ART.

AT THE OLD MASTERS.—II.

A Symbolist. An Impressionist.

S.-0 Impressionist, do I find you among the Primitives ? I have long been anxious to meet you in a place like this.

1-0 Symbolist, let me thank you for the wish before you add your reason. Yet I cannot say that I feel less hopelessly actual than I always do in your presence. For what con- stituency in your ideas am I privileged to stand, and do I indeed look like an Emblem ?

S.—Flattery was far from my thoughts. What I had in my mind was that when I meet you, as I often do. in galleries hung with impressions of the casual and the insig- nificant, you are able with a certain plausibility to assert that for the painter objects have no meaning worth con- sidering, that personality goes no deeper than the cuticle, that it is of the essence of the art to be superficial, of the artist to be an outsider. And you are wont to buttress your argument by a scornful glance at works which appeal by their subject to associations, or refer by their title to a story, but that as pictures are mighty poor. I often have not the heart to defend my principles before such inadequate examples, and

hence my satisfaction in finding you among those older masters of expression whose works are at once significant and pictorial.

1.-0 Symbolist, you surprise me greatly. I had just reached among these queer map-faces and meaning-tormented figures an island of refuge in this old man's head they say is by Direr—what a wonder he has made of that toothless mouth of age !—and I have been wondering with what face you could hold to your contention among pictures like these.. I do not find in the modern gallery a more hollow pretence of expressing a " subject" than I do here ; I only find that it was dictated by a different authority. Now it is the Public, then it was the Church ; but the cold and fraudulent courtesy with which the older painter treats his Biblical commission is,- if anything, more conscious than the attitude of the modern to his novel. Your vaunted " subject " is an " imposition " of the schoolmaster, and the painter indemnifies himself by truant excursions under cover of his task. I wonder how much Van Eyck, when he painted that superb altar-cloth, meddled with its significance; I conceive it meant red to him, with gold spots. Or take that notable painting of Bassano's in the other room,—imposed subject, The Angel to the Shepherds ; picture, some well-observed flesh with a happy consistency in the paint and admirable oppositions in the colour. This he borrows from Nature under mortgage only to some loutish country figures ; and as for the supernatural explosion in the clouds, I prefer to shut my eyes to it,. thinking that the red drapery in the foreground would excuse many angels.

S.—I admit the failure in the angel ; but can you seriously hold that it is tolerable so to treat such a subject,—to be so callous to all its bearings but one, that you can count success in a life-study or a drapery, a compensation for so great an evasion ? Let me take, if you will excuse the word,. a crucial case ? Would it be possible, for you even, to paint the Cross with an eye only to anatomy and the lights and shadows upon flesh ? To do so would be to confess a mind incapable of seeing things in their due relations. How huge a failure in proportion to be absorbed is maimed humanity when that is but an incident of the sacrifice, an incident hardly appreciable besides its forsaken divinity.

I.—Then is it to yonder Fleming I am to turn, who made- that subject the pretext for a view of his native town ; or do I understand you that the Raphael here fulfils your ideal? I see in it rather a confirmation of my view. He repeats,. indeed, a decorous hieratic tradition ; but to your eye there must be something frivolous in those fluttering ribbons of the angels about the Cross. I am reminded of the words of a certain prophet of your own about another picture of his,— the figures "poised in the attitude of three humming-birds."

8.—You ride away on the particular instance. But can you not see in it at least the propriety of the symbolic form P To reinstate the scene as it may have happened would be to- admit superfluous and distracting associations. Here is no detail that is not sanctioned by pity or devotion, and sum- moned by a befitting thought.

1.-1 am keenly aware of Raphael's or Perugino's one model) coming in under some such pretext, and of the fact that the pupil is uncomfortably on the fence of his master's conven- tion, without quite knowing which side of it he will drop.

S.—Well, let the Raphael be. How would you yourself think proper to treat the subject ?

I.—I am embarrassed which of several replies to make. In the first place, I should be very unlikely to treat it at all, not having seen it, and being under no temptation to reconstruct it fictitiously. You are constantly pressing upon me subjects which are great measured by some standard which has nothing. to do with my painting.

S.—Then it has no enthralling force for your imagination, such as to compel you to find a pictorial expression for it, in spite of difficulties ? So be it; but now suppose for a moment you had been a spectator, what then ?

I.—I think the proper answer at this point would be made by our friend Realist. He asserts that in presence of the living fact there is always a fountain of suggestion, that it teems with expression more apt and poignant than the sym- bolist can invent, and that the crude fact in Nature has not only natural revelations, but natural veils. He says he thinks you make a mistake in accumulating objects labelled with definite souvenirs; that, association for association, he prefers

_ them as they come charged with vague anticipations ; and I have no doubt he would contend that by waiting on the event he would find a moment when a haggard light or an ominous shadow would endow it more overwhelmingly to the imagina- tion than any ingenuity in absence could contrive.

S.—I should like to argue the point with him ; but let us come back to yourself. Would you, in presence of this scene, allow an incidental horror to distort its whole weight and significance, because that first entrapped your eyes?

I.—You forget that I am an artist. I should paint nothing that was to me horrible, though I admit I might be so unfor- tunate as to horrify you.

S.—Put it this way. Would you allow an accessory beauty to usurp the centre of your contemplation?

1.—Accessory ! Ah ! there is a straight issue, and I will fight you on this matter of relation. What is essential to me will indeed seem irrelevant to you, if you obstinately sit in a formal centre, and measure the importance of an effect by its distance from a fixed thought. I go with you into a shop and ask for a yellow coat, and you object,—No, you must have a black one, because I am in mourning; or, No, you must have a red one, because it is half-a-crown a yard, and that is the proper sum in relation to my income. I am not bound to choose my effect out of the shop of circumstance to suit with your associations, or with your intellectual price-list. You talk of " Subject," of "Scene," as of something made up and existing in fixed elements. It is only your preconceived picture makes it so, and the title of your picture that has a quarrel with the treatment of mine. Here, you say, is My Lord Thought with My Lady Suitable Feeling on his arm ; these must take precedence of the Messrs. Things and Facts, and a person of breeding will remember exactly with what deference to treat each of them. No Miss Sense Impression or Master Strange Effect, because of native charm, will be allowed to speak till spoken to, but must sit mum in due subordination to you, the Master of Ceremonies. To all this I cannot assent. I am constantly invited to decorous parties of the kind. The Important Events are seated round in their Sunday wear; the Appropriate Reflections stand by with nicely accommodated smile. But there is an unbidden guest who has a trick of intruding, and the intruder is Beauty. She seats herself at some unregarded corner of the board, and upsets its symmetry, or she ousts an entitled shadow, and all programme and etiquette are straightway at a stand. The exchange of scheduled compliments hushes at this audacious voice, till all listen open-mouthed ; the carefully marshalled apparitions instructed to reply to the toasts of Literature and the Drama, the Church and the Universities, flit like shades at cockcrow, and the Intruder's chair becomes the seat of honour by natural prerogative. To speak plainly, the intellectual relations you deal in do not hold for me as a painter, and I cannot help it if the accident I call a picture happens to me in circumstances that have for you a ready-made connection. A gleam falls, the angle of a shadow shifts, and I am rapt away in an intoxication; a dream has come through the multitude of the other business, and my business is with it. This is a magic that confers dignities of its own, annulling all previous degrees ; the man who last moment was a pauper in society may become a peer in light, and the caprice of a shadow obliterate a throne. Tragedy, it may be, collected the materials for her own ends, but they serve another, too ; the human paints and dyes may be there to a disastrous issue in fact; but this art will create from them a charmed heaven in despite of their purpose, and con- trol wounds and squalor to other than a pitiful effect. For I have never been witness of the scene so horrible or so scurvy that did not carry with it a picture for its anodyne.

S.—Out upon you, Anarchist of Sense, Somnambulist amid swords and lamentation ! Is it, then, human to be able not to think, not to feel ?

is humane in the surgeon when his duty requires it; why not, then, for the artist if his pleasure makes it possible? As a man, I grant you, I might be overborne in face of the event; but it is as an artist you challenge me; under that mail I should be invulnerable to the shocks of feeling. It is inhuman if you like, for it is to enter another world upon the salvage of this. There have been weddings and buryings, and agonies and battles; the moralist will make his own account with the coil causes and good and bad, the trage- dian will focus on the tears and cries ; but I hold myself equally justified with them if I can redeem from it an effect of vision, silent, immaculate. And I say it were possible to win this from broken flesh and blood, even if a god died. Now abuse me as you will. Say that painting is to me but a lust of the eye. I say it myself, not hoping to con- vince those who are incapable of the splendours of that desire that I am more than a sensual trifler. But I have been turning this discussion into a rhapsody. It is time you should retort for the Symbolist.

S.—I will next week. D. S. M.