until a hundred years later, namely at the end of the Eighteenth Century, that an English artist, Constable, revived the naturalistic style of landscape. He was a miller’s son, whose boyhood had been spent amid the simple loveliness of nature. Later he went to London and studied painting; but while he worked in the big city, his heart was in the country, and he suddenly made up his mind to go back to the old scenes, and paint what he knew and loved. He had seen some of the landscapes of the old Dutchmen, and resolved that he would do what they had done. In his own words, he would be a “natural painter.”

It was not long before the example of Constable led some of the younger French artists to study the old Dutch pictures in the Louvre. They were dissatisfied with the methods of painting upheld by the older artists. It seemed to them a waste of time to set up a model in a studio, and then, instead of drawing it as they saw it, to correct it according to some standard of perfection. Nor did they find any interest in putting a number of such figures into artificial groups, in order to build up some grand composition, supposed to represent some classical subject or story of the old time. They were full of interest in the life of their own time, which was the period following the Revolution, when France felt young again and vigorous, and the young artists and poets and fiction-writers were eager to express in their work their joy in the reality of life. When life was so real and so full of promise, why should they look back to the times of the great Italians and occupy themselves with the artificial and make-believe?

Among these younger men was one, Theodore Rousseau. He was not only independent in character and determined to see things with his own eyes and to represent them as he saw them and felt them, but he had a great love of nature. This led him away from the city into the country; where he studied the skies and the trees, and all the objects of the landscape with an ever increasing love and knowledge, until he came to know nature, as few have done, and to feel toward it, as a man feels toward that which he loves best in all the world. His favorite spot in nature was that which surrounds the Palace of Fontainebleau, an ancient residence some thirty miles from Paris, of the kings of France. It is a rolling tract of ground, broken up with rocky glens and thick with forest trees, especially the oak. On the outskirts of this enchanting garden of wildness, in the little village of Barbizon, Rousseau made his home, and around him gathered other artists, fascinated by the beauty of nature. Among them was the Jean François Millet whose picture, The Sower, we have already studied. He for the most part painted the peasants, working in the fields or tending their flocks; but the others, among them Dupré, Corot, and Diaz, painted the landscape, while Troyon introduced cows into his pictures and Jacque, sheep. With all of them the motive was to represent nature as they saw and felt it. They are known as the Fontainebleau-Barbizon group of artists, and their example has had very great influence on modern art. I shall speak of it presently; meanwhile will continue the story of naturalistic landscape.

It is a very interesting fact that while these French artists were going straight to nature for their subjects and inspiration, some American artists, knowing nothing of the Frenchmen, were doing the same thing. A similar love of nature and longing to paint it as they saw and felt it drew them from the city to the beautiful spots that border on the Hudson River. Their leader was Thomas Cole, who made his headquarters among the hills and valleys, the waterfalls and luxuriant vegetation of the romantic Catskills. Other names are those of Thomas Doughty, Asher B. Durand, John F. Kensett. Sometimes they painted the grander aspects of the scenery; the broad Hudson sweeping past its headlands, or the lakes with their girdle of mountains; but quite as often the simpler loveliness of smiling meadows and cosy farms. But always with the sincere wish to represent, as faithfully as they could, the natural beauty that they loved.

Gradually, however, as the country expanded Westward and the pioneer spirit of the nation was aroused, American artists began to attempt bigger subjects. Church, Bierstadt, and Thomas Moran attacked the colossal wonders of the Yellowstone and the Rockies. It was no longer the beauty of nature that inspired them, so much as its marvelousness and immensity. As many people believe, they tried to do something that is beyond the power of painting to express. For on the comparatively tiny space of their canvasses they did succeed in expressing some of the appearances of nature’s grandeur, but they hardly made you feel it. I believe myself it is impossible that they should; for an artist can only make you feel in his picture something of what he himself has felt; and he must have thoroughly mastered his own feeling before he can express it. But in the presence of the stupendous works of nature, as far as my experience goes, the feeling masters ourselves. Amid the vastness of the height and depth and breadth and the grandeur and glory and marvel of it all, our spirit is swept out of us. We see the mighty volume of water coming over Niagara and hear the roar of its might; but not as we gaze into the face of a friend and listen to the voice that we have learned to know and love so well. In the one case our feeling is all brought to a center of attraction, in the other it is caught away and carried beyond our comprehension. We can only lose ourselves in wonder.

Well, artists discovered the truth of this. Constable and Rousseau lead the way, and now it is the usual habit of the landscape artists to study nature as one studies the face and form, the expression and action of a friend. One cannot know a number of friends as intimately as one or two. So they have confined their pictures to the few and simple aspects of nature; one little fragment at a time, studied with loving intimacy and represented with the faithfulness of sincere and thorough knowledge. In doing so, they have learned like Johannes Vermeer and other Dutch artists of the Seventeenth Century, that much of the beauty and almost all the expression on the face of nature are due to the effects of natural light. Light has become the special study of the modern painters of the naturalistic landscape. And they have carried it further than the other artists did. Helped by the scientific men, who have examined into the color of light, the modern artist has found out how to represent a great variety of the effects of light: cool or warm light, the light at a particular hour of the day, at a particular season of the year, and in a particular kind of weather. In fact, the light that he represents in his pictures is a faithful rendering of some one of the countless conditions of natural light.

You remember how the light in Vermeer’s picture drew all the parts of the composition into a harmonious whole and gave it rhythm. So too, in these modern naturalistic landscapes the artist has ceased to depend upon line and form in making the composition. The latter is now rather an arrangement of masses of lighted color. We will talk more about this when we come to color; for the present, it is enough to remember that we must not expect to find in modern naturalistic landscapes the same handsome patterns of composition that we find in the classical. The modern have less dignity, but a more intimate charm. We do not stand apart from the scene and admire it; we rather enter in to it and enjoy it. It is something with which we are familiar in nature, but we are made to feel a greater beauty in it through the personal feeling that the artist has put into his work. The French have a term for this kind of landscape, which well expresses the artist’s motive and the feelings which his picture inspires in us. They call it the “paysage intime.”[7] Literally translated this means “intimate landscape”; but it may be rendered more freely a landscape in which we recognise how intimately the artist has studied his subject.

. . . . . .

I have given you a sketch of the growth of naturalistic landscape in the Seventeenth Century up to our own day, when this branch of painting has become fully as important as that of figure subjects. Now let me briefly describe the change that has taken place in the motive of the landscape painter.

The motive, or aim of the early Dutchmen was to make their pictures resemble as much as possible the actual landscape. They were, as I have said, “portraits” of the natural surroundings. In their desire that the portraits should be lifelike these artists painted in as many of the details as they could. Moreover their point of view was objective. By “point of view” I mean the way in which they looked at the landscape; and I call it “objective,” because they looked at it simply as an object in front of them to be painted as nearly as possible lifelike. This is the usual point of view of the modern photographer. You go to him to have your portrait taken. He poses you as an object in front of his camera. His aim is to make a portrait that will be like you, and will also please you because it is a good-looking picture. He will do the same for the next person that comes to him, and for the next, and so on. All of them are simply objects to be photographed. He has no personal feeling toward any of them; his point of view is objective. But, suppose he makes a portrait of his own child. He will wish it to be more than a likeness that any one would recognise. He wants it to be a reminder in after years, when she is grown up and changed, of how she used to look as a little one, in moments when to her mother and himself she seemed more than ever a darling. To him, you see, she is not merely an object to be photographed; his point of view towards his own child is not objective; on the contrary it is influenced by his personal love for her; the picture is to be a likeness plus something more—a reflection of his own feeling. This personal kind of point of view is called “subjective,” the opposite to objective. Perhaps you will understand the difference between the two more clearly by the following sentence: “The photographer photographs Mrs. X.” The photographer is the subject of the verb, photographs, “Mrs. X.” is the object. In this case the object is of more importance than the subject because it is Mrs. X. who pays the money and has to be considered. But change the words in this way—“The father photographs his little one.” Now, so far as the taking of the photograph is concerned, the father is the more important. He is the subject of the verb, the one who is going to do something and do it his own way, so as to represent something which he, the subject, has in his mind. His point of view is entirely his own—the subjective. Observe how this will affect the way in which he takes the photograph.

The little one has just come in, we will say, from a romp in the meadow. Her hair is tumbled and the light plays through the silky strands; there is a sparkle of sunshine in her eyes; her lips are parted in a sunny smile as she stretches out to her father a podgy hand, tightly clasping a bunch of daisies. “Little love” he thinks to himself, “what a picture!” He seizes his camera, and tells her to stand still a minute. What is it, do you think that he is going to try and catch? I need hardly say it is the radiance in her face. Perhaps her podgy hand too; but first and chiefly that expression of happiness and love; for it is an echo, as it were, of the happiness and love that he feels in his own heart toward her. If he succeed, the picture will be as much an expression of his own subjective feeling toward the child, as of the child herself.

If you see what I mean you can now begin to understand how Constable, and, even more, Rousseau and the other Fontainebleau-Barbizon artists looked at nature. No longer an objective point of view, like the old Dutchmen’s, it was a subjective one. To them nature was not merely an object of which to make a portrait. It was something they loved, and, because they loved it, they painted it, and in such a way that their pictures embodied the feeling which they had for nature. They are full of the artist’s personal feeling, or as it is sometimes called, sentiment. A landscape of Rousseau’s sets our imagination working. It may represent an oak tree and a rocky boulder, half hidden in ferns and vines, some little spot in the forest of Fontainebleau. As we look at it we become more and more conscious of the strength and vigor of the tree; the firmness of its huge trunk, the mighty muscles of its brawny arms, the grip which it has upon the ground, and our imagination may begin thinking of the roots hidden below the ground. While the branches spread out to the sunshine and the air, the unseen roots reach out and grip the soil and grapple with the rocks, anchoring firmly the tree against the storms of weather and time. And perhaps we begin to feel, as Rousseau himself did, that the oak is a symbol of the might of nature; and how she silently works on regardless of the changes that happen in the lot of comparatively short-lived men. Or we look at one of Corot’s pictures of the twilight, in which the trees seem to have sunk asleep in blurs of shade against the pale, faint light that is fading from the sky; and the hush and tenderness of the daily miracle of nature’s rest steals over our spirits. It is as if we were listening to the pensive melody of some sweet lyrical poem, very gently and reverently read; such a one, perhaps, as Longfellow’s “Hymn to the Night.” On the other hand, to receive an impression like that of Rousseau’s picture, we must choose a poem that tells, not of rest, but of the grandeur of human effort, and must read it in a strong voice and confidently, as if we were sure that to be strong and faithful to the end was a grand thing.

Indeed, so many landscapes, not only by the Fontainebleau-Barbizon artists, but also by modern men who are following in their footsteps, are full of the suggestion of poetry, and we speak of them as poetic landscapes. This does not mean that they illustrate any particular poem, but that they affect one’s imagination in somewhat the same way as poetry does. The reason is that such artists have the spirit of poets. For nature arouses in them deep emotions, and their pictures, like the poet’s verses, not only describe the beauty of nature, but express the sentiment, or feeling, of their own souls.

On the other hand you must not expect to find this suggestion of poetry in all modern naturalistic landscape. There are still artists whose point of view, like that of the old Dutchmen, is objective. They are content to paint the beauty of nature simply as it shows itself to their eyes. Nor need we argue as to which is the better way, this, or the subjective point of view. We may prefer the one or the other; though, perhaps, it is better for us to keep our minds open to the beauties of both.

CHAPTER XII

FORM AND COLOR

Yet, notwithstanding the identity of form and color, we find a certain separation between the two, when we come to study pictures. The reason is that some artists are more sensitive to form, others to color. As I have already said, an artist paints only the particular impression of an object which his eye receives. Every eye has its own particular way of seeing. Even the eye, most sensitive to form, will not see it as other eyes will; nor will any one color seem the same to every eye that is chiefly interested in color. This is only another way of saying that the varieties in nature are inexhaustible. Nevertheless, although no two elm trees are exactly alike, all elm trees are sufficiently similar to be recognised at once as elm trees. So with artists, some group themselves as painters of form; others, of color. In the old Italian days this distinction separated the artists of Florence from those of Venice. The Florentines—Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, among the greatest—were masters of form; the Venetians, especially in the persons of Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto, and Paul Veronese, were masters of color. The one group saw especially the shapes of things, the other saw the world as an arrangement of spots or masses of color.

The Florentines, in consequence of their interest in form, took great pains with the outlines of their figures. The outlines were clearly defined; in the mural paintings the figures were enclosed by an actual line; and always the figure shows distinctly against the background. For, having drawn the figure very carefully, the artist did not let the color, that was afterwards laid on, lap over the line or interfere with the subtle undulations of the outline. They were in fact, a school of great draughtsmen, who relied principally on the beauty and vigor of the drawing. The Venetians, however, were great colorists, relying on color; and may be spoken of as painters rather than draughtsmen. Yet they too, of course, were masters of drawing. They could represent the action of the figure as well as the Florentines, but unlike the latter, did not care for the clear outline. On the contrary, they softened or blurred the outline slightly, in closer imitation of nature.

If, for example, you look carefully at a tree, you will not find that its shape is enclosed by a hard line. The light creeps round the edges of the trunk and of the masses of foliage in such a way that the outlines are softened or slightly blurred. It is the same with a figure seated in a room; here and there its edges may seem sharply cut out against the background, but in other parts the edges will seem to melt into the background. In other words, as we look at the figure, what we are most conscious of is not its outline, but its mass of color in relation to the other masses of color that surround it.

Now, this distinction, between the way in which the Florentines and the Venetians saw and represented objects, still appears in modern art. In fact, ever since the days of the great Italians there have been artists who relied on drawing and artists who relied on color. For over a hundred years the importance of drawing has been upheld by the great school of art in Paris maintained by the French government. One of its famous teachers, Ingres, used to tell his pupils “form is everything, color is nothing.” Perhaps he only meant by this that, as long as they were pupils, the only necessary thing for them to think about and learn to represent was form. Because to draw well is so important for any artist, and it is a thing that can be thoroughly taught and learned. The French school takes as its standard of excellence the perfect forms of classic sculpture and the great works of the Florentine artists. Although the student may be drawing from a living model whose form is not perfect, he is taught to correct the imperfections of this or that part, in order that the figure, as it appears in his drawing, may be as near as he can get it to classic perfection. But color, as we shall see presently, is so much a matter of each person’s feeling, that it is impossible to reduce the teaching of it to any method or standard. So perhaps that is what Ingres had in mind. He meant that, for the time being, his students should consider form to be everything, color nothing.

On the other hand it is generally understood that he meant much more than this, that he was telling his pupils what he himself considered to be the whole duty of an artist. Let us try and enter into his point of view.

I can imagine some of my readers saying that the phrase, “form is everything; color, nothing,” is nonsense; because color plays so important a part in our enjoyment of sight. Just think what a dreary world it would be, if everything, for instance, were a uniform gray! Quite true, and Ingres probably would have agreed. As a man, he no doubt enjoyed the pleasures of color. But it was as an artist that he was speaking. He was stating what he believed to be the proper subject of his own art.

In the first place he was evidently one of those artists who see the shape rather than the color of things; to whom form makes an irresistible appeal. In the second place—and mark, for this is very important—he was not thinking of how things appear in the actual world, but how they should be represented in art. He was one of those artists who are not interested in naturalistic painting; who do not profess to paint nature. On the contrary, like the great Italians, he only borrowed from nature certain materials in order to build them up into a formal composition of his own creation. He would have told you that he was not representing the works of nature but creating for himself a totally different thing—a work of art.

On the other hand, many artists will reply, that the work of art need not be a totally different thing. That they themselves, like the Dutch of the Seventeenth Century and all the modern painters of the naturalistic composition, combine the two. It is by representing nature, that they create a work of art.

Here, you see, is a sharp conflict of points of view. One group of artists, loving nature, desires to represent it; the other, perhaps not loving nature less, certainly loves art more. This latter group, therefore, tries to improve on nature, and to use it only for the creation of something that it feels to be different and superior to nature. While the one set of men wed nature to art, the other divorce art from nature. Between the two there is a Great Divide, which no amount of talking can bridge over. The only conclusion to be reached is that there is right on both sides. For the one group, because of the kind of men composing it, its own way is the right way; and for the other, for the same reason, its way. We, as lookers on at the dispute, will do well to learn to see the beauty in both kinds of picture.

You may as well know the names by which the two points of view are known. With one, the naturalistic, we have already become acquainted. The other is called by the artists who practise it the “idealistic.” They will tell you that they paint “ideal” subjects. By those, however, who disagree with them, their point of view and method are apt to be called Academic.

The word ideal, used in this sense, has the meaning “more perfect than in real life.” When a person says: “The ideal way to spend a summer holiday”—we know even before he utters the next words, “would be,” that he is going to tell us something that he does not expect to enjoy. It is how he would have things, if he could arrange them according to his own idea of perfection. Now this is what the artist means when he calls his picture an ideal one.

Personally, I do not like this use of the word, because it seems to imply that this kind of picture is superior to the other. And the artists who paint this kind of picture believe that it is; we, however, who are simply students of pictures, longing to enjoy the beauty of all kinds of motive and ways of painting, will not admit this. We go back to the fact with which I started this book: that the value of a picture does not depend upon the subject but the way in which the artist has rendered it. Because a man portrays some noble incident from poetry or the Bible, or invents some scene out of his brain, it does not follow that his picture will represent a higher degree of beauty or a finer imagination than one which only represents some simple scene in nature. I will go further and say that some of the pictures of “still life”[8] by the Frenchman, Antoine Vollon, or our own American artist, Emil Carlsen, exhibit more beauty, yes, and even more imagination than many ambitious figure subjects. Why is this? How can a picture of a pumpkin and vegetables by Vollon, or one of Carlsen’s subjects, such as a creamy porcelain vase, and a lemon, and one or two other delicately colored objects on a white tablecloth, show more beauty and imagination than, for instance, an imposing picture like Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware?

The answer is that Vollon and Carlsen exhibit more feeling for beauty and more imagination in matters that especially belong to painting, while Leutze went outside of painting. Let me explain myself. Leutze saw beauty in the heroism of Washington and his soldiers, fighting against tremendous odds for a great cause in the terrible cold of winter. His imagination was kindled by the importance of the cause and the devotion of those who fought for it. It was the facts, as they appealed to his mind, and the ideas that his mind formed about them which he tried to represent. But the special field for the artist, as I have already said, is not covered by his mind but by his eyes. It is with what he can see that he should be first and chiefly concerned—the beauty of the visible world. And his imagination as an artist is chiefly shown in the capacity that his mind has for discovering unexpected beauties and rendering them. Thus to ourselves, and even to some artists, a pumpkin may seem but a bright orange mass, with a rough or shiny rind as the case may be; an attractive spot of color and shape, a thing to be admired for a moment and then forgotten. Another artist, on the contrary, sees a great deal more in it. He sees subtle differences of color, according to the way the light falls on it, various delicate differences in the roughness or smoothness of the rind; curiously beautiful accidents of color, as it reflects the colors of other objects near it; mysteries of shadow, some deep and strong, others so faint that an ordinary eye might not detect them. These and other qualities, that his sensitive eyes perceive, create impressions in his brain that fill his imagination with a sense of beauty somewhat as music does. He cannot tell you why he enjoys it so much, or explain in words the effect it has on his imagination. The whole impression is a vision of his imagination, excited by the sense of sight, and this vision he sets to work to interpret on his canvas, in order that it may be communicated to our eyesight, and, in turn, excite our imagination. We receive from form and color feelings of pleasure that we cannot describe in words but which are not less real on that account. It is an abstract enjoyment, free from any distinct connection with words or facts. On the other hand, in Washington Crossing the Delaware it is the record of facts, presented in the picture, that chiefly interests us. Neither the forms nor the arrangement of color have in themselves any separate abstract quality of beauty.

So, it is not upon the beauty of the things seen by the eyes, but upon the interest of things understood by the mind that Leutze depended. He really neglected his own proper field of painting, for that of the writer or orator. Therefore, he put himself at a disadvantage; for I think you will admit, that a good speaker or writer could describe the incident in a much more thrilling way than the picture does.

But we have strayed somewhat from our point. We were speaking of idealistic pictures, and noted that they are so called because the artist instead of representing nature as it is, corrects it and improves upon it in order to bring it up to what he considers an “ideal” standard of perfection. I mentioned that these pictures and the motive which prompts them are also called “Academic.”

The reason is that the school in Paris which teaches these principles of painting is maintained by the Academy of the Fine Arts; and its example has been followed by many other European Academies of painting. So, when we speak of a picture being Academic in character, we mean that its motive and manner of painting follow the rules laid down by the schools. To repeat a word we have frequently used before, they are based on the Academic Formula. Previously it was the Classic formula of which we spoke. This, you remember was the rule or plan for building up a formal composition, sometimes strengthened by the introduction of classic architecture and often representing some scene or story of classic legend. And it is upon this classic formula that the Academic practice is largely based. So when a modern artist paints a picture after the fashion of Raphael’s Jurisprudence, we can speak of its manner and motive as being Academic, Classic, or Idealistic. Sometimes, in fact, the meaning of these words is practically the same, but not always.

For at times an Academic painter will choose an everyday subject of ordinary life, yet his picture will not be naturalistic. There are two ways in which he may miss the truth of nature. Either he will try to improve upon the actual facts, or he will leave out the light and atmosphere in which the objects appear in nature. We may find examples of both these contradictions of the natural truth in Leutze’s picture. He was trained in the Academy of Düsseldorf, a city on the Rhine; at a time when that school had abandoned Classical subjects for incidents from history, or scenes from German legends, or what it called genre-pictures of peasant life. But these last were not genre in the sense that the old Dutch pictures were. For the latter reproduced the actual habits and life of the times, whereas the Düsseldorf artists presented fancy pictures in which the peasants were grouped, as if they were taking part in some scene in an opera or other theatrical performance. This artificial treatment appears in Washington Crossing the Delaware.

It is supposed to represent a historical incident. Do you think it has the value of history; that the incident really happened as it is here depicted? The artist, of course, was not present; he was compelled to shape the facts of the incident according to what he had read about them, or, as I rather suspect, according to what his fancy had pictured them. History tells us that the crossing began early in the evening of December 25, 1776, and lasted until four a.m. the following morning. Does this picture represent the dimness of a winter twilight, much less the gloom of night? I might ask the further question, is any kind of natural light suggested in this picture? I feel confident the answer is “no.” Leutze probably had no thought of representing this aspect of the truth; the Düsseldorf School paid no attention to the real appearances of light; or to the effect that light would have upon the appearance of the figures. Their outlines are sharply defined; every figure is rendered with about equal distinctness; no effort has been made to represent them in relation to one another, with varying degrees of clearness and obscurity. A similar artificiality appears in the representation of the ice. It is true the lights and shadows and gleam of the surfaces of real ice have been studied; so that the painting conveys the idea of ice; but this is a very different thing from the painted blocks representing the effects of real ice, as seen in real light.

So we find that Leutze, though wishing to give us a vivid representation of the incident, has neglected a number of important facts relating to the hour of the occurrence and to the conditions of atmosphere and light, as they must have affected the appearance of the scene. He was simply not interested in these matters. Then, what of the point on which he evidently relied—the grouping of the figures in the foreground? It is a ticklish job to pull a boat through a mass of floating ice-cakes.

Do you think that Washington and the flag-bearer would have increased the difficulty and peril by standing up? Don’t you know that to stand up in a boat even on smooth water is a foolhardy thing to do? It is a frequent cause of accident and loss of life in pleasure parties. On an occasion so serious as this would the leader have been guilty of such folly? Certainly not. Washington and every man, not actually engaged in navigating the boat, would have been sitting low down, so as to help preserve the balance and offer as little resistance as possible to the wind. Here, then, is another indifference to facts in this so-called historic picture. But Leutze did not care about facts. His motive was to bring out the heroic character of the events. So he made Washington strike a heroic attitude. It is the way in which a popular actor takes the center of the stage and strikes an attitude and waits for the applause. Leutze wanted a central figure around which to build up his composition and, in order to support the central figure, reared another behind it holding aloft the flag. Thus he wins applause, at once, for the star actor and the patriotic sentiment of the scene. In fact his composition is similar in intention and arrangement to the grouping of figures on the stage of a popular theater. It is theatrical. I do not say dramatic, but theatrical, between which two ideas there is this distinction. When we speak of a scene being dramatic we mean that the action of the plot has been vividly expressed by means that create an illusion of truth—that the characters behave as they might be expected to do in real life under the circumstances. By theatrical, on the other hand, we imply that the behaviour of the actors, instead of “holding the mirror up to nature,” is regulated so as to produce an artificial effectiveness. Such a scene we call theatrical, or stagey. And the same words, in my opinion, can be applied to this picture. For Leutze failed to realise, not only that truth may be stronger than fiction, but also that it may be more impressive than artificial effectiveness. The true word spoken in simple earnestness, the true act done simply, often move men’s imagination, where loud rhetoric and ostentatious conduct leave it cold. So, too, in a picture, a deeper sentiment may be aroused by simple truth of representation, than by a display of mock heroics.

In this picture, you will observe, we have been discussing the Academic point of view applied to the representation of an incident that really happened. The painter undertook a real subject, but has not rendered it as it would have really appeared to us, had we been there to see the event. This is a charge that can be brought against many so-called historical pictures, and against those smaller ones, the genre pictures, which are supposed to represent incidents of actual everyday life. When painted in the Academic manner they are not true to life, but artificially concocted.

On the other hand, as I have said, many Academic pictures, choosing classical or idealistic subjects, make no pretence of representing life. They try to improve on life by making their forms more beautiful than they actually are in nature; and build up compositions which must not be compared with the way in which people group themselves in real life. In such pictures we do not look for natural beauty but for that of the artist’s own invention.

So, to bring the subject to a finish, we must bear in mind that there are two distinct ways of painting a picture. If the artist has tried to represent nature, we must learn to compare it with nature; if on the contrary, he has tried to paint a subject of “ideal perfection,” we must not find fault with its unnaturalness. We may prefer the one or the other kind; but should not let our preference interfere with our judgment of the different merits of each. Until we recognise the “Great Divide” between the Academic and the Naturalistic points of view, we shall not get very far in our appreciation of pictures.

CHAPTER XIII

COLOR

We know that everything visible to the eye has color. When we think of a garden lawn, an impression of green comes into our mind. Green, an artist would say, is the local color of the lawn—the general hue which distinguishes it from the paths and flower beds. There may be dandelions spotted about the grass; indeed it is a lucky lawn that is not overrun with them; yet, notwithstanding the yellow patches, the local color of the lawn is green. And this is true, although here and there the grass may appear yellow in the warm sunshine, or, where the shadows of the trees lie, may have a bluish tinge; or again, in the distance may appear to be almost gray. You see then, that when we begin to talk about color, we do not think only of the general hue or local color, but also of the changes which take place in its appearance, according as it is subject to light and shadow or is seen near or further off.

Now let us take another case. A woman, we will suppose, has a quantity of white cotton material which she proposes to dye blue. She buys some indigo, and puts it in a tub of water. Into this dye-bath she plunges the cotton, and then hangs it on a line to dry. When she has taken it down and ironed it, it presents a uniform hue of blue, its local color. But what happens when she has made it up into a dress? The local color remains the same; but the appearance is no longer of a uniform hue. In some parts the blue is paler or whiter than the local color, in other parts darker; for now the material is not spread out smoothly, the light no longer falls upon every part of it in the same way. The skirt, for example, hangs in folds; and the full light strikes directly only on the raised edges of the pleats. Into the hollow of the fold less light penetrates, and at different angles.

Just what do we mean by angle of light? We must remember that the rays of light coming from the sun, radiate or travel outward in straight lines, as the spokes of a wheel radiate from the hub; except that the spokes of light are not confined to a flat circle, but radiate in all directions from every part of the sun’s orb. But to return to the wheel. Let us suppose that it is a buggy’s wheel, and that the buggy is jacked up, so that we can turn the wheel easily. We will do so until one of the spokes is pointing straight down to the ground, and, to make sure that it is exactly vertical, we will suspend in front of it a string with a weight attached to its lower end. If the spoke follows exactly the direction of this plumb line, then we know that it is pointing down directly to the surface of the ground. We know, in fact, that the direction of the spoke is at right angles to the surface of the ground; or, which amounts to the same thing, we may say that the surface of the ground is at right angles to the direction of the spoke.

But what about the direction of the other spokes of the wheel? With them the plumb line will not help us. We must get a straight stick, say the handle of the stable broom. If we hold this along the direction of either of the spokes, nearest to the center one, we shall find that when the handle touches the ground, it will be at a point further off from the hub, and not at a right angle to the ground but at an acute angle. If we try the same experiment with the next spoke, we may need a longer stick, for the point where it reaches the ground will be still further from the hub, and the angle of direction will be still more acute. If we follow on to the next spoke, we shall probably find that its direction, when extended, does not reach the ground. It points above it. Perhaps it hits the barn wall; and then again comes the question: does it hit the wall at a right angle or at an acute angle? The answer to this, if you think a moment, will depend upon the position, not only of the spoke, but also of the wall. For example, the spoke may point directly at the wall, so that when you stand at the corner of the barn and run your eye along the wall, the spoke will make a right angle with the wall’s vertical direction. But the wall has another direction—a horizontal one; and this may slope away from the direction of the spoke, so that if you stand in front of the wall, your stick makes with it an acute angle. Evidently under some circumstances a single direction may make with the surface of the wall both an acute and a right angle.

By this time our experiment, which started out so simply, has become perhaps a little puzzling to follow. But I don’t mind if it has; for I wish you to realise that, although this matter of direction and angles is simple in principle, it works out in a very complicated way. The more we realise this, the more we shall realise the wonderful effects of light upon color. As a beginning, let us imagine that the hub of the wheel is a center of heat, white-hot, and that the spokes are rays of light, not stationary like the woodwork but travelling outward at great speed. The shaft of light that runs straight down and strikes the ground at right angles to the surface, would make the spot where it touches very bright. The second shaft, however as it reaches the ground further off from the hub will illumine the spot with less light. Moreover, since it hits an acute angle and is travelling fast, some of it will glance off the spot. It will be reflected from the surface back and forth, somewhat as a ball is tossed backwards and forwards from the hands of a group of children.

This fact of reflection and the fact that the so-called angle of reflection is the same as the angle of incidence, or, in other words, the angle at which the light falls upon the object, explains a familiar sight. Have you never seen, late in the afternoon, when the sun is above the horizon, a blaze upon a hill side, so bright that your first thought is it must be a house on fire? You saw it suddenly; and, if you walk a few steps to the right or left, it as suddenly disappears; to reappear, however, when you resume your former position. By this time you know it is not a fire, but the reflection of the sun from some window or tin roof. The light, striking down upon it, glances off, and, as you happen to be in the line of its angle of reflection, strikes you full in the eyes. But move your position, so as to get out of the “line of fire,” and the reflected ray passes you by without attracting your notice.

Here is another example of reflected light, which you yourself can control. Do you remember the fairy Tinker Bell, in “Peter Pan”; how she appeared as a patch of light, dancing over the walls? Very likely when you returned from the theater you made her appear on the walls of your home. As you sat at the breakfast table you picked up a tumbler of water, or a bright bladed knife, and moved it about until it caught the light and tossed it across the room on to the wall, where you could make the fairy hover by gently shaking the glass or knife. On the other hand by changing the position of the glass or knife you could cause her to disappear; to reappear if you wished it, on another part of the wall.

Now after considering the difference between direct and reflected light, let us go back to the blue dress. We were saying, you will remember, that the skirt no longer presented an appearance of uniform hue. For the local color of the material had become affected by the way in which the light reached the folds. On the raised edges the blue appears almost white; in the bottom of the hollows, where no light penetrates, it appears to be almost black. Meanwhile on the sloping edges of the folds there are varying degrees of lighter or darker blue, according as the material approaches nearer to the light, or recedes further from it. In other words, the light strikes the surfaces of the dress at different angles; there are varieties of reflections, and some parts of the skirt are almost entirely removed from the action of the light.

But all this time we have been speaking of light, and yet the subject of this chapter is color. Well, the reason is, that color is light and light is color. If we were shut up in a cellar from which all light was excluded, we should see no color. Our eyes would experience no sensations of sight whatever, and, if we were left there a long time, our eyes, not being used, would probably lose their sense of sight. But, if after we had been in a cellar a little while surrounded by “thick darkness” as the old English expression is—meaning a darkness so opaque that the eye cannot penetrate it—the window shutter should be opened a trifle, then immediately our eyes would experience a sensation of color. The shaft of light, cutting across the darkness, would look white; but, if it hit upon a shelf of apples, our eye would receive a sensation of green or red or yellow. If light is color, why should it seem white in one case and some other hue in another? It is because in the whiteness of light are contained all the colors of which we are conscious. Very likely you know the experiment by which the truth of this is shown. Supposing you are still in the cellar and place in the pathway of the shaft of light a prism—that is to say, a bar of glass not round or square, but triangular—what will happen? The glass being transparent, the light will pass through it. But not in a straight line; for, as it hits one of the sloping surfaces of the prism, it will be bent out of its course; and then, as it reaches the opposite sloping side, it will again be bent into another direction. So the light in its passage through the prism will have been twice bent out of its original direction; and, when it emerges, it will be no longer a single shaft of white light, but will appear as a broad band of many colored lights; red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet. We may call this succession, a scale of color lights. They correspond in hue and order to the bands or scale of colored lights in the rainbow, for the latter is the result of an act of nature, which on a very large scale is like our experiment with the prism. Only nature’s prism is formed by a bar of rain on which strikes a shaft of light through a slit in the thick upper clouds.

With this scale of colored lights scientists have made delicate experiments. They have analysed the colors more exactly; discovering, that is to say, the distinct degrees of color, for instance, between the red and the orange, as the one passes into the other; and again between the orange and the yellow, the yellow and the green, and so on. Then, after discovering the succession of monochromatic tints, as they call them, by optical instruments, they have tested the power of the human eye to discriminate, or detect the difference between these various tints. Notwithstanding that the difference between the latter is so slight, they have found that the eye is sensitive to something like two million monochromatic tints. I mention it not to trouble you with figures but to stir your imagination; for such a fact should fill us with admiration not only of the marvellous qualities of light but also of the marvellous capacity of the human eye. It helps us to begin to realise the miracle of light and the immense field of study that lies open to the artist who is a colorist, to whom, that is to say, it is the color of the visible world that most appeals.

Light, then, contains within itself all colors. When light falls upon an object, for example, a leaf, the latter absorbs some of the colors of the light and throws off others. The part thrown off in the case of the leaf is what we call its color: green, or it may be greenish yellow, or a bluish green, or in autumn, crimson. Every substance has this power of absorbing some of the light and of throwing off the rest; and it is the different chemical properties of different substances that decide which of the colors of light they will absorb and which they will throw off; or, as we say, causes them to be a certain color.

We have spoken of the human eye being sensitive to an immense variety of colors. Let us consider the meaning of sensitive. In the first place, the eye receives an impression that causes it to telegraph to the brain a record of the hue; but it means more, for the word sensitive implies a capacity to feel. In some way or other the brain receives an impression of feeling. Just how it does, I understand, is not known; but scientists tell us that these impressions of sight, while they are not quite similar to the feelings aroused by sound, have something in common. Just as some sounds give pleasure while others are disturbing, so with colors—we receive from them sensations of pain or pleasure. According to the degree of our sensitiveness to sound or color our feelings are aroused. It may be only slightly, or it may be more intensely. It is pleasant, for example, to hear the sound of the robin’s note, and, as we peep out of our bedroom window to look at him, we may catch sight of the yellow or red notes of color that the tulips are beginning to make against the dark earth. They too will give us pleasure. And in both cases our pleasure may go no further than just a little enjoyment of their note of color or sound. Or, on the other hand, they may stir our imagination. We recognise their notes as the first signs of spring. Nature in her mysterious way has whispered alike to the robin and the tulip that the rigor of winter is over; that spring is come with its birth of new life, bringing beauty and happiness in its train. And in ourselves, as we recognise the notes of spring, life leaps up with a new sense of the beauty and happiness of living. Those notes, in fact, which began by giving only simple pleasure to our ear, have stirred ideas in our minds; they have become associated in our imagination with a fuller and higher sense of life.

On the other hand, some notes of sound distress us. The unexpected discharge of a gun may strike us unpleasantly; the roar of the wind and the rain against the window fill us with melancholy; the cry of a creature in pain, even before we know whence the cry comes or the reason of it, may cut us like a knife. I mean, that sounds, quite apart from any definite thoughts that we associate with them, may hurt us. So may colors. I might illustrate this by saying that sometimes when we enter a room the color of the carpet, perhaps green with red roses as big as cabbages, and the color of the furniture, which may be of gold upholstered in blue, seem to start up and hit us a bang in the eye. But perhaps you like smart colors, so I will offer another example. Shakespeare said—