ART AND LIFE.
CONTEMPORARY art in its public expects may be con. sidered a huge game, in which one side is taken by the artists and exhibitors of pictures, and the other by the great shilling. paying public. One bout has been recently concluded, and now there is a pail's°. The galleries are closed, the crowds of spec. tators are scattered, and the artists have long been busy in retirement, working for new successes, or to retrieve old failures, The present pause in the game affords the opportunity of putting a question which, though common enough in itself, will be, we fear, in this connection somewhat startling. It is, cal bone ? There are many people who think that pictures have a certain inherent periodicity, which causes them to make their ap- pearance in May, just as pantomimes do at Christmas, or grouse in August, and to these people this question wilt doubtless be the first suggestion that exhibitions of pictures are expected to have some underlying significance. In this age of utilities, however, when it is remembered what an enormous amount, of thought, time, and money is represented by these exhibitions, the question, cui bone ? is a very natural one. How much the better for it are they who paint, and we who look on P What is the significance of all these galleries, considered as one of the features of our civilisation ?
When Greek art had taken the first few steps in the decline from its perfection in Phidias, it presented a spectacle similar, in certain respects, to the condition of art here. The manual skill of the sculptors was perhaps greater than that of their pre- decessors. Never has marble been so finely handled as by them, but the dignity of inspiration had vanished. The representation of the simple, groat sentiments, no longer sufficed them; they strove to give their work attractiveness by depicting interesting situations, or pretty conceptions of the popular deities of the
minor mythology. In the place of Athene they carved. Aphro- dite, and. forsook Apollo for Dionysus. This was, of course, the beginning of a distant but certain end. Now, without pushing the parallel too far, and without implying that our artists have any past which is related to them as Phidias was to Praxiteles, it seems to us that the art of the present age, too, is character- bed. by skill without inspiration, by zeal not according to knowledge. Our artists—there are, of course, many brilliant individual exceptions to the general statements we are about to make—have acquired. an extraordinary dexterity in the manipulation of their tools and. materials, but they seem destitute of creative imagination, and. their works exhibit neither originality nor insight. They resemble the man who could talk fifteen languages, and, had not an idea to express in any of them; OT, more closely still, our army, which is supplied with weapons of incredible precision and power, while the reasons for which it fights are little, if any, better than those which guided men when they used bows and arrows. For instance, Mr. John Collier, as his " Clytemnestra " shows, can paint burnished copper so accurately that at a little distance the canvas cannot be distinguished from the metal itself ; and the blood which he represents trickling down it is so life-like that if you came upon it unawares You would probably start to wipe it away. It re- calls the story of the Greek rival artists,—one of whom painted grapes so life-like that the birds came and pecked at them, and the other of whom, painted a curtain so accurately that his rival stepped forward to draw it aside. But the story, if true, only serves to show how degraded was the art of their time. And Mr. Collier throws no light upon the real subject of his picture ; his face of Clytemnestra would do very well for the face of .Jocasta, or Lady Macbeth, or any other woman of tragic mien. So, too, if one may venture to question the work of the P.R.A. himself, consider Sir Frederick Leighton's painting of the faces in " Day-dreams " and " Melittion." In execution they are exquisite almost beyond description, but as faces they are unimaginative and uninteresting. The same thing is true of the landscapes ; they exhibit an astonishing manipulative skill, but are such mere imitations that when we are able to photograph in colours, a good part of the occupation of the landscape-painter will be gone.
A. second point of similarity to the same period of Greek art is furnished by the choice of subjects. Our artists seem to choose the far-fetched, the picturesque, the startling,—in a word, the likely-to-be-talked-about. An Eton boy shot dead just as he shouts " Floreat Etona!" ; a fearful scene at the saving of the guns at Maiwand ; "Borneo and Juliet," two cats ; "There's a little lady:! on with her cloak !" "Are you ready P" "The first kiss ;" "Tommy's got a prize ;" "An anxious moment;" " Hush-a-bye, baby, on the tree-top ;" "May we come in P"—these are specimens of the subjects and titles at the Royal Academy. Not a few of the pictures are unintelligible without an explanatory quotation, and now and then we come across such syntax as." painted by subscription," or "proposed sketch for a statue." Now, a picture is a permanent representation ; it is intended to be always before us ; we are to take it like a bride to our home, and to live with it. What would be the state pf mind produced by being surrounded with pictures like these P One shudders at the thought. Effeminacy, weariness, finally irritation and disgust, would be our conscious state, and uncon- sciously we should certainly suffer a dulling of susceptibility to lofty imagination and noble emotion.
Turning to another and greater of the arts, poetry, we find its condition similar, but worse. Many of its rising votaries are men of. splendid. genius and accomplishments, destitute of worthy themes of song. Their themes here, too, we bear in mind one or two glorious exceptions—are on a par with the painters'. subjects ; to give flow to their powers and to secure an audience they have resorted, on the one hand, to things which are simply revolting, like many of Rossetti's sonnets, the "Lana Veneris," and " Charmides," and, on the other, to trivialities, pretty ballads, roudels, and. conceits. What is likely to 'be the state of mind, of the man who keeps himself well read in this poetry ? He will be excited, without being satisfied ; be will become lascivious and. dainty ; in this case, also, the edge will be taken off his best susceptibilities.
Now, in the habits of the society in which these things are, what do we find P That painting and poetry frequently co-exist with all kinds of petty negligencies, and even vices. A wealthy man buys pictures and books and china and Eastern carpets, believing that he is a worshipper of the arts, and yet in a railway carriage he spreads his parcels over seats which he cannot occupy, and in his business many mean actions have become second nature to him. It is told of an old Greek professional philosopher that when a wealthy citizen was conducting him through room after room in his house, where every inch of space was occupied by costly ornaments, he turned suddenly and spat in his host's face, explaining, by way of apology, that he was compelled to expectorate, and that he had. chosen the only spot which seemed to him mean enough for the purpose. Such a philosopher would find amongst us to-day many opportunities for the repetition of his audacious lesson. So, also, we find that there are several of our most brilliant younger poets that a wise man would hesitate to invite to his house, and that not long ago it was rumoured that the cleverest of them all had narrowly escaped expulsion from his club.
Passing now from the actual to the theoretical, the foregoing reflections, if they are true, show that in the thought of the present day there is a lamentable reciprocal divorce between art and life. One explanation and defence is in the mouths of our artists,—art for art's sake. If you venture to ask for the raison d'dtrc of a meaningless or offensive picture or of a lustful poem, you are told, with no little scorn, that it has no particular aim or purpose; that, like all works of art, it exists for its own sake. When used solely by those who understood it, the phrase was convenient, but now it has become a popular shibboleth, and, like all such, is used. to hide ignorance ; one can no longer get a reasonable answer, because of the easiness of this irritating retort, which to render it more effective, is commonly flung at us in French,—art pour art. It is the modern resurrection of the old metaphysical subterfuge, causa sui. But it is a false doctrine, for such a solidarity rules in human nature, that nothing exists by itself or for itself ; the theoretical and the practical, the body and the soul, are in the closest causal intimacy. "Beauty," says Emerson, "is the mark. that God sets upon virtue ;" and if we contrive to falsify this sometimes in our own persons, it remains indisputably true in the impersonal domain of art. J. S. Mill said with surprise of his friend. Roebuck, who was a lover of poetry and a clever painter, that "he never could be made to see that these things have any value as aids in the formation of character." Art must have both its origin and its effect outside of itself. To vary the familiar proverb, we may say, as a man thinks, so builds ho, so paints he, and so sings he. Hence art is the best history of nations or individuals. The Pyramids are in themselves a whole history of Egyptian civilisation, and any one who appreciates thoroughly the curve of the stylobate of the Parthenon may dispense with a good deal of Grote and. Curtius. Beauty, properly understood, is the only worthy end of life ; and beauty is the appropriateness of anything to the place it has to fill, adaptation to environ- ment,—man4, fitness to fill his position in the universe. Thus beauty means, primarily, health, and hence the moderation of a well-balanced mind, temperance, the wise soul in the healthy body. And hence, all moral attributes. As Goethe said, the beautiful is greater than the good, for it includes the good ; it is the good. made perfect. To be beautiful, a will must be strong and a character upright ; to be beautiful, a spirit must be holy There are few things uglier than a weak will and an unholy spirit. So Mr. Morris's broad definition of art is "the beauty of life." With this new view, we no longer think him so extravagant who said that he would rather die for beauty than live for bread; and Art and Life are seen to be inseparable, and the divorce between them to be significant of a perishable civilisation.
Yet, bow different is the common view Art is called. "the world's sweet inn,"—that is, a picture is a kind of mental sofa or cigar. In Macmillan's "Primer of Art," a little book of which the special aim should be to give simple and. sound. definitions of the fundamental principles, Mr. John Collier writes :—" In the narrower sense, art may be defined as the Making of some- thing to please' the eye." "Beauty is that which pleases the eye." 13ut whose eye? is the question ; the eye of Phidias, or of Smith? Tintoretto's, or a colour-blind eye P Does the author hold. that there are no principles to be taught P This is but an instance of the slipshod writing, resulting from lax thinking on this subject, which we meet constantly. In the phraseology of common life, beauty means peacock-feathers, and sunflowers, and the latest whim of a lot of "fashion-mong'ring boys." To rescue the idea, which will be to rescue ourselves, let us for the present protest against all such things, until the time shall come when we have nothing to fear from the prettinesses of life, because the beauty of it will be secured. • It is unnecessary to go over the same reasoning with regard to poetry. The gist of it is given in a remark made by an American newspaper upon one of the poems to which we have alluded. If Mr. Wilde, said the. editor, should ever become sso common-place as to marry and have a family, we wonder how his sons will feel when they grow up to a realisation of the fact that their father is the author of Charmides.' According to Ben Jonson, the principal end of poetry is "to inform men in the just reason of living." This is what the greatest of our modern critics has been teaching us for years, and, in spite of the present popularity of other views, we. shall not greatly im- prove upon his definition.
To conclude, since the subject is vast and space limited, any one may find. additional answers to the questions with which we started, aud may estimate how far we fall short of the position of lovers of art—to which position we think ourselves entitled because of our picture-galleries and our ronclels—who will take a fair view around him and within him, and then ponder Mill's saying that the first lesson which the study of the Fine Arts teaches us is "to make everything beautiful that we do, and, above all, our own characters and lives."
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