French & English

In both music and drawing the French have shown themselves far better educators than in languages. Their ways of teaching drawing are especially marked by seriousness, by the discouragement of false, ignorant, and premature finish, by the wise use of simple and common materials, and by the consistent aim at sound knowledge rather than vain display. As the French have taught painting and sculpture they are both most serious pursuits; I mean that, if the French may often have been frivolous in the subsequent employment of their knowledge, they were assuredly not frivolous in the acquisition of it. For them the fine arts have been a discipline, a culture that has penetrated beyond the artist class.

The seriousness of French teaching has been accompanied by an admirable disinterestedness. Artists of the highest reputation, every hour of whose time was valuable, have been willing to undertake the direction of private schools of painting on terms that barely paid the rent of the studio and the hire of models. There they have given the most sincere and kindly advice to hundreds of students, both Frenchmen and foreigners, from whom they had nothing to expect but a little gratitude, and, perhaps, the reflected honour of having aided one or two youths of genius amidst a crowd of mediocrities.

In England this kind of teaching is all but unknown, yet a certain culture of the faculties by means of drawing is incomparably more general than it was in the beginning of the century. The total number of “persons taught drawing, painting, or modelling through the agency of the Science and Art Department” is now approaching a million, and this independently of the considerable numbers of young English people who study art privately or in other schools. The result of this culture is already plainly visible in the wonderful improvement of English taste and skill in everything that art can influence, an improvement that nobody could have foreseen in the first half of the present century.

In France, too, great efforts have been made to spread a knowledge of sound elementary drawing amongst the people. It is now a part of the regular course of education for the middle classes in the lycées, and there are cheap public drawing schools all over the country. In England this is a new enterprise, in France it is an attempt to recover lost ground; as the French workmen of the eighteenth century were certainly more artistic than their successors, and must have understood design more thoroughly. Even in the Middle Ages, as we know from the excellence of the work left to us, the common workmen cannot have been ignorant of art.

The real motive for this modern increase in art-culture is not the disinterested love of art, it is the desire for commercial success. France and England are not now really artistic nations. In the French provincial cities the modern buildings, which are so rapidly replacing what remains of the mediæval ones, display, as a rule, no artistic invention whatever, and if the English people were suddenly to awake one morning with an artist’s passion for the beautiful they would not be able to endure the prevalent ugliness of their towns. Still, though the nations are not artistic, both races produce exceptional persons who are so, and these are allowed to have their own way more than formerly in the warfare that they wage against the hideous or the commonplace. Their argument in favour of the beautiful is the very simple one that it makes life pleasanter and, so far, happier, and in some of them this argument takes the kindly form of desiring, especially, to make beautiful things accessible to the poor. They might even go further, and affirm that beautiful surroundings are favourable to health, which they certainly are, by ministering to gaiety and cheerfulness and so increasing the charm of life. The perception of this truth would produce a very close alliance between philanthropic and artistic spirits, as we see already in the generous and thoughtful founders of the Manchester Art Museum.

Art education is an attempt to return consciously to conditions of life which have long ago been attained unconsciously and afterwards departed from. There are now many schools of art in Lancashire by way of reaction against the ugliness of the industrial age. There was a time when Lancashire knew neither ugliness nor schools of art. The habitations of the Lancashire people in the sixteenth century, and for some time later, were always artistic, whether magnificent or simple, and so was the furniture inside them. The art was not of an exquisite or an elevated order, but it was art, and it was interesting and picturesque. The beauty of nature, too, was quite unspoiled, and though Lancashire was no more Switzerland than Manchester was Verona, still there was beauty enough in the county for all ordinary human needs; the pastoral valleys were green, the trout-streams pure, and if the skies were often gray it was only with clouds from the sea. The industrial epoch came and destroyed all this; it destroyed the vernacular architecture, it filled the beautiful valleys with the ugliest towns in the world, it fouled both the streams and the sky, it rapidly diminished even the health and beauty of the race. It is the conscious reaction against these evils which has made Lancashire a centre of artistic effort.

In France there has never been the same acute consciousness that modern life was making itself hideous; and, in fact, the conditions of urban life in France, except in certain quarters of Lyons and Marseilles, very rarely approach the melancholy imprisonment of an English manufacturing town. Most of the French towns are comparatively small, the country is easily accessible on all sides, they all have avenues of trees (many of them really magnificent), and those which are situated on the great rivers have spacious and well-built quays, which are the favourite residence and resort. In a word, the difference between urban and rural life is seldom painfully or acutely felt. It is, I believe, a consequence of this comparative pleasantness of French country towns that the artistic life in them is so torpid. Provincial exhibitions are, in France, quite incomparably inferior to English provincial exhibitions. The fine arts are much more successfully cultivated in Manchester and Liverpool than in Rouen or in Lyons. As for the smaller French towns, you find in them here and there an intelligent amateur, here and there a respectable artist, but, by the ordinary French bourgeois, art is not understood, it lies outside of his interests and his thoughts. He can no more appreciate style in painting and sculpture than he can appreciate it in literature. He lives in a country where you can hardly travel fifty miles without meeting with some remnant of noble architecture, and it has been necessary to pass a law to protect what remains against his ignorant spoliation. Contemporary provincial building is, as a rule, only masons’ work, and whenever an old church or a château is in any way meddled with, the chances are that it will be ruined beyond remission. The provincial nobility very rarely give any evidence whatever of artistic culture or attainment. If they attempt anything, the result is poor and incongruous, some pepper-box turret added to the corner of a modern house, or some feeble attempt to imitate the mediæval castle.

It may seem a contradiction to have begun this chapter with hearty praise of French methods in art teaching, and to have continued it with depreciation of French taste, but, in fact, both praise and its opposite are deserved. Paris has maintained the light of art in France. Without Paris, contemporary France would have a very small place in artistic Europe; with Paris it still maintains, though against powerful rivals, a leadership. London has not any comparable influence. Many of the best English Academicians, including the President, have studied their art abroad. The methods of English Academical teaching, which require a minute and trifling finish in mere studies, are a waste of the pupil’s time.

The English race, usually destitute of any artistic faculty or perception, produces exceptional geniuses in quite as great numbers as the French. The faculties that raise art above mere technical cleverness to the region of poetry are not excessively rare in the home of poetry itself. In fact, the English tendency has been to rely upon native gifts too much, to the neglect of handicraft, yet even in artistic handicraft the English have made surprising progress in the thirty years between 1850 and 1880. Their art critics go on repeating the old complaint that there is little above the common level, but the common level itself has risen, and the complaint amounts merely to the truism that exceptional excellence is exceptional.

The attainments of artists are, no doubt, a matter of national concern, as are the accomplishments of all workers; nevertheless, it is still more important, from the intellectual point of view, that art should be understood by many than that it should be dexterously practised by a few. Now, as to this separate question of intelligence concerning the fine arts, I have said elsewhere, and can only repeat, that in Paris it is wonderfully general, but not in the French provinces. Intelligence of that kind is common, without being general, in London, and not very rare in the other great English towns, whilst Edinburgh is incomparably more important as an art-centre than either Lyons or Marseilles. Neither the English nor the French aristocracy has ever, as a body,[10] shown an intelligent interest in art. For some reason that may be connected with the contempt felt by a noblesse for manual labour, the understanding of art seems to belong chiefly to the middle and lower classes, who often find in it a substitute for more expensive pleasures. As for the future, this kind of intelligence is likely to increase widely in the same classes, especially if art is more intimately associated with handicrafts and manufactures.

If I were asked what is the particular difficulty that usually prevents the English from understanding art, I should answer, The extreme energy and activity of their moral sense. They have a sort of moral hunger which tries to satisfy itself in season and out of season. That interferes with their understanding of a pursuit which lies outside of morals. The teaching of their most celebrated art critic, Mr. Ruskin, was joyfully accepted by the English, because it seemed for the first time to place art upon a substantial moral foundation, making truth, industry, conscientiousness, its cardinal virtues. The English imagined, for a time, that they had subordinated the fine arts to their own dominant moral instincts. Painting was to abandon all its tricks and become truthful. It was to represent events as they really occurred, and not so as to make the best pictures, a sacrifice of art to veracity that pleased the innermost British conscience. Again, it was assumed that mere toil in the accurate representation of details was in itself a merit, because industry is meritorious in common occupations. In short, all the moral virtues were placed before art itself, which, in reality, is but accidentally connected with them.

The English love of nature, in itself one of the happiest of all gifts, has not been altogether favourable to the understanding of art. It has led many English people to subordinate the fine arts entirely to nature, as if they were but poor human copies of an unapproachable divine original. In reality the fine arts can only be understood when they are pursued and valued for themselves.

The feebler moral sense of the Parisian mind and its less passionate affection for nature have left it more disengaged and more at liberty to accept art on its own account, as art and nothing more. There is a kind of Paganism which is able to rest content without deep moral problems, and to accept with satisfaction what art has to give without asking for that which it cannot give.

The final word on the subject may be that there is a diversity of ideals, that the English ideal (speaking generally) is moral, and the Parisian ideal artistic.