FIGURATIVE ART
AT the present day, when, speaking generally, all forms of graphic art seem to owe their existence to the primary object of imitation of the more superficial, temporary, and accidental aspects of nature; there would seem to be some danger of forgetting that art has properly any other or loftier function. In painting, for instance, technical skill has become so all-important that the end is too often lost sight of in the means; a brilliant execution seems so sufficing that the hand appears to say to the brain, “I have no need of thee.”
I am far from wishing to undervalue technical skill; we all know that it means hard years of labour and incessant industry. To disparage it would be like an attempt to throw discredit on the faculty of speech or writing; but we should soon tire of language and literature without thought or poetry, without analogy and illustration, or even if it gave us nothing but the best “special correspondence.”
If we conceive all forms of plastic art to be so many different methods of expression for the mind,—if we hold, in short, that art is a language, not only for the expression of particular moods and phases of nature, or portraitures of human character, but also for the conveyance of the higher thoughts and poetic symbolism of the mind,—then I think it is no longer possible to rest content merely with the results of industry and facility of hand, still less so when it is lavished upon the realisation of the commonplace, or squandered in the vivid portraiture of squalid detail, which paints vulgarity in all its glory, or spends all the resources of archæological knowledge and draughtsmanship upon the presentment of some triviality in antique dress, going a roundabout way in order to signify next to nothing with the utmost nicety.
Art has become a toy only when it rests satisfied here; and when it lives to please, it must please to live. The public is a big child, without a child’s simple tastes, and cries continually, not for signs, but wonders; “Young men,” as Falstaff says, “must live,” and so it is all explained.
Admitting this, however, we should yet not be justified in assuming that the taste for, or sense of, figurative design, or allegory in any form, was extinct among us. Far from it.
Curiously enough we shall find it at what may be called the extremities of art, or rather, at the head and at the feet. We shall find it still in its original home, in the province of high poetic and decorative painting; and we find it also, in a rough-and-ready form, in our popular politico-satirical prints, where from week to week passing events, political situations, and popular characters are figured in every variety of pictorial parable, with varying degrees of ingenuity and epigrammatic point; but the ingenuity is undoubted, and the popularity of this form of figurative art equally so.
There is also another form in which what may be called figurative art still holds its place in the popular mind—I mean on the stage, and in the region of spectacular ballet and pantomime. The ballet has a very ancient origin, no doubt, and it is of course entirely figurative, all feeling being expressed by action alone, without the help of words. It is the drama of the body. Modern appliances in stage machinery and lighting have given a new development to this species of show, which has great capabilities, and although there is generally a want of refinement, of controlling and directing taste on the whole, there is often a vast amount of ingenuity and pretty invention in scenes and details. In one of these spectacular ballets not long ago there was a gigantic figure of Time painted at the back of the stage. His hour-glass presently opened like a door, and out of it came one by one the hours, represented by damsels, each showing (besides her legs) distinct and appropriate emblematic feeling in her dress. Here, I thought, was a notion conceived in the true spirit of figurative design.
Fashion and the demands of the market may elbow aside the claims of figurative art in a picture exhibition, yet, one now and then has its effect, as, so to speak, after the whirlwind of sensation, the earthquake of literalism, and the fire of personal vanity, is heard the still small voice of figurative thought. While we can point to such examples of painting as Mr. Watts’s “Love and Death,” and Mr. Burne-Jones’s “Fortune,” it cannot be said that either the power or the feeling for the highest art has fallen to decay.
Between the region of party politics and the serene air of ideal poetry there would seem to be a great gulf fixed, but the fact that at both ends of the scale symbolism should be the natural outcome, seems to show that strong feeling of either kind seeks for figurative expression. The passions, the seasons, the senses, the virtues, the vices; fate and time, love, fame, fortune, life, and death itself,—these all belong to the world of allegory, and continually reappear in new shapes, being by nature so protean that no fixed form may hold them. Each age has its own view of them, and that view is sure, sooner or later, to appear visibly in design.
It seems to be far too readily taken for granted that everything of importance concerning such ideas in art has been said long ago, that we must only expect more or less graceful shadows of what has been done in the past to decorate our stained windows, friezes, our panels, ceilings, and mosaics. Nay, there are people of the persuasion that ornamental art should be content to be ornamental and no more; they are content with figures elegantly employed in doing nothing, if, like the peer in the comic opera, they do it remarkably well. Allegory seems to depress them, and symbolism to put them out; life according to this school is “a tale of little meaning, though the words are strong.”
I should not quarrel with this view if it led to high and satisfying results, and I am far from saying that the exclusive study of line, tone, arrangement, and method is not of great value. But so are grammars and dictionaries. Rhythm, metre, and diction do not make poetry, though they are essential to it; and my contention is that you cannot separate style and matter in art, any more than in literature, without serious loss.
But in a civilisation which is more distinguished by a morbid care for decency than for a love of beauty, when the cry is Sartor Resartus, and large profits are made by the sale of fig-leaves; in an age when no one has made up his mind upon first principles, and there is a premium on reserve; when men are chary of avowing in any shape their dearest convictions, not from fear of bodily jeopardy, but out of consideration for the feelings of others, or, perhaps, their own social position, any pictorial expression of ultimate ideas, or vigorous thought embodied in vital design, must of necessity be rare.
The ancient religions of the world were nothing but figurative systems—personifications and symbols of the forces of nature, varying in different countries as they were gradually evolved from some perhaps common primitive type, or grew naturally out of the independent imaginings of the human mind; certainly all have elements in common, and varieties of the same conceptions appear again and again, through endless modifications and developments, as the same plants vary in different soils, and under different conditions. A foundation of natural mythology was common to them all, and this mythology was conceived and modified according to the genius of the race amid which it grew. The Greek religion had the same origin, but the Greeks alone of the ancient nations set free from traditional forms in their art this nature worship; we may follow it from its primitive archaic types till it is transfigured in heroic shape. Religion transformed by art becomes poetry, and all things were made subservient to the dominant sense of beauty. Of this Greek choice we have a beautiful figure or emblem in the “Judgment of Paris,” which art never tires of repeating, and which, like all the Greek stories, never seems to lose its significance.
In the sublime fragments of the sculptured groups which decorate the pediments of the Parthenon, even as we see them in our own Museum, the eye is first charmed and won by the rhythmical sweep and play of line, the masterly counterbalance of curve, the largeness of style in the treatment of individual forms, and what must have been their triumphant combination in an harmonious whole. We, perhaps, think last and least of the poetic thought, or scheme of thought, which comprehends and informs the entire design. Yet here is figurative art in its highest form. Heroic shapes personify and express the physical and moral forces of nature, and all are subservient to, and contribute to the climax (I am thinking now of the eastern pediment), from the sun-god who rears his arms out of the sea to urge his tossing horses, to the fates who bring the hour of the glorious birth, to which, as the crowning fact and summit of the design, all seems to attach as the highest aspiration of the Athenian mind.
After the lapse of ages, through darkness, destruction, and neglect, these fragments remain, not only unequalled as sculpture, but true as figurative design, as expressing what Nature herself continually teaches—namely, the triumph of mind over matter, of the dominion of the higher organism over the lower, or, in modern philosophic phrase, the survival of the fittest in the struggle for existence.
It is strange to think how from the ancient mythological sources in the dim past flow down the little streams that serve everyday life and humble domestic use. Scattered in the drift, as it were, of a common speech—itself a conglomerate of so many elements—like fossils, how many well-worn fragments we meet of symbolism in proverb, or fable, or allusion. They are common property, the decorations of everyday talk, repeated again and again to emphasise and illustrate the most ordinary conversation, like the little woodcut devices used by the early printers over and over again to enliven their close pages of type.
It would be an interesting but almost endless task to collect and sift such fragments, and trace each back to its origin. Many come from the widest-read and most ancient books, such as Æsop and the Scriptures, and centuries of human experience are perhaps condensed in some scrap of proverbial wisdom or folklore. Indeed, as regards mankind at large it would appear that the figurative element was the only enduring one. History becomes lost in tradition and mythology. Lesser personalities are rolled into the greater, and greater personalities are lost in types. Events are generalised, and the image of the past experience of the race upon the general mind becomes generic, like that of the visual impressions of the individual, as Mr. Francis Galton has so strikingly demonstrated.
It is this natural tendency of the human mind which gives figurative art its importance; experience is the clay on which it works. Imagination is the creative force, and sense of beauty the controlling power. A mental efflorescence springs from life’s rough way, which in words becomes a figure of speech or rises to poetry, and in design, emblem and allegory.
The love of figurative art, which had been embodied in so many rich and strange shapes all through the Middle Ages, bound up with the mysticism and gorgeous ritual of the Roman religion, or entangled with the quaint conceits of heraldry, displayed in mystery show and masque and pageant, or emblazoned upon the illuminated parchment, rose to new life with the Renaissance, and found with the art of printing new means of expression in woodcut and copper-plate.
The allegorising power of poets like Spenser found its counterpart in the designs of such artists as Albert Dürer and Holbein, and the best inventions of the emblem books, which are so characteristic of the period.
The taste for these emblem books seems to have lasted all through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and into the eighteenth. Collection after collection issued from the press in all the principal centres of western Europe. The most complete and widely-known were, I suppose, those of Andrea Alciati, which appear in so many different editions since the first, printed at Milan in 1522.
The art of the designs in these books varies, of course, very greatly, according to the current artistic capacity and taste; sometimes rich and inventive, or quaint and graceful, but often little more than a kind of pictorial heraldry, where the moral intention overmasters the artistic power, and becomes merely a label or ensign to point to the moral of the emblem writer.
There exists a ceiling at Blickling Hall, in Norfolk, in the library there, which is curiously like an emblem book worked out in an ornamental scheme. It is in low relief, in plaster or some kind of gesso or stucco, and is said to have been done by Italian workmen. It is panelled out in a way characteristic of the time of the house, which bears the date 1619. In the panels are curious figure designs—allegorical representations of the senses, the virtues, and the vices—which remarkably correspond in conception and treatment with their next of kin in some of these old emblem books. The general effect is very rich and agreeable, and though now white, it was probably coloured in the manner of the elaborate ceilings of the middle Italian Renaissance taste, as we find them, for instance, in the Doria Palace at Genoa, in the work of Giovanni da Udine.
Mr. Morris tells us that all the leading types of pattern design sprang originally from ancestral forms which were definitely symbolic; so that art, which we now call purely ornamental, once was made expressive of mental ideas,—like Persian and Arabic texts in Eastern carpets and tiles, where language and ornament are often one and the same thing. The descent of our Alphabet itself has been traced in a direct line back to the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic signs; and these again were formed into a species of alphabetical system from an earlier form of picture or emblem writing. Even after they had been systematised into the equivalent of an alphabet, pure symbols are used for the expression of abstract notions, such as thirst, for instance, where a calf is figured above the zigzag lines which signify water.
The hart drinking from a stream is a well-known early Christian symbol; we see it in mosaic in the churches at Ravenna, with the vine and the peacock. These last, too, seem to have been a favourite device to carve upon marble sarcophagi, and it may well be contrasted with later Christian taste, in its choice and treatment of symbols in the modern graveyard; and what a strange medley of emblems meet us there!
Not less mixed is the symbolism of commerce, as exemplified in the variations of the modern trade-mark. Æsop and the Bible are again drawn upon, as well as Pagan mythology; but here again perhaps the less said about art the better. It is only interesting as showing the value in the purely practical sense a figurative device may have, something which is distinctive and easily identifiable. It is in some sense a survival of picture-writing or hieroglyphic, without its old Egyptian ornamental sense and distinction of style.
Philosophy, too, in her most modern dress has recourse to symbol. The high priest of Evolution adopted a device for the cover of his book, showing a plant springing upwards from earth, and putting forth leaf, bud, and finally flower; a caterpillar among the leaves, a chrysalis pendent from the bud, and a butterfly hovering over the open blossom. Nothing could well be more tersely, and at the same time comprehensively, expressive of perhaps the greatest and most far-reaching theory of our time.
Nothing, then, appears to be beyond or beneath the range of expression in figurative design; no touch or conception of life but is made more emphatic and comprehensible by being cast into a concrete image—a kind of visible and picturesque logic to satisfy the eye as well as the mind. But while vigorous design, Atlas-like, can sustain the world of thought upon its shoulders, no breath of thought can quicken dead art into life again. It is the true test of really vital design that it should carry without effort its own intention, and never be over-weighted.
This vigorous mental vitality as manifested in art is always characteristic of the great periods. Nor is it spent in one direction only, but, like the life-blood, circulates freely through the whole body of art; so that the chased pattern upon a piece of armour or a watch-plate, the design of a dress fabric or the woodcut ornaments of a printed book, no less than the frescoed or tapestried wall and the highly-wrought easel picture, declare the same nervous energy and endless untiring inventiveness in beautiful and fertile design.