which the higher gifts of taste and imagination are not indispensable A satisfactory degree of success has often been attained in it by men of very moderate intellectual power ; some- times, indeed, they have made fortunes more easily than men of genius " This, perhaps, is a "satisfactory success" of a kind ; but what Mr. Hamerton, apart from this question of money, seems to mean by satisfactory success, is being able to catch a likeness without being able to make a picture of it, for he goes on :—" Some portraitists have succeeded with a feeble gift of colour, and with a degree of technical charm so moderate that it would have been insuf- ficient for a painter of still-life or landscape; this was the case of Ary Schafer, who succeeded in portrait by nothing but sound drawing and good taste." Again, "this art is simple in the sense of requiring very little imagination and very little intricacy of composition." "We know," he says elsewhere, "how little drawing is usually put by landscape- painters into their works."
A review of the illustrations enforces the same judgment as a reading of the text. It is the choice of a critic for whom there is small difference between mediocrity and excellence. Some good things there are—the photogravures are the best —but just as the phrase "Cox and Corot" slips out in the text, so Dioksee balances Rembrandt in the plates, and Fildes, Leslie, Woolner, and Gilbert appear in a collection where hardly a master is represented. Greek art is exemplified by very poor drawings after second-rate originals. Mr. Harcer- ton's real love is with genre; to notice the circumstances in a picture of life, to speculate on the characters in pictures of incident, is his natural way of approaching painting. The mighty blast of Modern Painters disoriented his taste, and left him conscientiously surveying, with his eminent common-sense, the fields over which it blew. Or, to vary the figure, the author of Modern Painters was the builder of a cathedral-like system, the gothic logic of whose con- struction was filled with an imagination and rhetoric con- cordant with their scope and magnificence. Mr. Hamerton is like the cultured incumbent who takes round parties of visitors to the chapels, and explains to the old lady who objects to the nude, and the agnostic who objects to the sacred, the monuments they encounter. He has even taken on himself to enlarge certain chapels,—that of land- scape art, for instance, and that of Turnerian topography. In this last work he has taken newer ground, but with the old ambition in its architectural scheme. The many things he says in it that are true and to the point are badly smothered by the more numerous things that, if true, are unimportant, and the not a few that are twaddle.
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