THE FIELD OF ART

ART IN THE SCHOOLS—FIRST CONSIDERATIONS.

IT is not this year for the first time that the Regents of the University of New York State have prepared valuable photographs for distribution among the schools of the State. Now, however, there comes a "tentative list" of similar photographs, and this brings up in a forcible way the old question, whether there is any such thing possible as teaching art in the schools, and if so, how it may best be undertaken.

Some preliminary definitions seem to be required, however. The question as to the fitness of the photograph for this purpose is nearly always stated, as if the graphic and plastic arts were expressible in terms of the literary art. Unfortunately, this is not true at all. Indeed, the student of those arts of non-literary expression is apt to go rather too far in asserting the falsity of it.

When the student first perceives clearly that each of the fine arts differs very widely from all the others, he is very apt to assume too much importance for his own differentiation of those arts. He sees such striking differences that he ignores resemblances and similarities; or he is very ready to do so. It is evident to him that the piece of literature needs a subject of the nature of narrative, or description, or exhortation, or prayer, or jest, and that the dignity or meanness of the subject has much to do with the artistical result. Then it appears to him that music requires no subject of that character; that music goes to work in another way and addresses the spirit of man, not by relating or describing, not by appeals to morals or to memory. He hardly disputes Arnold's dictum that poetry is "a criticism of life;" referring only to the same author's explanation of criticism and to the further elucidation of the thought which is contained in the phrases "We turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us;" but he reflects that he would be a rash critic who should try to judge any piece of music in that way. This is clear to the mind of the student; but still he ponders over the graphic arts, over sculpture and painting, in all their forms, wondering why those arts seem to him half-way between literature and music, having less to do with preaching or portraiture than the one, and more, it seems, than the other. He finds that painters are more concerned with light and shade, and also more busy with composition and the leading lines and, again, more thoughtful of bringing whites prettily together, than they are of telling any story or influencing any person's conduct. And the sculptors are concerned with dignity of form, and care as little about whether they deal with piety or with passion as do the musical composers.

He reflects upon architecture, too, if his imagination and memory take him so far out of the present time that architecture seems to him a fine art at all; and he asks: What is the "subject" of that work of art which exists in the interior of Aya Sophia, and which one sees as he enters it by the Porta Basilica? It is, indeed, not surprising that some writers are always at work, comparing architecture and music. Suppose that one were to try to give in words that impressive effect of the inside of the great church. He would have either to describe the effect produced upon him, thus translating from one language into another, or he would have so to combine thoughts, expressed in words, as to give the same impression of awe-inspiring dignity, mingled with grace, with charm, with what one might call suavity. In order to produce this effect upon the reader of a prose passage or a piece of verse, the writer would have to take a subject other than that afforded by the mere description of a building. In other words, he could not translate; the language would break down under him; he could not give the same impression in the language of words which the artist has given in the language of space, of masses, of delicate tones, of light and shade. And he would recall the fact that the time was when Aya Sophia gave also an impression of soft blooming color, of which now only a slight indication remains.

It is not then essential that the work of art in architecture should have a subject in the sense in which the work of art in literature must have a subject. Unless our logic is too rapid for us, it would seem that the same rule must apply in the case of any comparison between two of the fine arts, and that it does not follow from the need of a subject in literature, as of narrative in one poem, of description in another, of patriotism, mingled with exhortation to courage, in a third, and so on, that a painting must needs have similar subject. And the first painting that the student meets as he enters a gallery of pictures will very likely be a landscape, and he will at once see that in this picture there is no narration, no morality, no piety, no appeal to the spirit—nothing but description, and a description admittedly so slight and cursory, so deliberately incomplete, that it may almost be dismissed as not of weight in the consideration of the picture's value. And yet a picture must represent something natural, something tangible; it cannot go straight to the emotions as music can, but has to act through memory and knowledge. And the student is left wondering, as we found him wondering a few lines above, whether painting be, indeed, half-way between music and literature in requiring less subject of the kind that is not merely artistic than the one art, and more than the other.

II

The question is rather What is the practice of the artist than What ought to be the practice of the artist. When, in some future epoch of thought, these questions about fine art shall be more generally understood by the writers and thinkers than they now are, it may become possible for some Ruskin of the future to preach an acceptable creed as to the proper mission of the artist; but it has not been possible for the Ruskins of the past or of the present to do so, simply because they have failed to understand the conditions under which the artist does his work. There is very little use in exhorting a man to better things until you are able to sympathize with what he is already engaged upon. Now, it requires but a limited observation of artists to ascertain that they are little occupied in narration, in description, in preaching, in devotion, or in jesting; but a very long continued and minute observance of their ways will leave the beholder in the same mind about these, and more and more convinced that artists are chiefly occupied in producing works of art and nothing else. And what are the works of art which they are trying to produce? In the matter of painting, which is our present subject, it is unfortunate that the word impression has been used in a special sense as describing the way of work of a certain special body of painters, because it more accurately described the way in which most painters work than any other single word will suggest it. The object of the landscape-painter is commonly to paint something upon his canvas which will convey to the spectator an impression which he, the landscape-painter, has already received from external nature. That impression may have come upon him during the watches of the night, as he thought about what he had seen by day; or it may have come upon him instantaneously as he faced a piece of hill-side with trees, or a single old tree. Suppose it even to be a sunset sky, with miles of ocean illuminated by the colored fire above; it is with no hope of adequately representing that sea and sky that he sits down to paint, but he proposes to paint an impression which that sea and sky have made upon his sensitive mind, and which he thinks will be interesting when painted. That, then, is the landscape-painter's subject. Not the whole truth, nor even any essential part of the truth, about a hay-stack or a mountain-range, but an interesting artistic impression made upon the artist's mind by the hay-stack or the mountain-range. Here, as in literature, there are nobler subjects and less noble subjects; but here much less than in literature is the nobility of the work of art affected by the nobility of the subject. In two pictures by Homer Martin, one represents the stretch of an Adirondack lake, with mountain and forest and a great wealth of varied cloud-form in the sky above; while the other represents only the ridge of a hill seen from a point so low that the ridge cuts the sky and nothing else is seen against the sky but the tops of a few trees which grow on the farther slope. It is impossible to say which of the two pictures is the nobler. The bigger and fuller picture may, indeed, be a greater work of art than the smaller one could ever be, and yet that is so very small a fact! What the artist has done is, first, to make a design out of the material afforded him by a broad landscape and the varied sky, and in the other instance to make a design out of a monotonous grassy slope, a few tree-tops, left unaccounted for except by the beholder's intelligence, and a very uniform gray firmament beyond. Who shall say which is the nobler design of the two?

Mr. George Moore has published an essay well worthy of consideration, in which he undertakes to show that the "failure of the nineteenth century" in painting is that it has assumed the necessity of taking a subject in the literary sense, in the moral sense, in the sense of those frequenters of picture-galleries who prefer the picture which is to them the most like a novel, or a pathetic poem in words. The assumption is, and it is certainly a safe one, that those persons who are attracted to these pictures in order that they may study archæology or feel a religious thrill, or be made curious and inclined to look up the facts in either story, or, finally, to feel the domestic pathos of the scene at the sick child's bedside—those students of art are on the wrong track, and will never discover what, in most cases, the painter is after when he paints a picture. Italian art and Dutch art had died before "the subject" had appeared, and it was not until the end of the eighteenth century that this evil thing "really began to make itself felt, and like the potato blight, it soon became clear that it had come to stay." And the conclusion is that if the painter would now produce pictures worthy of himself he must reject the temptation to attract spectators by tickling their feelings or showing off his learning, and must paint pictures with painter's subjects only.

III

The argument continually carries us away into a seeming denial to the graphic arts of all subject of any sort other than the painter's subject pure and simple, that is to say, form expressed on a flat surface, light and shade, tints and gradations, and color. And yet we cannot be quite satisfied with this conclusion in view of the fact that the great painters of the past, the men whom Mr. Moore cites throughout his article named above as regardless of "the subject in the modern sense," still painted humanity, and that with interest. The thought expressed in the discussion given above, if it stands alone and by itself, is likely to mislead the student in this way, that he will suppose that the artist in color or light and shade is indifferent to human interest. But this is not exactly so, and an anecdote, nothing in itself, may illustrate this fact. It is only a few days ago that a certain wide reader, one who has much knowledge of men and of affairs, a traveller, too, and a student, but an artist always and primarily, an artist of forty years' constant practice, meditation, and severe training, alone with a friend, was talking to him of Mr. Kipling's recent poem about the torpedo-boats, and the destruction of the enemy's ships by night—and, as this seemed to interest neither party very much, our artist's friend turned to that other poem of Mr. Kipling's which begins with the couplet:

To the second poem the instantaneous response was made that that indeed was worth reading, that there was human interest in that. Now, this remark would have been of no special value to our present argument had it come from the lips of a literary man, or of a sociologist, a philanthropist, or what you please, except the man who did actually say it, namely, an artist with the brush and with colors. That this painter, living almost exclusively the life of a painter, should have felt the need of human interest in the one case and the presence of it, even in the rough soldiering and coarse-grained emotions of the other, is notable, in a way. But observe that the comment was made upon two poems and not upon two paintings. Had the same two subjects been painted, the case might have been very different, because the picture of the great fleet and the destroying torpedo-boats might have been immeasurably more powerful from every point of view from which a picture should be judged than the picture which would illustrate the incident on the battle-field.

What those two lines in the poem express, and express well for a piece of wording, the picture might easily make a principal incident and a principal part of its subject—its artistical subject. The blaze of the search-lights half illuminating the ocean and leaving the rest of it the darker by contrast, while the fatal torpedo-boat eludes the light and is dimly recognized by the path it has drawn of ripples and foam which themselves catch what little light is diffused through the damp atmosphere from the white beams which pierce the darkness; all this would be a picture, and this which is here described would be the sufficient subject of the picture. On the other hand, the battle-field scene might easily be the stupidest thing possible; red uniforms, with dust and horses of several colors, the gleam of light on the guns and accoutrements; all of this is artistic subject, indeed, but it is of the slightest and most commonplace kind, and unless treated with wonderful technical skill, would fail to command much respect. Unquestionably, the "human interest," if strongly felt by the painter in this case, might be effective to give personality to the driver, to the driver's brother, and even to the slaughtered horse, and a dramatic composition might possibly be made out of that which, in almost any painter's hands, would become a mere narrative picture of the kind most commonly in evidence and most to be deprecated.

And yet there is "human interest" to be found in pictures which are none the worse for having it. The discussion of these is simply the most difficult task that is set to one who would write about the art of painting. Let us take Paul Baudry's picture of Charlotte Corday. The scene is a very small room with a low dado for the protection of the wall, as befits a bath-room. On the left is the bath-tub with high straight sides, and filled with the sheet, the fond de bain, so commonly in use even now on the continent of Europe. Beside the bath-tub, a rough wooden box has been "up-ended" and carries, like a little table, an old-fashioned round ink-stand, a sheet of paper, and a quill pen. A short plank which has been lying across the foot of the bath-tub has tipped into the tub, carrying with it some sheets of paper. A chair which has been standing by the side of the bath-tub is overset. With the chair has fallen a garment which still partly covers it; and a plumed hat fills the extreme right-hand lower corner of the picture. A map of France, as large as the wall of the small chamber allows, hangs opposite to the spectator and to the eye of the person occupying the bath-tub. The well-known facts are that Marat, while following the prescription of his physicians and taking the long-continued bath prescribed, was occupied in writing, and that Charlotte Corday, on her persistent demand, was admitted that she might lodge with him some complaint, and that she then stabbed him to the heart. Of the dying or the dead Marat, nothing is seen but the foreshortened face, one shoulder, and the long bare arms; the handle of the deadly knife projects and is relieved against the livid flesh. The resolute woman stands against the window-jamb, and in full light, relieved by her own and the wall's shadow cast upon the map and the dado behind. Her figure is tall and massive; she is dressed in a gown with strongly marked stripes and wears a voluminously folded handkerchief around her shoulders and neck; her hair is loosened; her figure dominates the picture and seems to reduce everything else to an accessory. The face of the slayer is set, as if with the resolution she has just acted on, and with terror as to what is now to follow. The eyes are wide open and the action of the right hand, with clenched fingers, shows how, in relinquishing the haft of the knife, the muscles have convulsively closed again as if it were still retained by their clutch.

The thing to observe here is the presence of the human interest demanded, and that in a very concentrated form, indeed; but also the relatively larger value of the artistic language in which the story has been told, and of the smaller value, relatively, of the human interest itself. Let us admit that the picture is a nobler work of art because of this expression of human interest—the striking down of the tyrant, the momentary victory of the heroine, the approaching cruel punishment of that heroine—patience, resignation, resolution, patriotism, and just enough of questioning as to the glory and value of the great French Revolution. All this, which in a poem would be insisted on, dwelt upon, which would form the one "subject" of the work of art, here, in the picture, forms but a part of the subject, and in the opinion of every artist, the inferior, secondary part. The chief subject is, after all, form, line and mass, light and shade, and color. The result is better for having the human interest; the work of art is nobler than if the same light and shade and color were investing walls and draperies where no human interest existed; and the conclusion seems to be that what is valuable in the picture is primarily the two human beings as visible objects, and the strong contrast between them in their represented action, their pose, their coloring—that is, in the outward aspect of their life; and, secondly, the organized light and shade of which these human figures form the chief and ruling part. And the lesson to learn seems to be that the language of painting is so immensely more important, relatively, than the language of literature, that the rules of judgment, applied to the one art, fail lamentably when they are tried upon the other.

R. S.