ART.
MRS. BARRLNGTON ON ART AND CRITICISM.* WE could hardly have hoped for so exact a confirmation of a portion of our last week's article upon Art as is afforded us by Mrs. Barrington's paper in the Nineteenth Century of this month, no less than three of its pages being entirely devoted to an attack on Art critics ; but of this portion we will speak later. Let us now consider what our authoress has suggested towards answering the question with which she heads her article,—" Is a Great School of Art Possible in the Present Day? "
Firstly, we observe, with some surprise, that Mrs. Barrington never answers the question at all, and the only result which we can arrive at is that if certain things were not as they are, and certain methods were pursued, it would be very much better for Art. Thus, we learn that " the worst difficulty lies in the want of the most elementary instinct for beauty in the masses." We confess that there is to us something irritating in this calm way of settling the matter. We are almost tempted to ask who are these " masses " who are distinguished by this lack of feeling? Is Mrs. Barrington quite sure that she has got (to use a rather vulgar, but forcible expression) hold of the right end of the stick ? that it is really the Upper Ten who possess this instinct for beauty. Indeed, it would seem that this is by no means certain in her mind, for in the following pages she complains that " a jar is felt by those who really love Art by the attitude Society takes with regard to her. There is a want of true sensitiveness as to the high position she is capable of taking. Society is not strung with the finest fibres with regard to her." It seems we are in a "parlous state,"—no instinct for beauty in the masses, no true sensitiveness to the high position of Art in society. Where these are, we look for the fulcrum for our Archimedean lever. Where are we to find too, the motive-powers for the production of great art ? for certainly, whatever else be its character, it is not Aiopathic.
Towards the end of the article we find the answer, or at least as much of an answer as is given, and it is to this effect,— The men of genius ought to help the students of genius, for at Present nothing is done for the development of individual The Plineteen1A Century. Aprill, 1879. C. K. Paul and Co.
genius, " for tiding over those years of difficulty when so. much superior talent succumbs under the pressure and difficulties of living." This assistance might possibly; Mrs. Barrington appears to think, be given by the greater men allowing the pupils to work on their pictures, &c. The second suggestion is that of " an Art Company, composed of our first artists, and the enlightened Crcesuses who seem_ anxious to help Art, along with other good work. The artists could help by their genius and knowledge, and the Crcesuses by their money and influence, towards the production of great public works of art, and by apprenticing students of genius," &c. That is all ; our author then returns to the want of the world's knowledge of the beautiful, and to her favourite stumbling-block, " the masses," who, indeed, have an uncomfortable knack of mixing themselves up in all important matters, and of finally obstructing the working of all nice little " Morrison-pill remedies."
Let us recapitulate a little. The worst obstacle to a great School of Art is the want of instinct for beauty in the masses ; the second, is a perversion of sentiment in society regarding the high functions of Art. Other minor difficulties are the condi- tions of modern life, the separateness of the position of art ; and lastly, the fact that " the artists do not live in the highest thought of our day, and the highest thought seems often strangely blunt with regard to the poetry of form and colour." We are now, perhaps, in a condition to give the answer which Mrs. Barrington omits, taking her premises for granted.. And it will be this. A great school of art is impossible, in the present day, unless we can alter, first, the artist's habits of mind; secondly, society's habits of mind ; thirdly, unless we can supply the masses with an instinct which they do not possess ; and fourthly, unless we can change the conditions of modern life. So that it would seem there is little hope for us; we must. even rest content without the great school, and make the most of what we have got. Nay, is it not worth consideration, though we fear it will sound heretical in the ears of our aesthetic friends, whether what we have may not really be the best for us, if only because we have it. It seems to us that all talk about great schools of art is somewhat beside the mark, if in- tended to serve as a formula for producing such a school. If the age be " not an artistic one, why, then, it is not an artistic age," to parody Hamlet, and no recipes for patronage or pupil- age will make it so. It is no good giving Mr. Burne Jones half-a-dozen dull pupils, in the idea that his genius will com- municate itself to them ; and to talk about giving him or any other great artist only pupils of genius, presupposes that you know your man of genius when you have got him,—a thing, which neither kings, people, nor persons of artistic proclivities have ever yet done. Besides, as a matter of fact, the pupil of genius is one who requires least of all the training of one of his own stamp. There is no good in sending Titian to the studio of Giorgione, or Tintoretto to that of Titian ; they only (very often) get kicked out as incapable, or else perverted into a style of work which is not their own.
Nor, we confess, does the idea of the Company of Crcesuses and Geniuses recommend itself to us, as either practicable or desirable. Crcesuses and geniuses never did get on well together yet, and we doubt whether they would in the supposed instance.. It is true, that the Crces uses are only to supply money and in- fluence, and it is expressly stipulated that they are to be "en-- lightened," but we fear that it would scarcely do, even under those restrictions. It may be remarked, in passing, that your modern Crcesus, likes to have a finger in any pie for which he is supply- ing the materials. But leaving Mrs. Barrington's theories on the obstacles and the incentives to Art for a moment, let us say a few words upon what appears to us the most vital portion of this paper. This may be summed up as consisting of two parts,—an attack upon what is commonly known as real- istic art, as opposed to poetical ; and secondly, an attack, decidedly bitter, upon Art Criticism. For reasons which will. presently appear, we will take the last-mentioned. first. To give our readers an idea of the vivacity with which this lady does her work, we must collect a few of the sugar-plums which she throws at us and our critical brethren of the weekly Press ; though we are pleased to see that the Spectator has es- caped the sad fate of the Saturday Review and Atherca3um, and is. not condemned by name. Well, then, we learn that critics have. not sympathy with art, as art; no understanding of the artist's creations, or sympathy with the genius that has created a form.. Even to elementarily educated minds,, it is " wonderful to see
how extremely wide of the mark are the criticisms of the general literary world on work which is the result of this creative faculty." " Anything funnier than the various criticisms on the Grosvenor collection of last year can hardly be imagined. The little thought given is surprising ;" " mud of flippant criticism,"—" special cliques," " mutual-admiration societies," " patronising daily-paper criticisms,"—" ignorant criticism,"— and so on, at great length. One sentence, however, we must quote as it stands, if only to show how excessively unrestrained in her remarks upon others' knowledge an author can be, even while she testifies against the ex-
pression of crude opinion A literary man's judgment of a picture, if quite honest and original, must be tempered with extreme modesty, the moment he passes from the literary aspect of art to the more strictly artistic and technical qualities, for no judgment but that of a first-class artist himself could be taken as thoroughly satisfactory in these matters. Conscious of this, perhaps, many an intelligent critic gets himself coached up in this part of his business by the artist, often by no means first-rate, for whom he has a bias, or whom chance has thrown among his acquaintances. The result is we get the not disinterested opinion of one or two artists on their own and other men's work in these criticisms,—not spontaneous intellectual efforts suggested by the work judged. To any one behind the scenes, who has watched how these Art criticisms are concocted, and how the litterafenr's opinion is formed, it is clear that both artists and the public should think little or nothing of the ordinary newspaper writing on Art, for the very good reason that the writers rarely discover any- thing for themselves. Unfortunately, the sensitive tempera- ment of the artist makes it difficult for him to be quite in- different, whatever nonsense is written about his pictures, which, it must always be remembered, are like part of himself, are like his own children, and however clearly he discerns the weakness and the want of originality and knowledge in a criticism, he knows that a large portion of the world will look at his picture, thinking the while not how the pictures are really impressing them, but of what they have read from the supposed superior judgment of an Art critic ; and the public, as a rule, is so little capable of judging for itself, that it eagerly reads the Art notices, wishing to know something about the pictures before they go,' too hurried and too lazy about Art even to attempt to form an original opinion."
Now,we do not intend to attempt to contradict Mrs. Barring- ton, who implies that she is " behind the scenes, and knows how these things are done." We can only say that the present writer has been accustomed for nearly four years to review Art Exhibi- tions, and that he has never seen the slightest reason to believe that what she says is true. It will be noticed that the accusation she makes is really far more grave against the artists than the critics ; for, whereas the critics, according to her, are only endeavouring to get a knowledge which they do not possess, the artists, on the other hand, are using the critics as a cover for praise of their own work, and detraction of others. Throughout this article, Mrs. Barrington speaks from the point of view of the artists ; and she should, we think, inform us who are the artists who give information in this way, and who are the critics that receive it. We are quite accustomed to hear around us on every side random charges of malice, ignorance, and carelessness, but we must confess it does seem a little hard, that to all these should be added, the accusation of using another man's information, and representing it to be our own, par- ticularly when, from the very nature of the case, we must know that such information cannot be disinterested. Let us now see how afar Mrs. Barrington has a right to speak about partial and superficial criticism. There are only a few artists mentioned, the great ones, Watts, Burne-Jones, and Rossetti, all representative of poetical art, and Mrs. Barrington praises them well and with justice; but why should she have, there- fore, thought it necessary to run down Tissot and Legros ? One does not blame Locker because he is not Arnold, or Tennyson because he is not Browning ; we let Burnand write " Happy Thoughts " and George Eliot " Middlemarch," and do not find fault with either, so long as the " Happy Thoughts" make us laugh, and " Middlemarch " makes us think,—both have alike their meaning and their value. Now, it is unjust to speak of Tissot (as Mrs. Barrington does), as if he never painted anything but costume ; it conveys quite a false notion of Tissot's work. In the first place, he paints with almost unequalled skill
effects of sunlight and warm shadow. There was a picture (in the same exhibition as the lady in yellow flounces, which Mrs. Barrington condemns so vehemently) of a child.
standing in shadow, with a sunlit lawn behind her, which was quite wonderfully true to the effect of sunlight; and this alone would remove his work from the class in which Mrs. Barrington puts it. But, again, M. Tissot does far more than this ; his aim has always been to seek the picturesque in modern life, taking modern life as he finds it. If we had to object to his work, it
would be fair to complain of his apparent satisfaction with a, society which is neither thorough nor sincere, but it is quite unfair to give the impression that his work has no meaning.
It has such meaning as modern life can give it when viewed. in its society aspect, and so it is a true work of its kind. And then, of M. Legros, Mrs. Barrington tells us to look at a head by Bellini and one by Legros, and thick of the difference. But there is really no ground for comparison. The heads to which this lady alludes as having been done- with as few touches and in as short a time as possible, were not done as pictures at all (as she must, if she knows anything of the subject, be aware), but were mere studies, executed before the students in the Slade School, for the purpose of showing them what might be done from the living model in the course of two hours. In fact, the way to work at speed was all they pro- fessed to show, and the present writer, who has had the pleasure of studying under M. Legros and seeing his work, considers that they did show it very successfully. But what can we think of the impartiality which contrasts a finished pic- ture with a hurried study executed for a special purpose ? But Mrs. Barrington goes very much farther in mis-statement than this, for she says on page 725, " Still, even the admirers of their work cannot pretend that it produces any food for thought or emotion, save that for admiration of technical skill." This statement, as far as it refers to Legros, can be shown to be per- fectly erroneous and unjustifiable. It is not even necessary to go to M. Legros' pictures to refute it, nor will we quote our own or any other " newspaper criticism," but refer Mrs. Barrington to the remarks upon " La Mort d'un Vagabond," made by Heathcote Statham, in the Fortnightly Review, some two years since. Indeed, when M. Legros is dealing with the lives and deaths of the poor, his pictures are almost invariably sugges- tive and thoughtful. " Le R epos des Pauvres " and " Le• Chaudronnier," both exhibited in the Grosvenor Gallery, were pictures whose only fault appeared to us to be their excessively sombre tone of colour and neglect of all pictorial at- tractions, in order to dwell more strongly on the leading thought. Of such kind, too, are the various pictures of church interiors which this artist has painted. For, in no sense of the word, is Legros a popular painter, and never could be popular. He' looks habitually in his pictures on the " grey side of life ;" its miseries and hard struggles attract him, rather than its sun- shine and gay dresses, and indeed, he may almost be said to form the exact antitype of Tissot, representing the inward miseries, as the former does the outward attractions, of civilisa- tion.
Previous page
