IMITATION AND EXPRESSION IN ART
TO any one who has put his head beneath the magic cloth of the photographer, and has seen, focussed on the glass screen, a beautiful pre-Raphaelite miniature of nature, the thought must have occurred—if the secret of retaining colours as well as forms in chiaroscuro by photography could be discovered, what would become of modern painting?
But, it may be said, photography is already one of the chief props and ministers of modern painting. As it is, the camera and the dry plate often supplement, if they do not supersede, the sketch-book and the laborious study, and the influence of photography and photographic effect is apparently the paramount influence in contemporary work. Would painting thus lean upon photography if she felt that she was but being led to her own destruction? Very likely not; yet, of necessity, the weaker leans upon the strong, and the object being the imitation of superficial fact, photography is strong where painting is weak.
For the last quarter-century and more, the stream of tendency in art, reflecting that in life and thought, has been setting strongly towards naturalism; and this naturalism (or literalism, as I should prefer to call it) is both the cause of the effect and the effect of the cause. It both acts and re-acts, and certainly its action upon art is one of the most striking signs of the times.
Amid the confusion of critical tongues, the artificial conditions of the market, the absence of public taste, the false values of exhibitions, and the hopeless commercialism upon which they are based, what wonder is it that painters should eagerly seize upon such help as photography can give, to force still further already forced effects. But it is a fatal alliance, and photography must win in the long run in such an unequal race.
Art, like the aged and world-worn sage Faust, ardent for life and enjoyment, snatches eagerly at the promise of renewed youth—the vision of realised nature—held out by the demon, and ignores the consequences.
It is time to ask whether the game is worth the candle? The answer of course depends on our conception of the scope of art; what are its ends and aims? If it is indeed the exclusive pursuit of naturalism or literalism, there is nothing but the prospect of this unequal race with photography, which, in the attainment of fact or of phase, and even in beauty of tone and effect, puts any painting or drawing hopelessly at a distance.
On this course it is clear that art is destined to be finally beaten by science. It may be indeed that art is destined to be absorbed and comprehended in science, for even the hitherto uncontested field of ideal conception is threatened by the results of the composite photograph, and Mr. Galton’s generic images.
Painting would certainly never have been brought to this pass if she had not been parted from the early companion of her way, but she has severed herself from craftsmanship, from ornamental design—nay, generally speaking, from design and invention, too—and given herself body and soul to literal imitation of nature dominated by commercial sentiment and sensation.
Again it may be objected, is not the business of painting then to imitate? I answer, only a part of the business, and only in so far as imitation contributes to expression, whether of beauty, or thought, or story, or phase of nature, in which it ceases to be merely imitation and becomes an art—that of representation. Where would be either use or enduring pleasure in art, if it did not express something besides the mere accidents of superficial fact? As well might the poet deal in nothing but description, or the musician limit himself to reproducing the noises of the farmyard, as the painter be content to ignore invention and design, story and poetic suggestion. In these things the human mind comes into play, and it is these qualities that give life and endurance to art. Nor is there any substitute for them. We cannot get our designing done by machinery, or our thinking by photography. The only known mechanism for these processes is that of the brain itself.
Mere cunning of hand invariably tires, and this is why superficial literal imitation by itself is always so dull. We are bored to death by what is called realism, and can only keep up our interest by a constant succession of novelties; like the audience in a theatre, who tire of a mere scene, an arrangement of properties however real, according to stage realism. On the stage, however, strongly as it reflects the literal tendencies of the day, art may safely go much farther in that direction, as the meaning and expression (to which thought, scenery, and properties may contribute in a high degree) must finally depend upon the dramatic action of the living persons, and these, at least and from the pictorial point of view of the stage, from the very fact that they are alive, can never be overpowered by accessories.
Of course, I admit, as regards painting, apart from any poetic embodiment or abstract treatment, there is the expression of the facts of light and colour, texture and tones, and these—although, with the exception of colour, they can be rendered by photography with an accuracy and completeness quite unapproachable—really would appear to be at present the only qualities, the only facts, the expression of which is worth the attention of the painter. If that is really the case, painting—pending its final extinction by photography—must be content to take an inferior intellectual position among the arts. “Art is art, precisely because it is not nature,” said Goethe, but the modern painter, so far as he is articulate, would render it, “Art is art, precisely because it mocks nature.”
The career of an illustrious contemporary (as shown in a recent collection at the Grosvenor Gallery) illustrates in a remarkable way certain degrees of expressiveness and imitation in painting. It is remarkable, too, as showing that, even when the object in painting is to cast off all convention, and to represent nature without prejudice or prepossession, how, even then, unconsciously, under the influence of passionate feeling striving for expression, the painter develops, as it were, a new convention of his own. The most striking quality about the earlier pictures of Millais is not what was commonly supposed to be the chief characteristic of the pre-Raphaelite school, namely, their unflinching truth to nature, but rather the intellectual force of their poetic and dramatic expression. Comparing the work of the earlier period—say from 1849 to 1856—with the work of the later—say of the last ten years—one may see as totally different aims as are perhaps possible in the work of one man. The close textures, beautiful detail, fine and finished execution, deep though not always harmonious colours, and romantic feeling of the earlier time have in the later work entirely disappeared, and nearly everything is sacrificed to the more superficial facts of full relief, and accidents of lighting, atmosphere, and surface. I do not lay so much stress on the fact that the recent pictures are chiefly portraits in the technical sense (although one certainly does rather resent that personages of mere wealth and fashion should have usurped so much of the painter’s time, and filled so many of his canvases, to the extinction, in great part, of the romantic and dramatic element in his art), for Millais has always been a portrait painter whatever his subject. His one particular idiosyncrasy as an artist has, from the first, consisted in the force and directness of his realisation of nature, which is of the essence of portrayal, or portraiture. He never showed any tendency to idealism in any shape, so far as I am aware, but has always been content to take nature as he found her, without endeavouring, by careful and conscious selection and comparison, to build up types of form, or elaborate schemes of decorative composition and colour. He is not a seer of visions or a dreamer of dreams. Life and circumstance are enough, without reading between the lines. In this directness lie both his strength and his weakness as an artist.
Again, to compare the last with the first, one is struck with a certain flatness of the general effect of the early work, as in the Ophelia, for instance. And to this, no doubt, the multiplicity of careful and beautiful detail contributes, as well as the deep and frank tones of colour afore-mentioned. The impressiveness of the results is dependent upon those qualities—upon this treatment—bound up with them as inseparably as the words of a poet are with his matter and style. When relief, and superficial and accidental facts of light are sought after, the whole feeling changes, and the method with the characteristics expressed. We stand in the common light of day, and talk with the members of Society. Gone is the glow of the romance—the passion and the earnestness of youth, with the beautiful detail, and the even and certain finish of the workmanship. We have to make the best of it, and extract what satisfaction we may from the contemplation of a coarser realism of more obvious facts, including a certain amount of British brutality, a vulgar ostentation of wealth, and the attraction or repulsion of matter-of-fact personalities—these things being expressed by an execution which shows more directness than care, and more force than finish or beauty.
We draw the lesson that with increased facility there is less care, and a coarser literalism takes the place of earnest realism, and while the attention is narrowed to individual and accidental characteristics, there is a notable decline of thought, dramatic power, and decorative effect; depth of colouring has departed with beauty of execution, which are the natural vehicles of the expression of quite different aims.
We are led to the conclusion that the search after a more obvious, literal, and surface imitation of natural fact is followed at the sacrifice of the more refined and delightful qualities, and with the limitation of these comes the limitation of the range of expression. The more of nature,—at least of her more superficial facts,—the less, apparently, of art—the less of the expression of the individual thought of the artist.
If this be a true statement of the tendency of modern painting, let us be satisfied with photography. If we value literal representation solely, and the preservation of superficial facts and effects of surface lighting, photography can give them better and more certainly than any paint—can produce in a moment of time what years of labour could never accomplish. And then, too, the photograph gives us the facts, and, within their limited range, as much force of expression as belongs to facts, without any false sentiment, which is too often the case with the painter. If we can get our facts registered for us with absolute certainty and fidelity, and without individual bias, let us take them and be thankful: but let art give up the struggle for territory over which she can no longer claim exclusive or absolute jurisdiction. Let her rest in her own borders. There is a large and ample domain in which there is no fear of invasion; a fair and beautiful region, peopled with the
flowered and fruited with the rejuvenescence of the thought of all time; where invention and expression are the familiar friends and counsellors of art, and truth becomes identical with beauty in the large control of design.
But this is the possession of merely Decorative Art—despised and rejected of men; fit only to be lounged upon or trodden under foot: a toy in the hand, not credited with brain or soul, or power of expression, speaking in strange tongues and parables, or at the best a harmless species of lunacy, fed but with the crumbs from the table of the pictorial Dives.
But the race is not always to the swift brush, or the battle to strong colours, and painting is not the only eloquent language of expression in art, although its effects are more obvious and palpable. We have but to think of the means of expression at the command of the architect (unrestricted, that is, by Boards of Works and Building Acts)—even without the aid of sculpture or painting—in the simple but sublime language of proportion, mass, space, and outline. It is true, imitation is not unknown even in architecture, and we live under the shadow of the great historic styles; but in architecture anything like actual imitation of the materials and surfaces in other materials is now universally despised and condemned. It remains, so far as it is an art, a purely expressive one. How emphatically, and with what subtlety, architecture is capable of expressing ideas and principles of construction! and in so doing expresses not only these but the laws of evolution, and the changed temper of peoples, and social conditions in the long result of time, gathering under the shelter of its wings the whole family of arts and crafts which are its offspring.
Sculpture, too, eloquent in its severe limitations, and by reason of them, speaks in the language of pure form. It is true, it has its own equivalents for colour in contrasts of surface and richness of detail, but the attempts to introduce pure imitation, as with the Milanese school of modern Italy, have certainly not elevated the art. Any imitative success has been gained at the price of higher beauty and meaning—of the higher qualities of form, and repose and dignity of expression. I have noticed, too, that in sculpture, where imitation has been the primary object, the effect is curiously false, as in the case of a portrait statue in marble in costume, where the lace and different dress materials are sometimes imitated with surprising dexterity, but only to give an impression not of life but rather of a whitewashed effigy. Clearly, a step farther is called for if imitation is the sole object. We must revise the art of effigy and paint up to the life. Nor, where faithful portraiture is demanded, can there be any reasonable objection.
Interesting as coloured monumental effigies may be, and however undoubted the fact that it was the practice of the ancients to tint their sculpture, it cannot blind us to the more delicate and elevated expression of pure form, which no sculptor, I suppose, would forego as the justest and most eloquent medium for the embodiment of a heroic or poetic theme—or even solely as a means for the expression of the carver’s sense of the decorative effect of light and shadow in relief work.
There can be no doubt, too, that colour obscures and disguises form. I do not mean to say that it has not an emotional expressiveness all its own, but it is a different kind. We feel the beauty and expressiveness of a drawing by Mantegna or Albert Dürer, and do not ask for colour, or for more heightened and graphic expression than their pen lines convey. This seems to show how little the highest artistic and intellectual expressiveness is dependent on close or literal imitation of nature. To mock nature is one thing, to read and to express her, quite another. I doubt if, even with the photograph and the modern literalist, we could get on without line to make clear the nature of many things disguised in the illusory actuality of light and shadow: facts of construction, for instance, facts of growth, facts of texture and character, can all be made more emphatic and expressed clearer in a line drawing; and, apart from individual skill in its use, this is, perhaps, largely owing to its capacity of abstraction—which sounds like a paradox! A drawing in line is the result of a convention—a treaty between the mind and nature, signed by the free hand of the designer, and sealed by the understanding and imagination. Nothing shows so completely the quality and resources of a master as his perception and treatment of the value of line: nothing more eloquently and distinctly speaks of the vigorous or enervated condition of art in any period than its line drawings. Line is the nerve-fibre of art, knitting and controlling the whole body, but flaccid and meaningless in its day of decline. Compare, for instance, the woodcuts of the early sixteenth century with those of the later or of the next century, and the difference corresponds with the vigour and decline of the Renaissance impulse in design.
The indifference to the value of line as a means of expression in our day is an ominous sign of the state of the arts—despite the so-called revival of etching. Our students are taught to stipple and work up their drawings in chalk, and charcoal seems to be the favourite medium with the modern painter when he is obliged to draw: but both are far inferior in delicacy and precision, and therefore in real potentiality of expression, to the pen-point, or even the firm lead or hair pencil. Effect, however, is more readily produced in chalk or charcoal. If you are not forcible you can at least be black, and you can command an abundance of the convenient obscurity of shadow to hide the want of invention and the absence of purity and precision of line.
In the rush, too, for directness and the unbiassed imitation of nature, another expressive resource of line has been thrown overboard, and this is what is usually included in the term composition. No doubt this has destroyed the commonplace, second-hand stock-in-trade species of pictorial composition, but it has also discouraged higher aims. But few painters nowadays, I imagine, except those more or less interested in decorative design, trouble themselves about schemes of line and counterbalancing curves, or think much of their picture in the skeleton.
The concentration, too, of the attention of the modern painter—the narrowing of his interest to the imitation of facts—tends, as we have seen, to the limitation of his dramatic or poetic interest, or even to its entire extinction. Our painter’s strength is spent upon the realisation of persons often uninteresting, and incidents and themes quite frivolous or even repulsive.
I am far from wishing back the old days of church influence and patronage, when most pictures were religious and the demand for Madonnas and saints almost unlimited; but when congratulations are offered on the changed conditions—that art has broken loose from old encumbering traditions and from sacerdotal fetters, it is too often forgotten that, in spite of her boasted freedom, it is but an exchange of bondage. When we see gifted artists chained down by their very success to the constant production of the same sort of thing—generally the presentment of some fact or phase of nature without ulterior significance or import to humanity—where is our boasted width of range and variety of interest?
Year after year our exhibition catalogues give us the same titles—the same quotations even—I will not speak of the works corresponding with those legends. I do not know that the money bag makes a better escutcheon than the cross keys. I prefer the Phrygian cap and the red flag to either, and truly our material gods, it would seem, give not so much freedom as the old spiritual ones; for even in the oft-repeated nativities and crucifixions of mediæval and early Renaissance painters, what a world of invention and expression was often put into them! Such subjects became, indeed, not only most fruitful themes for the display of all the resources of the painter in the delineation of the life and manners of his time, but their figurative significance gave them a solemnity and depth of meaning for which it would be hard to find an equivalent in modern art.
Storiation, which played so important a part in ancient art—what scope has it in the modern cabinet picture? Were it not for the decorative designers, the idea of story and series in pictorial design would become extinct. Even in their hands it is too often too much on the old lines, embodying the old ideas, and—from the necessities, perhaps, of much or most important decorative work being for ecclesiastical purposes—the ancient creeds.
If, owing to the absence of simplicity and dignity of life, but few modern scenes lend themselves to decorative storiation—if the modern body be too cumbered and disguised, what of the mind? Surely there are thoughts and ideas distinctly modern, capable of figurative and poetic embodiment, and charged with concern to humanity, if only he who runs could be persuaded also to read.
If a painter here and there shows that he possesses any ideas a little beyond the range of the illustrated newspaper, he is sure to be laughed to scorn, and should he persist in his belief that painting is not merely to be regarded as a commodity of the market, or as a toy for grown-up and rather dull and blasé children, let him abandon the hope of making his bread by it.
A word as to the expression of action. A while ago Mr. Meybridge lectured artists, through the Royal Academy, on the right way to depict the action of a horse. He certainly succeeded in demonstrating, by a very ingenious method, whereabouts a horse’s legs are found at certain given consecutive moments—arrested by the photograph—but no more striking proof could be given, especially when motion is concerned, of the meaninglessness of an isolated fact than one of these photographs. Taken singly, they express arrested action, which is exactly what they represent and nothing more. It is only when the series is placed in consecutive order, and turned on a wheel, so that they succeed each other on the retina, that the action is really represented, and it is then of course complete; but that is illusion rather than representation. Mr. Meybridge would have persuaded us that artists have been fools since the world began in this matter. But in representing a galloping horse, or any figure in action, in design, the problem has always been to avoid the look of arrested action which the exact record of the moment gives. The artist has to express, not arrested, but continuous action. He must suggest, therefore, the moment before and the moment after, and that often in one figure. The result has been a certain convention, which conveys the idea of speed to the mind more completely and convincingly than the exact imitation of the action of any given moment could possibly do.
The truth is, that the external facts of motion are, like other facts, expressionless in design, by themselves, and unless associated with other facts and suggestions, and this has hitherto been frankly acknowledged in art. I do not say that a new convention—new and more perfect methods of expression of nature in art—may not be built on the aggregation of more accurately recorded and observed facts, and more profound knowledge. The plain inference is the other way. The degree in which exact knowledge controls and determines methods of representations in art is always a nice problem, and I do not pretend to settle it.
My conclusion is, that the modern mind, in its eagerness for literalism, has been led so far, after all, to but a superficial kind of realism, and that which passes for realism is indeed too often only a one-sided realism—reality only half realised. At the best it is but the realisation of the passing sensation—the passing moment—the least real thing in life and nature.
Nature, when we think we have seized her, verily turns and mocks us in her turn. Alter the focus—go a little farther, or a little nearer, and all is changed and falsified: so the artistic chase, like the artistic problem, is endless. While idealist and realist are disputing, that Pluto of art, the photographer, instantaneously seizes the fair maiden, and carries her in a moment to his dark chamber, whence, though indeed she reappears ravished of colour, it is in such verisimilitude as might well be the despair of the painter, were not his vows addressed to a yet fairer than Persephone.