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Reviews
A ‘JOLLY’ ART CRITIC
(Pall Mall Gazette, November 18, 1886.)
There is a healthy bank-holiday atmosphere about this book which is extremely pleasant. Mr. Quilter is entirely free from affectation of any kind. He rollicks through art with the recklessness of the tourist and describes its beauties with the enthusiasm of the auctioneer. To many, no doubt, he will seem to be somewhat blatant and bumptious, but we prefer to regard him as being simply British. Mr. Quilter is the apostle of the middle classes, and we are glad to welcome his gospel. After listening so long to the Don Quixote of art, to listen once to Sancho Panza is both salutary and refreshing.
As for his Sententiæ, they differ very widely in character and subject. Some of them are ethical, such as ‘Humility may be carried too far’; some literary, as ‘For one Froude there are a thousand Mrs. Markhams’; and some scientific, as ‘Objects which are near display more detail than those which are further off.’ Some, again, breathe a fine spirit of optimism, as ‘Picturesqueness is the birthright of the bargee’; others are jubilant, as ‘Paint firm and be jolly’; and many are purely autobiographical, such as No. 97, ‘Few of us understand what it is that we mean by Art.’ Nor is Mr. Quilter’s manner less interesting than his matter. He tells us that at this festive season of the year, with Christmas and roast beef looming before us, ‘Similes drawn from eating and its results occur most readily to the mind.’ So he announces that ‘Subject is the diet of painting,’ that ‘Perspective is the bread of art,’ and that ‘Beauty is in some way like jam’; drawings, he points out, ‘are not made by recipe like puddings,’ nor is art composed of ‘suet, raisins, and candied peel,’ though Mr. Cecil Lawson’s landscapes do ‘smack of indigestion.’ Occasionally, it is true, he makes daring excursions into other realms of fancy, as when he says that ‘in the best Reynolds landscapes, one seems to smell the sawdust,’ or that ‘advance in art is of a kangaroo character’; but, on the whole, he is happiest in his eating similes, and the secret of his style is evidently ‘La métaphore vient en mangeant.’
About artists and their work Mr. Quilter has, of course, a great deal to say. Sculpture he regards as ‘Painting’s poor relation’; so, with the exception of a jaunty allusion to the ‘rough modelling’ of Tanagra figurines he hardly refers at all to the plastic arts; but on painters he writes with much vigour and joviality. Holbein’s wonderful Court portraits naturally do not give him much pleasure; in fact, he compares them as works of art to the sham series of Scottish kings at Holyrood; but Doré, he tells us, had a wider imaginative range in all subjects where the gloomy and the terrible played leading parts than probably any artist who ever lived, and may be called ‘the Carlyle of artists.’ In Gainsborough he sees ‘a plainness almost amounting to brutality,’ while ‘vulgarity and snobbishness’ are the chief qualities he finds in Sir Joshua Reynolds. He has grave doubts whether Sir Frederick Leighton’s work is really ‘Greek, after all,’ and can discover in it but little of ‘rocky Ithaca.’ Mr. Poynter, however, is a cart-horse compared to the President, and Frederick Walker was ‘a dull Greek’ because he had no ‘sympathy with poetry.’ Linnell’s pictures, are ‘a sort of “Up, Guards, and at ’em” paintings,’ and Mason’s exquisite idylls are ‘as national as a Jingo poem’! Mr. Birket Foster’s landscapes ‘smile at one much in the same way that Mr. Carker used to “flash his teeth,”’ and Mr. John Collier gives his sitter ‘a cheerful slap on the back, before he says, like a shampooer in a Turkish bath, “Next man!” Mr. Herkomer’s art is, ‘if not a catch-penny art, at all events a catch-many-pounds art,’ and Mr. W. B. Richmond is a ‘clever trifler,’ who ‘might do really good work’ ‘if he would employ his time in learning to paint.’ It is obviously unnecessary for us to point out how luminous these criticisms are, how delicate in expression. The remarks on Sir Joshua Reynolds alone exemplify the truth of Sententia No. 19, ‘From a picture we gain but little more than we bring.’ On the general principles of art Mr. Quilter writes with equal lucidity. That there is a difference between colour and colours, that an artist, be he portrait-painter or dramatist, always reveals himself in his manner, are ideas that can hardly be said to occur to him; but Mr. Quilter really does his best and bravely faces every difficulty in modern art, with the exception of Mr. Whistler. Painting, he tells us, is ‘of a different quality to mathematics,’ and finish in art is ‘adding more fact’! Portrait painting is a bad pursuit for an emotional artist as it destroys his personality and his sympathy; however, even for the emotional artist there is hope, as a portrait can be converted into a picture ‘by adding to the likeness of the sitter some dramatic interest or some picturesque adjunct’! As for etchings, they are of two kinds – British and foreign. The latter fail in ‘propriety.’ Yet, ‘really fine etching is as free and easy as is the chat between old chums at midnight over a smoking-room fire.’ Consonant with these rollicking views of art is Mr. Quilter’s healthy admiration for ‘the three primary colours: red, blue, and yellow.’ Any one, he points out, ‘can paint in good tone who paints only in black and white,’ and ‘the great sign of a good decorator’ is ‘his capability of doing without neutral tints.’ Indeed, on decoration Mr. Quilter is almost eloquent. He laments most bitterly the divorce that has been made between decorative art and ‘what we usually call “pictures,”’ makes the customary appeal to the Last Judgment, and reminds us that in the great days of art Michael Angelo was the ‘furnishing upholsterer.’ With the present tendencies of decorative art in England Mr. Quilter, consequently, has but little sympathy, and he makes a gallant appeal to the British householder to stand no more nonsense. Let the honest fellow, he says, on his return from his counting-house tear down the Persian hangings, put a chop on the Anatolian plate, mix some toddy in the Venetian glass, and carry his wife off to the National Gallery to look at ‘our own Mulready’! And then the picture he draws of the ideal home, where everything, though ugly, is hallowed by domestic memories, and where beauty appeals not to the heartless eye but the family affections; ‘baby’s chair there, and the mother’s work-basket.. near the fire, and the ornaments Fred brought home from India on the mantel-board’! It is really impossible not to be touched by so charming a description. How valuable, also, in connection with house decoration is Sententia No. 351, ‘There is nothing furnishes a room like a bookcase, and plenty of books in it.’ How cultivated the mind that thus raises literature to the position of upholstery and puts thought on a level with the antimacassar!
And, finally, for the young workers in art Mr. Quilter has loud words of encouragement. With a sympathy that is absolutely reckless of grammar, he knows from experience ‘what an amount of study and mental strain are involved in painting a bad picture honestly’; he exhorts them (Sententia No. 267) to ‘go on quite bravely and sincerely making mess after mess from Nature,’ and while sternly warning them that there is something wrong if they do not ‘feel washed out after each drawing,’ he still urges them to ‘put a new piece of goods in the window’ every morning. In fact, he is quite severe on Mr. Ruskin for not recognising that ‘a picture should denote the frailty of man,’ and remarks with pleasing courtesy and felicitous grace that ‘many phases of feeling.. are as much a dead letter to this great art teacher, as Sanskrit to an Islington cabman.’ Nor is Mr. Quilter one of those who fails to practice what he preaches. Far from it. He goes on quite bravely and sincerely making mess after mess from literature, and misquotes Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Alfred de Musset, Mr. Matthew Arnold, Mr. Swinburne, and Mr. Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat, in strict accordance with Sententia No. 251, which tells us that ‘Work must be abominable if it is ever going to be good.’ Only, unfortunately, his own work never does get good. Not content with his misquotations, he misspells the names of such well-known painters as Madox-Brown, Bastien Lepage and Meissonier, hesitates between Ingrès and Ingres, talks of Mr. Millais and Mr. Linton, alludes to Mr. Frank Holl simply as ‘Hall,’ speaks with easy familiarity of Mr. Burne-Jones as ‘Jones,’ and writes of the artist whom he calls ‘old Chrome’ with an affection that reminds us of Mr. Tulliver’s love for Jeremy Taylor. On the whole, the book will not do. We fully admit that it is extremely amusing and, no doubt, Mr. Quilter is quite earnest in his endeavours to elevate art to the dignity of manual labour, but the extraordinary vulgarity of the style alone will always be sufficient to prevent these Sententiæ Artis from being anything more than curiosities of literature. Mr. Quilter has missed his chance; for he has failed even to make himself the Tupper of Painting.
Sententiæ: Artis: First Principles of Art for Painters and Picture Lovers. By Harry Quilter, M.A. (Isbister.)
[A reply to this review appeared on November 23.]
A SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY THROUGH LITERATURE
(Pall Mall Gazette, December 1, 1886.)
This is undoubtedly an interesting book, not merely through its eloquence and earnestness, but also through the wonderful catholicity of taste that it displays. Mr. Noel has a passion for panegyric. His eulogy on Keats is closely followed by a eulogy on Whitman, and his praise of Lord Tennyson is equalled only by his praise of Mr. Robert Buchanan. Sometimes, we admit, we would like a little more fineness of discrimination, a little more delicacy of perception. Sincerity of utterance is valuable in a critic, but sanity of judgment is more valuable still, and Mr. Noel’s judgments are not always distinguished by their sobriety. Many of the essays, however, are well worth reading. The best is certainly that on The Poetic Interpretation of Nature, in which Mr. Noel claims that what is called by Mr. Ruskin the ‘pathetic fallacy of literature’ is in reality a vital emotional truth; but the essays on Hugo and Mr. Browning are good also; the little paper entitled Rambles by the Cornish Seas is a real marvel of delightful description, and the monograph on Chatterton has a good deal of merit, though we must protest very strongly against Mr. Noel’s idea that Chatterton must be modernised before he can be appreciated. Mr. Noel has absolutely no right whatsoever to alter Chatterton’s’ yonge damoyselles’ and ‘anlace fell’ into ‘youthful damsels’ and ‘weapon fell,’ for Chatterton’s archaisms were an essential part of his inspiration and his method. Mr. Noel in one of his essays speaks with much severity of those who prefer sound to sense in poetry and, no doubt, this is a very wicked thing to do; but he himself is guilty of a much graver sin against art when, in his desire to emphasise the meaning of Chatterton, he destroys Chatterton’s music. In the modernised version he gives of the wonderful Songe to Ælla, he mars by his corrections the poem’s metrical beauty, ruins the rhymes and robs the music of its echo. Nineteenth-century restorations have done quite enough harm to English architecture without English poetry being treated in the same manner, and we hope that when Mr. Noel writes again about Chatterton he will quote from the poet’s verse, not from a publisher’s version.
This, however, is not by any means the chief blot on Mr. Noel’s book. The fault of his book is that it tells us far more about his own personal feelings than it does about the qualities of the various works of art that are criticised. It is in fact a diary of the emotions suggested by literature, rather than any real addition to literary criticism, and we fancy that many of the poets about whom he writes so eloquently would be not a little surprised at the qualities he finds in their work. Byron, for instance, who spoke with such contempt of what he called ‘twaddling about trees and babbling o’ green fields’; Byron who cried, ‘Away with this cant about nature! A good poet can imbue a pack of cards with more poetry than inhabits the forests of America,’ is claimed by Mr. Noel as a true nature-worshipper and Pantheist along with Wordsworth and Shelley; and we wonder what Keats would have thought of a critic who gravely suggests that Endymion is ‘a parable of the development of the individual soul.’ There are two ways of misunderstanding a poem. One is to misunderstand it and the other to praise it for qualities that it does not possess. The latter is Mr. Noel’s method, and in his anxiety to glorify the artist he often does so at the expense of the work of art.
Mr. Noel also is constantly the victim of his own eloquence. So facile is his style that it constantly betrays him into crude and extravagant statements. Rhetoric and over-emphasis are the dangers that Mr. Noel has not always succeeded in avoiding. It is extravagant, for instance, to say that all great poetry has been ‘pictorial,’ or that Coleridge’s Knight’s Grave is worth many Kubla Khans, or that Byron has ‘the splendid imperfection of an Æschylus,’ or that we had lately ‘one dramatist living in England, and only one, who could be compared to Hugo, and that was Richard Hengist Horne,’ and that ‘to find an English dramatist of the same order before him we must go back to Sheridan if not to Otway.’ Mr. Noel, again, has a curious habit of classing together the most incongruous names and comparing the most incongruous works of art. What is gained by telling us that ‘Sardanapalus’ is perhaps hardly equal to ‘Sheridan,’ that Lord Tennyson’s ballad of The Revenge and his Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington are worthy of a place beside Thomson’s Rule Britannia, that Edgar Allan Poe, Disraeli and Mr. Alfred Austin are artists of note whom we may affiliate on Byron, and that if Sappho and Milton ‘had not high genius, they would be justly reproached as sensational’? And surely it is a crude judgment that classes Baudelaire, of all poets, with Marini and mediæval troubadours, and a crude style that writes of ‘Goethe, Shelley, Scott, and Wilson,’ for a mortal should not thus intrude upon the immortals, even though he be guilty of holding with them that Cain is ‘one of the finest poems in the English language.’ It is only fair, however, to add that Mr. Noel subsequently makes more than ample amends for having opened Parnassus to the public in this reckless manner, by calling Wilson an ‘offal-feeder,’ on the ground that he once wrote a severe criticism of some of Lord Tennyson’s early poems. For Mr. Noel does not mince his words. On the contrary, he speaks with much scorn of all euphuism and delicacy of expression and, preferring the affectation of nature to the affectation of art, he thinks nothing of calling other people ‘Laura Bridgmans,’ ‘Jackasses’ and the like. This, we think, is to be regretted, especially in a writer so cultured as Mr. Noel. For, though indignation may make a great poet, bad temper always makes a poor critic.
On the whole, Mr. Noel’s book has an emotional rather than an intellectual interest. It is simply a record of the moods of a man of letters, and its criticisms merely reveal the critic without illuminating what he would criticise for us. The best that we can say of it is that it is a Sentimental Journey through Literature, the worst that any one could say of it is that it has all the merits of such an expedition.
Essays on Poetry and Poets. By the Hon. Roden Noel. (Kegan Paul.)
COMMON-SENSE IN ART
(Pall Mall Gazette, January 8, 1887.)
At this critical moment in the artistic development of England Mr. John Collier has come forward as the champion of common-sense in art. It will be remembered that Mr. Quilter, in one of his most vivid and picturesque metaphors, compared Mr. Collier’s method as a painter to that of a shampooer in a Turkish bath. 1 As a writer Mr. Collier is no less interesting. It is true that he is not eloquent, but then he censures with just severity ‘the meaningless eloquence of the writers on æsthetics’; we admit that he is not subtle, but then he is careful to remind us that Leonardo da Vinci’s views on painting are nonsensical; his qualities are of a solid, indeed we may say of a stolid order; he is thoroughly honest, sturdy and downright, and he advises us, if we want to know anything about art, to study the works of ‘Helmholtz, Stokes, or Tyndall,’ to which we hope we may be allowed to add Mr. Collier’s own Manual of Oil Painting.
For this art of painting is a very simple thing indeed, according to Mr. Collier. It consists merely in the ‘representation of natural objects by means of pigments on a flat surface.’ There is nothing, he tells us, ‘so very mysterious’ in it after all. ‘Every natural object appears to us as a sort of pattern of different shades and colours,’ and ‘the task of the artist is so to arrange his shades and colours on his canvas that a similar pattern is produced.’ This is obviously pure common-sense, and it is clear that art-definitions of this character can be comprehended by the very meanest capacity and, indeed, may be said to appeal to it. For the perfect development, however, of this pattern-producing faculty a severe training is necessary. The art student must begin by painting china, crockery, and ‘still life’ generally. He should rule his straight lines and employ actual measurements wherever it is possible. He will also find that a plumb-line comes in very useful. Then he should proceed to Greek sculpture, for from pottery to Phidias is only one step. Ultimately he will arrive at the living model, and as soon as he can ‘faithfully represent any object that he has before him’ he is a painter. After this there is, of course, only one thing to be considered, the important question of subject. Subjects, Mr. Collier tells us, are of two kinds, ancient and modern. Modern subjects are more healthy than ancient subjects, but the real difficulty of modernity in art is that the artist passes his life with respectable people, and that respectable people are unpictorial. ‘For picturesqueness,’ consequently, he should go to ‘the rural poor,’ and for pathos to the London slums. Ancient subjects offer the artist a very much wider field. If he is fond of ‘rich stuffs and costly accessories’ he should study the Middle Ages; if he wishes to paint beautiful people, ‘untrammelled by any considerations of historical accuracy,’ he should turn to the Greek and Roman mythology; and if he is a ‘mediocre painter,’ he should choose his ‘subject from the Old and New Testament,’ a recommendation, by the way, that many of our Royal Academicians seem already to have carried out. To paint a real historical picture one requires the assistance of a theatrical costumier and a photographer. From the former one hires the dresses and the latter supplies one with the true background. Besides subject-pictures there are also portraits and landscapes. Portrait painting, Mr. Collier tells us, ‘makes no demands on the imagination.’ As is the sitter, so is the work of art. If the sitter be commonplace, for instance, it would be ‘contrary to the fundamental principles of portraiture to make the picture other than commonplace.’ There are, however, certain rules that should be followed. One of the most important of these is that the artist should always consult his sitter’s relations before he begins the picture. If they want a profile he must do them a profile; if they require a full face he must give them a full face; and he should be careful also to get their opinion as to the costume the sitter should wear and ‘the sort of expression he should put on.’ ‘After all,’ says Mr. Collier pathetically, ‘it is they who have to live with the picture.’
Besides the difficulty of pleasing the victim’s family, however, there is the difficulty of pleasing the victim. According to Mr. Collier, and he is, of course, a high authority on the matter, portrait painters bore their sitters very much. The true artist consequently should encourage his sitter to converse, or get some one to read to him; for if the sitter is bored the portrait will look sad. Still, if the sitter has not got an amiable expression naturally the artist is not bound to give him one, nor ‘if he is essentially ungraceful’ should the artist ever ‘put him in a graceful attitude.’ As regards landscape painting, Mr. Collier tells us that ‘a great deal of nonsense has been talked about the impossibility of reproducing nature,’ but that there is nothing really to prevent a picture giving to the eye exactly the same impression that an actual scene gives, for that when he visited ‘the celebrated panorama of the Siege of Paris’ he could hardly distinguish the painted from the real cannons! The whole passage is extremely interesting, and is really one out of many examples we might give of the swift and simple manner in which the common-sense method solves the great problems of art. The book concludes with a detailed exposition of the undulatory theory of light according to the most ancient scientific discoveries. Mr. Collier points out how important it is for an artist to hold sound views on the subject of ether waves, and his own thorough appreciation of Science may be estimated by the definition he gives of it as being ‘neither more nor less than knowledge.’
Mr. Collier has done his work with much industry and earnestness. Indeed, nothing but the most conscientious seriousness, combined with real labour, could have produced such a book, and the exact value of common-sense in art has never before been so clearly demonstrated.
A Manual of Oil Painting. By the Hon. John Collier. (Cassell and Co.)
