On art and artists

There is hardly anything which I hate so cordially as opportunistic criticism, which, in respect of phenomena in art-production presented in a noisy and pretentious way, affecting to signify modernity and progress, does not honestly take a side, but with the cunning foresight of the bat in the fable attempts to come to an understanding with both the opposing armies, of the birds and of the mice. Criticism that openly wears the uniform of a pronounced movement in art can be put up with. The enemy of the movement fights the criticism and the movement at the same time. It shares all the fates of its banner; it is in the danger, and it may be in the victory. If the movement for which it carries weapons succumbs, it gets the worst of it too, and experiences the treatment accorded to the vanquished. It has to lay down its weapons of criticism, falls into contempt, and has no longer the possibility of devastating art life, of perplexing artists, and oppressing those who enjoy art. Insufferable, on the other hand, are the clever, the unprejudiced, the eclectics, the smooth civil sneerers who praise, yet with faintness, who blame, yet with a saving clause, who carry in their lips such well-known and rather good phrases as: “Certainly, there is some exaggeration here, but the peculiar style is not to be misjudged”: “It is certainly no finished creation, but the work, nevertheless, contains some promise”: “This is not exactly a work, you know, which one could recommend for imitation, yet there is much to be learnt from it”: “It is the new wine in Goethe’s Faust that is acting so absurdly, but still perhaps it will yield a good vintage.” These people who talk so sweetly are those who really poison the springs of public taste. Thanks to them, movements which ought to stand without the pale of the law enjoy a sort of equal justification, as it were, of the æsthetic, historico-artistic copyright. Their mask of benevolence, justice, and toleration gains them the confidence of the irresolute, who, left to their own feeling, would recognise, at once, in certain works, either a gross impropriety of the shameless sort, or an indubitable manifestation of insanity, yet through the cheap phrases of opportunistic critics, become doubtful of themselves and say: “If such sober-minded scholars as this and that critic constantly find something to recognise in this stuff, I am perhaps wrong to condemn it at once.”

Moderate feelings are much more widespread than extreme feelings. They are the normal product of the nervous system in civilised men; to the great majority of half-coloured, faded grey men subdued colours only are sympathetic; violent and shrill colours may amuse it; but, in its innermost being, it feels instinctively drawn only to the lukewarm ones. It believes them; and on their information, on their irresponsible recommendation, gives to the most openly rascally art-firms the credit through which alone they can hold out for a while.

And these critical warpers of justice are not assailable. They always play an imposing part, and are always right. If an objectionable movement lasts—and there are aberrations which have held their ground for at least a generation—then they triumph modestly, for they have been among its first heralds and have “recognised at once the sound kernel in the first strange shell.” If the imbecility is as such patent to all, and disappears amidst the derisive laughter of the intelligent, they triumph again, only somewhat more self-consciously, for they have “not let themselves be dazzled by novelty, and have pointed out its weaknesses, and worked strenuously at its defeat.” Thus every adventure in art life, every campaign in criticism, be its issue what it may, increases their esteem; and the longer they continue their course, which is so mischievous to the community, the more blindly the multitude yields to their leadership, and the greater devastation they are guilty of through their dishonourable exercise of their office of guardians in matters of art.

I well know how this opportunism in criticism arises. It is the result of the co-operation of the basest and most despicable intellectual qualities. I find its causes in the dull feeling for the beautiful which renders weak and indistinct all reactions from artistic influences, and suffers neither delight nor irritation to arise: in the cowardly fear of man and pitiful adulation, which aims at injuring no one and only thinks of keeping a retreat open for itself; finally in common vanity, which prefers to please a crowd of gaping boobies rather than the select few, and the flattering, though so cheap, reputation of being “very intellectual,” to the responsibility of crude performance of duty. The favourite word by which the opportunistic critics compound with every artistic confidence trick is “development.” If the clairvoyant monitor utters the cry of “decay and degeneracy,” the opportunists reply, “buds of a new and splendid bloom.” They love to appeal to the history of art. That is right. When the Masolinos and Masaccios sprang up, the last pupils of Gaddi and Orcagna whimpered, “Now there is an end of painting.” But what was at an end was Byzantine art filled by Cimabue and Giotto with some fresh life, and what began was the ever glorious Cinquecento. And much nearer to us: when Delacroix emancipated himself from the colour rules of David’s pupils, and broke out into a downright exultation of red and blue and purple; when Corot, Rousseau, and Dupré set homely nature viewed with lyric eyes in the place of Poussin’s classic landscape degenerated into dial painting; then earnest voices likewise accused the innovators of digging the grave of art, and yet we know nowadays that Delacroix and Corot were by no means the wild anarchists which the Academicians held them to be, and that an uninterrupted line of development extends from David and Prudhon through Géricault to Delacroix, and from Nicholas Poussin and Claude Lorrain through Joseph Vernet, and even through Watteau to Corot—a line which was unnoticed by contemporaries, yet one which we now see clearly. It is the dodge of an unscrupulous attorney to quote these examples when treating of the art of a Puvis de Chavannes, an Aman-Jean, the Præ-Raphaelites, pointillistes, vermicellistes, and pipists. There are sure marks of recognition by which the authorised can be distinguished from the unauthorised, the true from the false, development from retrogression, and buds from gall-nuts. A movement which, indeed, resolutely diverges from the taste dominant at a given time, though striving to approach nature, need not, but may, have a future; and he who does not suffer from stiffness in the joints will not, as a matter of course and on principle, refuse to follow it with benevolent curiosity. If, however, the new movement departs from nature, one may confidently say “it leads to nothing.” If an independent method which strives after personal expression reveals itself in a revolutionary effort—however peculiarly, nay, perversely, it might impress—the intelligent man will not condemn, but wait to see if something living comes from the attempt. If the practised eye, however, recognises, in the peculiarity, either a cunning imitation or a cold-blooded, intentional oddity, then one may confidently pronounce the death sentence, for it contains in itself no germs whatever of development. The only two eternal sources of art are, and will be, feeling for nature and personality. Fidelity to nature and honesty produce living creations. Unnaturalness and affectation are marks of decay. He who ever holds fast to these simple dicta will hardly ever run the risk of mistaking a Will-o’-the-Wisp for a lighthouse, or what is morally, if not practically, a more serious error, of treading under foot an insignificant chrysalis with the living and beautiful butterfly it enshrines.

Even of the manifestations of insanity of crack-brained painters, of the hoaxes of tricky strugglers for success, and the whims of childishly immature and childishly careless people living from hand to mouth, who have sprung up in the last two or three decades, the good man’s insinuating word of the “sound kernel,” of the “tendencies, capable of development, to a new blossoming of art,” has been spoken by the opportunistic of critics. Well, time has now given the answer to these verdicts, at any rate in regard to some of the movements for which those prophets so benevolently predicted a glorious future. Fifteen or twenty years ago we saw in the Paris Salon, beside the expressionless fabrications of the usual daubing artisans—the “Mother’s Joys,” the “Young Lady at her Toilet,” the “Oyster with Lemons,” which constitute the stock in trade of all exhibitions of pictures—only two formulæ appear in hundreds of repetitions: the vulgarly realistic, after the style, let us say—to mention a particular name—of Bastien Lepage, that pupil of Cabanel who had degenerated into an apostle of Courbet; and the pseudo-idealistic, after the model of Puvis de Chavannes. Workmen with brutalised countenances and greasy blouses, and unearthly figures in antiquated landscapes of chalky paleness, disputed the visitor’s attention. A concreteness which did not spare us a single finger-nail in mourning, struggled for supremacy with a careless vagueness which styled itself “Abstraction” or “Synthesis” and produced only questionably schematic types. Whole walls exhibited unbroken rows of pictures which reminded us of the spectral ballet of the dead nuns in “Robert the Devil.” Then we came to rooms where an unmixed company of rag-pickers, and night-men exercising their calling, of huzzies on the night-prowl, dung-carting stable-helps, and rapscallions at loggerheads, were quite at home. One of these movements, i.e., painting in faint colours, has hardly a representative left; the other—the art of vulgarity, meanness, and ugliness—only a dwindling few.

Here, then, we have two movements, to which “the intellectuals” have promised a future. One of them is as dead as a door-nail and buried, the other dying. He who did not let himself be cheated, or want to cheat others, could predict this outcome with certainty. Debased realism was a misunderstanding of the impulse towards truth displayed by the Manet School. This School held itself bound in conscience to record minutely even the unessential and the ugly accessories. Their limited imitators sought only that which was ugly and unessential in the world of phenomena. They thereby wandered far from the eternal aim of art—to excite an emotion by a work of art; for the mere imitation of a sight either actually indifferent or frankly repulsive can never excite an emotion. It was, therefore, easy to recognise that this tendency could not be lasting. The pseudo-idealism of Puvis de Chavannes showed the other infallible mark of morbidity, viz., impersonality and dishonesty. He tried, by an artificial bleaching of colours and a semi-transparent white-wash, to produce the effect of old and faded frescoes, in which their age of several hundred years is an element of æsthetic effect, by reason of the dim depictment of what is remote, dead and gone, and unknown; by reason of the longing they awake for what has for ever passed away and will never appear again. It was imitation; it was an attempt to deceive. It was not the honest revelation of personality, but its disguise in a strange, historical costume. That had no future, and it could not last.

What justified the primitive naturalism of the pioneers, the convinced fervent service of truth, this survives victoriously every change in fashion, and, in fact, is developing strongly further. True naturalism, which grows enthusiastic for the poetry of unpretentious sights, and was the logical development of Rousseau’s return to nature, and of Greuze’s village stories inspired by that return (the “Village Bride,” the “Father’s Curse,” the “Son’s Punishment,” etc.), has held its ground. On the other hand, loathsome painting, which is naturalism run mad, has been finally conquered, and the spectral painting of Puvis is about to follow it into oblivion.

These much-extolled tendencies have, then, no future in them. They were not buds which were to develop into blossom and fruit. They were wild suckers in which a generation of artists fruitlessly squandered its best strength, and which are now withered and blown away by the wind.

And that, too, will be the lot of other aberrations which have not yet quite run their riotous course. That may be predicted with quiet confidence, without any being taught by the future of another.

A great philosophical doctrine is deducible from these facts. All development—including that of art, which is a part of nature and a part of human nature, and obeys the common laws of nature—all development is constant, and will be diverted from its logical course by no power. Its great procession always goes through a main street, and sudden turnings aside branch off only into blind alleys. Extreme forms have no stability; they remain individual monstrosities without issue. The strenuous life is always making efforts back towards the typical constitution of the species. In art this law may be found deplorable up to a certain point; for it is inimical to strong individualities, even to honest and justifiable ones, and favourable to the indifferent average, whilst in art the absolutely untypical individualities are full of charm. But, as things are, it is the iron law of development which no living thing can escape.

It is not easy to oppose successfully the opportunistic criticism which always professes to see, even in the maddest and silliest things, at any rate, “germs of artistic development”; but it is, nevertheless, a duty of subjective morality to do so. My verdict on many notabilities of fashion stands in sharp contrast to that which one generally hears and reads about them nowadays. He who does not suffer from the delusion of greatness, or a morbid distemper of contradiction, feels a position of this kind painfully. I have earnestly and conscientiously tried whether my adversaries were justified in demanding that I, as an individual, should submit to their huge majority. Well, I cannot concede this right to them. In dozens of instances, I have too closely observed how the unanimity of contemporary opinion about an artist arises. It is enough for an artist to invent a whim and obstinately cling to it, without letting himself be put out by indifference, vexation, or scorn. Very soon some ass of a critic will come and explain this whim as an inspiration of genius. This he will do out of vanity, affectation of originality, or an itch for sensation. He will do it to give the impression that he is of more brilliant intellect than the common herd, and that he alone can appreciate a beauty which the Philistines stupidly pass by. If the humbug of a critic has some skill in coining phrases, a little perseverance, and a fairly sonorous pulpit, he will infallibly, in course of time, collect a congregation around him; for it is easy to gain adherents to a chapel which one designates as a place of worship for the intellectual élite, men of fine feelings, and those gifted with understanding. Provided that this sham lasts only a few years, it must needs triumph over all opposition. A young generation grows up which takes it for granted. No one puts to the test what has come into his possession, but takes it as a matter of course. It attains iron permanence. What was a paradox yesterday has attained the rights of dogma to-day by mere lapse of time. Busy pens now vie in outbidding each other in the elegance and wittiness of the phrases with which they express the prescribed admiration for the great man. If an independent person steps forward, and shows the worthlessness of the puffed up celebrity, the devotees of the little chapel, which has grown into a great church, feel an honest indignation against the heretic. “How does this man dare to doubt, when we, who are certainly better and cleverer than he, piously believe.” That is the history of every religion: when it is organised it becomes intolerant and endeavours to assert itself by means of violence. But, to the honour of mankind, there are, nevertheless, always independent spirits who will not let themselves be intimidated, and on whom authority does not impose. They test the dogma, and kick it away if it is not firmly based. The stake has not protected religion from these independent critics; still less can the Corybants of art-reporting guard a fashionable idol from them.

The right of criticising the views even of the most overwhelming majority must be maintained. A final proof in disputed questions regarding æsthetics is, I admit, not to be supplied. All artistic influence rests on suggestion. The work of art, itself and, originally, exercises the suggestion on a minority endowed with delicate sensibilities. On the great majority an opinion of others, delivered with firmness does so. The great majority of people admire one who is praised because it is suggested to them by his trumpeters that it is their duty to admire him. As a matter of fact, they feel the admiration, without being conscious that not the work of art has inspired them with it, but the enthusiastic gossip which they have read and heard about it. These people refuse to believe me when I tell them that they are admiring something which is an aberration. The prior suggestion prevents them from tolerating a fresh suggestion from me. No one, however, can contest this so far as he is quite certain only of his own feelings. In art, effect is an infallible criterion, even if of only subjective value. If a man feels definitely as regards certain pictures that they are valueless and unmeaning, he has a right to express it as strongly and honestly as he feels it, even if millions declare that they discover all kinds of loveliness and depth of meaning in them. One will perhaps fail to convince a single creature, and will, as likely as not, long remain a preacher in the wilderness. But perhaps not for ever. The inventors of a fashionable culte, whom their selfishness obliges to stand up for their own work, will not remain in arms for ever and live. Those who worship after them have not the same strong, effective grounds, the originator’s vanity, for defending that culte desperately. The snobs who thronged to it because it was the singularity and they were the exceptions, necessarily abandon it as it becomes commonplace and they find themselves in a vulgar majority. Then the uninfluenced art-conscience again faces the work; it becomes susceptible to the warning of him who was, up to then, “the one voice crying in the wilderness,” and in a short time all lips murmur: “That was indeed a swindle.”

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