ART.
SUBJECT AND TECHNIQUE.
THAT the dignity of the performance does not depend on the dignity of the subject, but on that of him who treats it, is surely indisputable. God himself is not dignified on the lips of the ranter, but Ithuriel loses no dignity when he handles the toad. The man of refined intelligence and feeling knows how to talk about anything, because, in the act and manner of speech, he relates himself to the thing spoken of; he places it, determines how it stands to his feeling, and conveys his determination to the listener. A thing, repellent in itself, falls to be treated ; it is steadily seen and understood, and by the accent and movement of language is adjusted to specula- tion and sentiment, so that it is thought of under a tolerable angle of pity or horror or irony or fun. He will not cheapen sentiment by its display when it is not called for, knowing, as he does, too muoh for ready effusion; he will not apply ludi- crous standards, being neither teetotaler nor Phariseca: and thus, whatever subject he may handle, noble or there will result from the justice of his sentiment. and the close aptness of its expression and response in the music of words, an unfailing sensation of beauty. Who would not rather hear a great and eloquent Judge pronounce sentence on an odious crime, than suffer from a turgid eulogy of virtue ; or would not sooner surprise in a phrase about trivial things the voice that proclaims distinction of character, than detect in a disquisition on high and important themes a note that stamped the speaker commonplace?
That this sense of refinement, or want of refinement, is con- veyed in the very form and texture of speech, whatever its theme, no one would deny, and to its effects a large number of people are sensitive, because the art of conversation is of prime necessity and universal practice ; that the same truth is obscured in the art of painting arises from the fiict that it speaks a language by no means so generally known or so readily acquired. The result is that all the art of it, the means by which, as in language, the feeling of the painter towards his subject is determined and conveyed—the intona- tion, the accent, the expression—all this goes for nothing. and the spectator is left contemplating a bare "subject," because he actually sees nothing else. Just so a man who did not know Greek might get so far with a play of 2Eschylas as to discover that its subject was adultery. 'Why, what is this P' he would say ; 'a book dealing with one of the worst vices of ancient civilisation ! ' and shut it in a pions horror. It would be necessary, for such a reader, to put some very plain and obvion3 intimation against the book's title, such as, "This book deals with adultery, but does not recom- mend it." Even so in painting : if the spectator, who does not know the language of painting, finds a subject classed in his mental list as "degraded," he will need some very coarse in- dication of intention on the painter's part, some violent dis- claimer in the written language he is accustomed to, before he is prepared to acquit the painter of the most discreditable intentions. Before a picture of people drinking, he will clamour, Swear to me that you meant this for a temperance tract, or I shall denounce you as a corrupter of youth.' The painter was quietly talking about the scene to those who could understand his language ; they followed with delight the refinement of his observation, the points of irony, the close comments, the appropriate feeling of his speech : to the other man, all this does not exist, because he has not learned its A B C.
A curious result is the absolute mistakes that such a spectator must make in estimating the bearing of the art of different painters. What, for example, is the import of Hogarth as usually estimated, and what is the real import of his art ? He is usually taken for what he gives himself out to be, and that is a stern moralist and preacher. He has taken care to write that kind of label conspicuously across his pictures, to indicate that intention in his titles and descrip- tions. Bat the language of painting, of which, on the dramatic side, he was a very considerable master, speaks from every line of his canvas in contradiction, and what it tells us is that the man, in spirit, was a jolly rowdy, with a jollity somewhat of the undertaker's kind. Now, except to intolerant minds, there is room in painting for the jolly rowdy ; but how fanny it is that he should contrive to pass muster as an austere teacher, in virtue of a cheap moral loosely appended to his delighted observations of low life. He always reminds one of some witness in a Law Court attuning a beery voice to a note of unction, and relating that his friend, the accused, 'smelt 'orrible of drink, and his language was disgusting' (language he proceeds to reproduce with gusto). With a literary in- dication, then, to steer the sentiment of the publics, a painter may do anything; and a great artist, like Charles Keene, may use the drunkard freely as a subject in the pure spirit of fun without being cried out upon, if only he legibly inscribes a written joke beneath the drawing. Bat the painter, the com- plexity of whose feeling, the gravity of whose spirit, the refinement of whose vision express themselves in their own language of painting, is denounced for want of a label parodying all this in speech ; the artist whose ' finish " is of that real kind that has an observation to back every touch, an observation, and therefore a finish, going beyond all drawing but the very best, is de- scribed as the result of a hurried age ; and the man who, of all the -painters of our time, has most shunned the vulgarities of advertisement and publicity, has most patiently followed his inspiration in seclusion from the crowd and its ideals, is held up as the type of an interviewing society. It follows, naturally enough, that the critic, whose humble but neccessary office it is to avert public wrath from fine painting, is supposed, when be praises a picture in which Degas happens to have treated a cafe scene, to wish either (1) that every one should go and drink absinthe in cafes, or (2) that painters should paint nothing else. What is desirable is, that painters should treat whatever subject they take in hand with the same delicacy and sense of beauty. To praise Macbeth is not exactly the same thing as encouraging murder, or insisting that only murder should be written about.
It is impossible to reveal to any one who has not an eye for the language of painting, where the pictorial element comes in. It is difficult, but perhaps not impossible, to convince him that there is a gap in the set of terms under which he looks at a picture, and that it is just that part, which does not exist for him, that makes it a picture. He is ready to allow that, besides the "Subject," there is something called" Technique ;" a picture is for him, Subject + Technique. He understands by technique some cleverness in the brushwork that escapes him, and that he makes a present of, with scorn, to the pro- fessional painter. He considers the matter exhausted by this division, and does not dream of the essential term that mediates between the two. That term is "Imagination." Imagination is the power of seeing images in things, an& making images out of them. To extract the beauty out of a water-bottle as you look at it is to exercise the painter's imagination ; and it is this faculty applied to a scene, selecting this element and rejecting that, up to the nicest effects of feeling, that makes a picture. In the imaginative treatment of the subject, technique is already implied, for technique means remembering the tools you have to work with, and taking nothing from a scene that these tools will not naturally and beautifully render. Technique is therefore a condition under which the painter sees things, but it is not a mechanical beauty stuck upon the surface of a picture and detachable from it. It is only bad technique that can be so considered, the flashy trick that means nothing, or the mechanical smoothness and finish that means nothing. In the best painting the execution comes out of the image as necessarily, as naturally, as simply, as a blossom out of a tree. You cannot define where conception leaves off and execution begins, because they are one act. The touch is seen by the painter in his subject before he lays it on. Now, the very reverse is true of bad painting. It is all technique and no observation. Go. round the Institute of Painters in Water-Colours, or a similar exhibition, and in almost all the work you will find a..
most determined and laborious technique, but the most glaring absence of observation. There is a fixed idea of stipple, let us say, which is a kind of technique, but the stipple stands for no act of vision. Just because the painter had not looked at his object, and had nothing to say, he has recourse to a mechanical procedure which has a certain skill and " clever- ness " in it, but which represents absolutely nothing. It is in such painting that the conception of a picture as Subject + Technique, is really justified, whereas in good painting there is touch that does not mean an observation and a preference..
But, says the objector, shifting his ground, if you have this imaginative power, why not employ it always on subjects noble in themselves ? The objection is surely based on a very childish and a very simple and abstract view of things, and a disregard of the range of notes from which an. emotional effect of a high order may be struck out, It is like complain- ing that all poems are not hymns ; it is like reviling the fiddle, because it is not the harp. It is wiser, surely, to recognise that an artist knows best out of what material he can win his effects of beauty; to be sure that the fiddle or the harp is of the best quality ; and to realise that, for the keenest effects of' beauty, a touch upon some humble or forlorn or desperate note- in life is often the most telling.means. In any case,— " One flash of it within the Tavern caught Better than in the Temple lost outright."
It is in this sense that Subject is important. To each artist his own, and if he obtains from it an effect of beauty, and an effect of poetry or irony or fun, it is something of an imper- tinence to suggest that he has chosen the wrong material.
To hint in a democratic age that to apprehend an art de- mands a special faculty and training, is to seem an enemy of the people. But nothing is gained by concealing the fact, and the " coercion" spoken of in the article of last week is not an attempt to force admiration on people who cannot feel it.—it is only the claim for decent behaviour from the outsider in presence of an art that he does not understand. As a matter of fact, once the outsider has got over the strangeness and novelty of an unwonted style of art, he is prepared to enjoy his own sensations before one painter as he did before another. Troyon will do almost as well to suggest " Cow " to him atter a time as Mr. Sidney Cooper. But to suppose that he, there- fore, admires the art in the Troyon, is an illusion. The picture merely serves to remind him Of what he has felt or some one has said about cows. The Philistine of one age wishes to scratch his name on the paintings of the Sistine; the Philistine of another reads his Ruskin quietly below, and reserves his contumely for Corot ; the Philistine that follows likes Corot almost as well as Mr. Leader, and wishes to run his umbrella through Degas. He must be coerced once more, and in a year or two, Degas will be to him even as that other painter of the de- graded subject, Rembrandt. For the battle was over ten years ago, and we witness a belated skirmish in an outlying
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