ART.
ME MANCHESTER EXHIBITION, AND WHAT ITS ART COLLECTION SHOWS.—II.
Vs mentioned in our last week's article upon the lessons to be harnt from the Manchester picture-galleries, that most of the mange and some of the decadence in English landscape-painting vere exemplified in, and in part due to, the influence of the three ahools which at the present time are most in favour amongst a. In giving these the names respectively of the "Idyllic," the "Pre-Raphaelite," and the " Foreign School," we most remind mr readers that such labels do not pretend to be scientifically mourate, and are only used for purposes of convenience. No listinguishing line can be clearly drawn between many of the ?lotuses of the above classes; there is no such thing really as a school of " Idyllism " or " Pre-Raphaelitism," and the Foreign " school is not of one but many kinds, varying between themselves si the utmost degree. Still, roughly speaking, the classes of artists whose work is chiefly directed by one of these three in. luences are moat potent amongst us at the present time, and it .s worth while to try and understand the scope and direction if their art, its natural outcome, and its origin. A few words, therefore, on each of these points.
Amidst all the fuss which has been made, all the " dust of praise" and blame which has been raised about pre-Raphaelite painting and painters, it is a little strange that no one should have seen clearly that its true deficiency was not due to its harking back to a remote past, but to the predominance over its theories of art of what may be called the spirit of the future. For, indeed, if the best pre-Raphaelite pictures be examined carefully, the essence of their art will be found to be scientific. The mediaeval form of the pictures has blinded most people to this peculiarity, which, indeed, is at first sight scarcely credible, and something as though we should find Mr. Herbert Spencer working out his sociology with a divining-rod, or Darwin study- ing the laws of life by a consideration of the " aspect " of Mercury or Venus. Still, the truth is so, strange though it be, and a little consideration will suffice to prove the matter. Take, for example, Mr. Raskin's famous definition to the effect that the essence of pre-Raphaelitism is that it endeavours to show human actions and customs as they actually are or might have been, instead of as they might prettily be conceived to be under the rules of art. Or take another definition, rather celebrated a quarter of a century ago, and from its pessimistic spirit probably due to the irritation of sonic Academic artist, — " Pre-Raphaelitism exalts minutiae at the expense of beauty." Both from the favourable and the unfavourable definition, the same point is made, the opposition of the theory to Beauty, as considered apart from truth. The matter of Ruskin's definition might be put in this way ,—• Pre-Raphaelite art is the representation of Nature,—beautifully if possible, but at any rate truly.' Now, we cannot stay here to examine the fallacies contained in the above assumption, but it would be difficult to find a single phrase which contained so much dis- putable matter, and which, regarded as a criterion of good art (and this is the way Ruskin desired it to be regarded), is lees defensible. Human life is not long enough, nor human faculties adequate, to produce accurately in a picture all the details of the simplest natural scene. From the very first touch that is laid upon the canvas or the paper, the artist has before him the question of compromise affecting every part of his work. Selection is, indeed, the most vital quality of art, and it is in accordance with the intelligence and scope of this quality that a great painter takes his rank and produces the finest work. "Nature," as Kingsley said, in a memorable passage, " is a thousandfold more wonderful and glorious than you would dare to represent her ; ergo, every picture is a failure, and the nearest hedgerow worth all your galleries put together,"*—which he calls, truly enough," arriving on pre.Raphaelite grounds at a by no means pre-Raphaelite conclusion." Leaving, however, for the moment on one side the impossibility of carrying out the pre-Raphaelite theory, the attempt to paint things and people exactly as they are is, we repeat, not an artistic but a scientific one, and iu no other age of the world than a scientific age could it have gained ground. With Mr. Ruskin, it is true, its basis was due, perhaps, chiefly to a misconceived idea of religious duty ; he thought it an approach to the impious, to alter or modify what God had created. But he too, unconsciously to himself, relied upon the scientific accuracy of the pre-Raphaelite art ; and his famous defence of Holman Hunt and Millais was entirely based upon the question of accurate observation of Nature. The mediaeval form in which Rossetti cast his work, the half-realistic, half-archaic symbolism of Holman Hunt, the simple and intellectually dull realism of Millais, were but so many disguises which coucealed from the public, and the artists themselves, the motive beneath their work. Not to dwell upon this point any longer, we may say briefly that the study of landscape was directly affected, in a great measure through the writings of Mr. Ruskin, by this pseudo-scientific aim. All our modern landscapists are touched with it, and unfortunately, but naturally enough, the most serious, intelligent, and earnest amongst them, are the most affected. Look at it struggling to reproduce in a million ripples in Mr. Brett's attempt to paint every wave in twenty miles of seascape in his " Britannia's Realm,"—a spectacle for gods and men, if viewed aright, as piteous as it would be to see seven maids, with seven mops, attempting to sweep up the sea-sand. Look at Mr. Alfred Hunt's scarcely less painful patience as he sits by the side of the stream in "Leafy Tune," and devotes a summer to giving us every crevice in the rock and every quiver of the leaves, in his little ten-foot paradise. Look at Mr. Holman Hunt's " Strayed Sheep " (perhaps the most beautiful of all his pictures), marvellous is its brilliancy and its multiplicity of beautiful and minute detail, and yet with no grasp whatever of the scene as a whole; an apotheosis of mosaic rather than a triumph of painting. All of these were at the Manchester Gallery ; all are very famous works by famous artists ; and at the present day Mr. Brett and Mr. Alfred Hunt stand in the very front rank of our landscape-painters. But if we compare any one of these (and a fortiori any one of the works of less able artists of the same style) with the works of our earlier landscapists, we see at once that the difference between them is not one of degree, but actually of kind. These modern pictures of which we have been speaking, are not, in the old sense of the word, landscapes at all ; they are " lines" taken here and there, almost at random, from Nature's encyclopaedia, and set in gilt frames more for our instruction than our pleasure; interesting, too, they are, in a sense, as any series of well-ordered facts mast be which has needed patience and a genius for investigation beyond that possible to one person in a thousand; but the artists have lost sight of the broader truths of Nature in adherence to its minutiae, and in trying to do the impossible, they have failed in achieving that which men have done before them. Remember this, that work of this sort, though necessarily doomed to failure, since the task it attempts is an impossible one, has been powerful to destroy, or at least to blind the eyes of the general public to, the Art which rests upon a broader, simpler, and truer basis. And
• We quote from memory.
this for the simple reason that (artistically) uneducated people look at pictures less with their eyes, than their prejudices and pre- viously acquired ideas. To them, a field is green in any light, at any hour ; a leaf has a definite shape, as has a table or a chair ; a gown is made of stuff; or silk, or satin ; and the pattern on a Turkey- carpet or a wall-paper is always clearly visible. To recognise details in a picture is—we are speaking broadly, of the majority, but, we believe, quite accurately—the only pleasure which such people have in picture-seeing ; and since few of them notice the breadth and general aspects of Nature, they fasten with an air of pleasure upon the minute things which they can recognise,—a clearly defined rock, a tree with each leaf distinct and green, a long mass of clouds shutting out the sky, a transparent wave, a perfectly modelled piece of bramble, or a sheep's fleece with the wool looking—" like wool." But all the details that the most labo- rious artist can possibly introduce, are only the raw material of a landscape picture ; the picture itself is a wholly different thing. And turning again for comparison to the works of our earlier men, we find what they conceived a landscape to be,—the enforcement of some beautiful impression of Nature, or some intense feeling about Nature, in which every detail introduced bore its part in producing the required effect. These elder men did not conceive that any bit of Nature taken at haphazard, and wrought oat with no idea save that of putting down every part separately, would make a landscape picture ; they thought, on the other band, that there must be some ruling impression of beauty, some idea to which everything in their picture directed the eye, or, rather, the eye of the mind ; and beyond this, they endeavoured to give the broad, what may, we think, rightly be called, in artist's phrase, "the big things" in Nature,—the truths of space, the brightness of the sky, the solidity of the earth, the fresh feeling of the air, the evening silence, and the winter gloom. And not being pre- occupied with the minor details of the scene, it is unquestionable, though " most strange and wonderful," that these comparatively ignorant and, for the most part, uneducated men saw further and more truly than their successors see in these days of enlighten- ment and culture. Stanfield's knowledge of wave-form was probably, from the scientific point of view, as compared with that of Mr. Brett, as that of a child to a professor ; but Stanfield saw and painted a sea, as well as the waves that make it up, and his sea has these great qualities which Brett has never given us, —fluidity, mass, and movement. The "Abandoned," perhaps the best of Stanfield's sea-pictures, was at Manchester, and it was after coming fresh to this work from Mr. Brett's "Britannia's Realm," that the comparison suggested itself.
We have dwelt over-long on this portion of our subject, but before we leave it, must say a word or two about what is, in our eyes, the worst form of landscape-painting which is popular at the present time, and that is what is usually called the " Scotch School." The essence of this work is to substitute the effect of a passing glance at Nature for all other qualities ; it is, in fact, to put as little as possible in a picture, and is, we regret to say, generally accompanied by a desire to put it on as big a canvas as possible. Two crying sins distinguish this school, and they are lack of thought and feeling and want of delicacy of hand. Speaking broadly, we may say that these large Scotch landscapes have the merit, at their best, of vivid sketches,—works, that is, which succeed in catching one or two of the matters of which landscape pictures are made, but which are in no way worthy to be considered seriously as completed work. They, too, are due to a sort of bastard pre-Raphaelitism,—a pre-Raphaelitiem from which the industry and patience have disappeared, and left only a sort of " cockiness " in the face of Nature, which springs probably from the contempt for all early traditions. For—and this is the point which deserves to be dwelt upon, and which we wish our readers would take the trouble to examine and think about for themselves—the " cockiness " we speak of, the some- what blatant quality of the Scotch landscapes, springs from the fact that their work leaves off where the real difficulties of land- scape commence. If a painter omits from his canvas all subtlety of colour and form; if he does not seek to say anything that is not self-evident, and, as it were, in words of one syllable, about Nature's meaning ; if he is on the technical side content with a rough-and-ready execution such as might be executed with an ordinary birch-broom, and is frequently executed with a palette- knife, there is no reason why we should not have as many landscape-artists as we have house-painters ; and in the main, this is what the Scotch school tend towards, if they do not actually achieve.
Let those who think that such deficiencies are necessary in
order to preserve the freshness and strength of Nature, cast one glance in imagination at the finest landscape in the Manchester Gallery, and the one which nearly twelve years ago we said was the finest landscape of the modern school,—namely, Fred. Walker's " Ploughing." Here are the words we wrote of it in the gallery itself. Our readers will probably remember the subject, which is a great sandstone cliff lit up with the setting sun, and in front a purple field with two white horses ploughing, and two boys guiding the plough ; whilst in the foreground, a little stream, bordered with brushwood, runs across the picture. "Coming in straight from the gorgeous Spanish pictures of John Phillip, with the eye still full of his glorbus colour, this landscape of Walker's still seems far more splendid. It is superior not only in quality of colour, in so far as that is considered apart from the thing represented, but in loveliness of natural atmosphere and effect. And the treatment of the horses and the figures, though instizet with the very finest feeling of ancient art, echoes, but in no wise copies, the tradition on which it is founded. It interprets that sentiment or tradition in accordance with the individcal sympathies of the artist, and the motives, needs, and knowledge of his own time. It is nineteenth-century to the core, but nineteenth-century of the finest artistic kind ; and the picture forms a contradiction, set in the most forcible phrase, to thet assertion, false as it is feeble, that we live in an age where tie poetry of Nature has faded and the poetry of man been exth- guished, and where no imaginative renderings are possible lo pictorial art of the occupations and the scenes of ordinary English life."
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