During the last years the relation of public opinion to works of art has been repeatedly discussed, and on each occasion with great warmth.

The discussion, in the main, is concerned with two questions which are independent even if they are connected with each other, viz.: Has the public a right to judge a work of art, or must it renounce its own opinion and simply bow before the verdict of specialists? Have not all, or, at any rate, many, works of art that have subsequently gained undisputed recognition by the world, been strongly opposed and rashly rejected on their first appearance in public?

In 1899 intellectual Berlin was excited about a pertinent question. Professor Franz Stuck, the Munich painter, had obtained a commission for a wall-painting for the German House of Parliament. When the artist sent in his sketch, there came a shriek of most unpleasant astonishment from the judging committee of the Reichstag, and a member, Dr Lieber, expressed in public session, in very strong language, his absolutely unmixed feelings in respect of the work.

The Munich friends of the insulted artist, to their credit, made common cause for him. They published an armour-clad protest, in which they characterised the members as “laymen unable to judge,” and reproached them with impertinence because they “thought they understood everything better than learned specialists did.”

I expressed my views then in the Deutsche Revue of this opposition between specialists and laymen in plastic art, and I ask permission to repeat here in brief the essential part of my arguments.

Who are the experts? From the general drift of the objection on the part of the Munich artists it was to be concluded that they must be the practising artists, the critics, perhaps also the professors of art-history. Let him who does not belong to these three sacrosanct categories steal weeping away from the confederation of experts. And even among the critics there is probably a selection to be made. The critic who praises the artist is to him undoubtedly an expert; the critic who blames him shows himself incontestably as a bourgeois, and in intelligence stands almost as low as a common University professor who does not teach art-history.

All this is foolish talk. In matters of art, if, indeed, any one can, only an individual—never a category—can lay claim to the rank of expert. Is, perhaps, the practising artist the expert? He is not so necessarily. There are people whose vocation in life, or, speaking more correctly, whose usual occupation, is painting, but whose painting is a continuous insult to art. One may be a professional painter, and yet a pitiful dauber, and commit such impudent sins against good taste that every non-expert must recognise this at the first glance, and be provoked at it. Or is the critic the expert? It would be a good joke to assert that.

Nearly every verdict on a work or an artist committed to paper by a professional critic is opposed by another verdict, also by a professional critic which says the exact contrary. Which of the two critics is an expert? Which of the two has a right to demand that people should bow before his verdict, because he habitually makes phrases about works of art in public? What proof of capacity do the papers as a rule demand of the beaux esprits to whom they entrust art criticism? He who has observed dozens of times how ambitious young newspaper-writers, on their first report of an opening of an Exhibition, or after forming a coffee-house acquaintance with an artist thirsting for advertisement, suddenly discover in their minds a gift for art criticism, and have subsequently cultivated this with brazen self-consciousness; he will feel highly amused when people try to crack up art-critics as experts, simply because they exercise this function. Even professors of the history of art, even directors of museums, are not, by reason of their office, experts in the sense of possessing very profound understanding of art. The academic study of art-history lays the chief stress on the facts belonging to the history of life and morals, which need have nothing in common with the understanding of art. One may make in archives the most beautiful discoveries for the biography of Leonardo, and not feel a single one of his pictures. And as regards superintendents of museums, it is possible to relate the funniest anecdotes about their fallibility, and oppose to them simple connoisseurs, also “non-experts,” who have formed splendid private collections.

The truth is there are no experts in questions of art, as there are, perhaps, in questions of technique. Expert knowledge presupposes the existence of fixed rules, of a canon. There can be no talk of this in the fine arts. The only element of painting that, at least to a certain point—to the point where the individual conception and, with it, really artistic interest first begins—is under objective rules, is drawing, both from its figure as well as its perspective side. This element can be taught, learnt, and faithfully measured, for nature furnishes the scales. On the other hand, the colour element in painting is subject to absolutely no canon, but at best to subjective feeling, at worst to a fashion of the period. Every artificial colour is a convention; for, as I have argued more particularly in my studies of Sisley and Pissarro, none can truly reproduce the real colours of natural phenomena, and it is wholly a consequence of education and habit, when the polychrome of oil-painting or water-colour more easily excites in us the illusion of colouristic truth than the monochrome of the two-colour or of black and white art. One decade paints in dark, another in bright colours. One school likes powerful, another subdued harmonies of colour. Præ-Raphaelites imitate the tone of old frescoes and faded Gobelins. Puvis de Chavannes took the colour out of his pictures by a transparent white-wash, pale as the moon. Besnard, on the contrary, discharges fireworks, without caring in the least if the mad tumults of colour that he loved are possible or not in nature. Carrière envelops his figures in a dense mist. Cottet has, very recently, brought into fashion the black and dark shadings which go right back from Ribot and Prudhon to Velasquez and Ribera. Who is right? Who is wrong? Here everything is feeling, and consequently subjectivity. Of drawing, one can in all cases say (and by photography irrefutably prove), it is correct, or it is wrong. Colour does not admit of a similar verdict. All that can be said of it is: “I like it,” or “I don’t like it.”

For beauty in art, in the present condition of the perception theory, the physiology and psychology of pleasurable feelings, there is no other standard than subjective feeling. This is dependent on the greater or the less sensitiveness of the nervous system, on its perceptivity of slight qualitative and quantitative differences in the excitation of the senses, and, therefore, on an essentially congenital constitution of the organism. The gift of receiving strong impressions from works of art can be developed by practice, by the frequent and attentive study of works of art of different kinds; but it cannot be attained artificially by any effort or any amount of study.

What, then, mean the expressions expert and layman, when applied to æsthetic verdicts? The classes of society, in which preponderating occupation with intellectual problems, continued through several generations, has refined the nervous system and rendered it more sensitive, produce, as a rule, individuals with a feeling for art. These live in large towns, in the centres of art life, they travel, and visit numerous collections, and thus their feeling for art is developed into a wide understanding of it, that studies works of art from the historical standpoint. These are the real experts, so far as there can be any talk of such in æsthetic questions. But these classes of society, these individuals are only to the very smallest extent painters or professional critics, i.e., critics writing for the public. To wish to exclude them, on that account, from the expert class is ludicrous presumption of certain persons who, by their own authority, confer this title on themselves. The educated public—the intellectual élite—has not the least reason for allowing their opinion on works of art to be dictated to them by painters who may well be daubers or crack-brained fools, or by critics who may be ignorant phrase-mongers.

So much for the first question as to the fitness of the so-called layman for criticising works of art.

The second question, as to the changes in public opinion about certain works and their authors, is considerably more complex.

It is not to be gainsaid that such changes have occurred, but they are much rarer than those would like to make us believe who, from instances of pretended later conversions of originally rebellious taste on the part of contemporaries, hope to succeed in proving that the ugly is beautiful and the beautiful is ugly.

The names which were most often cited to prove the incompetency of contemporary judgment on works of art of modern tendency are most unfortunately chosen. Millet, Rousseau, and Corot were looked upon by their contemporaries as smearers and daubers; Manet was laughed to scorn, Böcklin pronounced a fool, his friends advised Hans Thoma to change his name, etc., etc. In order not to go to too great length I will now leave Thoma and Böcklin out of the discussion. But the others! That Rousseau and, especially, Corot passed for smearers and daubers among their contemporaries is simply not true; on the contrary, justice was at once done to them for their technique. Even their most unscrupulous opponents admitted that they were draughtsmen and colourists. What they were reproached with was only the alleged intellectual insignificance of their work. People remained under the influence of classical landscape with ancient buildings or ruins, and a decoration of ideal figures such as Poussin brought into fashion, and Claude Lorrain cultivated. A landscape without nymphs or shepherds in Arcadian dress, without temples or figures of Hermes, seemed empty, insignificant, ignoble. The majority had as yet no taste for the witchery of mood in wood and field. Why, Corot himself was not clear about what was new and determinative in his own art, for in some of his grandest pictures Dryads dance, beneath young-leaved trees immersed in the mists of springtide, the most correct sham-classic square dance. It was only in his last period that he renounced this ancient magic. Rousseau had broken away from tradition more resolutely, and was on that account less esteemed than Corot by contemporaries whose education had been perverted by precedent. But the worst that was said against the two did not go beyond the assertion that they were “vulgar.”

The case of Manet is, of course, different. People have roughly disowned this painter; but it is absolutely false to talk about a change in popular opinion about him. Those who “laughed at” him thirty-five years ago, laugh at him in precisely the same way now. In my study of the Caillebotte room in the Luxembourg Museum I have alluded to the angry protest of Gérôme and Gustave Moreau against admitting the works of Manet and his friends into a State collection. If the laughers are not so numerous, and if their laughter is not so ringing as in the “Olympia” year, it is simply because the man is absolutely done with. Only a few stragglers still talk nonsense about Manet, men who have missed the connection of “the last train,” and some greybeards in their dotage—the barricade warriors of the “Salon”—who fancy they are still breathing the gunpowder smoke of 1863, and will keep up to the day of their death, which cannot be far off, the happy, exultant mood of the beer-evenings at the Café de Madrid. None among the pillars of young and living art recognises Manet as his ancestor. People know now that he was a discovery of Zola’s. The sharp turn in the development of art in the last thirty years of the last century was inaugurated, not by him, but by others. Courbet introduced realism which has nowadays shrunk to nothing. Monet kindled “Free Light,” and that was a very great service which, unfortunately, is also no longer fully acknowledged, for the latest race of Parisian painters again abandons joyful brightness and goes back to the gloomy, oppressive tones of “the ’fifties.” Manet, however, found nothing and invented nothing, and he owes the noise that was, for a period, heard about him only to his relations with a devoted friend, who vindicated his own tendency by that of the painter, and said of him all the good which he thought of himself.

The change in taste from one generation to another is a general law which I proved in the Neue Freie Presse of 9th August 1896, and afterwards developed and established in the Florence Rivista Moderna (No. 3, of 1898, “Le alternanze del gusto”). I strongly believe in the prevalence of this law; but if particular cases are followed in detail, it is recognised that many an apparent change in the appreciation of a work or an artist rests on an illusion of the senses.

To return to the subject of Manet. An awful din arose at the first appearance of “Olympia.” Friends and foes waged wild battle with each other. Each panted for the blood of the other. Twenty years later the picture that had been so hotly contested was hung in the State Museum, which roused fresh, but considerably weaker, opposition. Finally, however, no one any longer protested against its presence in the picture-gallery, and now a sophist might assert: “There, you see! The picture which was once laughed at is, thirty years afterwards, acknowledged as a classical work of art.”

Gently! That is by no means proved. The fight has ceased only because it has become objectless. Who nowadays waxes warm against Manet? The man, you know, is dead, not only as a human being, but also as an artist. He no longer troubles any one. He no longer exercises any bad influence. He no longer even poisons popular taste, for it is sufficient to observe the visitors to the Luxembourg, to see that they pass by the “Olympia” with laughter, and shrugging of the shoulders, or else with astonishment and shakes of the head. If a belated corybant raises a shout of “Hail, Manet!” he is merrily allowed to shout. It is superfluous to shout him down, for nobody listens to him. The truth is that the taste for Manet is not in the least changed. People find the “Olympia” every whit as repulsive nowadays as it was thirty years ago; but they no longer say so with a loud voice and with the veins about their temples swollen, because, generally, people no longer stop before its mouldy ugliness.

If you examine very carefully, you will generally find that the various appraisements of particular works in a new generation do not originate from later generations regarding it differently than did contemporaries, but from their generally no longer viewing it with the same eyes. Let us only bear in mind always that the vast majority of mankind have no feeling of their own for artistic beauty. They act as if they had some feeling only because they know that a feeling for art is pronounced to be a mark of higher culture. We cannot rate too highly the part played in art idiocy by sham culture, pose, and self-deception—or, shall we say, more indulgently, by auto-suggestion? Honest confession of obtuseness to art is hardly found in any but the two poles of humanity—on the extreme summit and at the lowest antipode. A man must be either a rustic lout or an overtopping genius like Prince Bismarck, to confess that he can make nothing of the fine arts. The culture-Philistine never has this courage. He always pretends that he finds luxurious enjoyment in the contemplation of art. This culture-Philistine always repeats what has been said to him; he admires where the Baedeker-star prescribes admiration. And he is, in many cases, not even dishonest. He persuades himself that he feels what he regards it as his duty as an educated man to feel; and he really comes to feel it in the end, thanks to this self-persuasion. All the effects of art depend on suggestion, so far as they are not concerned with the most absolutely primitive and undifferentiated sensual excitations. On one who has a genuine feeling for art the work of art itself conveys the suggestion, which is followed by feelings of pleasure. On the average men, whose blunt nerves take no impression from the work of art itself, the Baedeker-star—the label—exercises this suggestion. If a work of art has once got the reputation of excellence, either because it deserves it, or because it acquired it from a dishonest, busy, bold, and swaggering clique, the next generation of Philistines in art does not test it further, but takes it as something accepted. The clique can then state triumphantly that the work they have puffed is a success. But has it on that account acquired real success?

The number of free, strong men is extremely small, who have the courage, desire, and ability to examine the veracity of traditional labels; but there is a frightful devastation every time that such an idol-destroyer and overthrower of altars breaks into the Temple of Renown, which is guarded by that dragon, the Good Old Way. People are then convinced about the quantity of plaster rubbish which has been smuggled into proximity with real marble and gold-and-ivory work in the semi-darkness of the sanctuary, and has enjoyed for hundreds, perhaps for thousands of years, the same veneration as the wonder-working revelations of genius.

But suppose we conceive in our mind’s eye the extremely rare case in which a real masterpiece was misjudged at first, and, later on, was greeted with acclamations. In this case the question, as a rule, is not of lack of understanding, but of lack of sense of proportion. The contemporary age which blames, and the succeeding age which praises, are both right, i.e., they do not praise and blame the same thing, and the divergent appraisement of the work is simply due to the fact that contemporaries like to dwell on the faults and overlook the excellencies, whilst latter generations neglect the faults and regard only the excellencies. The contemporaries were biassed in severity, their successors are biassed in indulgence. Ideal justice is not of this world. But faults remain faults even in the ages that come after, and excellencies, too, were excellencies even in the period of their origin; and it is jugglery and forgery when people interpret the change in appraisement as if a later generation had admired as a merit that which an earlier generation had stigmatised as a fault. Just one example to illustrate these propositions: Millet is said to have passed for “a dauber and smearer.” Now, his contemporaries who blamed him used no such harsh expression. They said only that Millet drew incorrectly and painted carelessly, and those with a real feeling for art notice exactly the same thing to-day, only they say it no longer, unless the question is expressly put to them. On the other hand, his contemporaries, too, noticed his deep moral earnestness, his warm human feeling, the touching simplicity of his style, which we prize so highly in Millet to-day. But they were not inclined to forgive him his defects in execution on account of these intellectual merits, whilst we take his weakness in form into the bargain on account of the feeling it contains. These weaknesses, however, are there to-day precisely as they were thirty years ago, and he who fails to see them is guilty of presumption if he passes a verdict on pictures.

Taking them altogether, the works and artists that were overvalued by contemporaries are far more numerous than those that were underestimated at the beginning. And even in the extremely few cases of the latter category, the injustice of contemporaries did not, as a rule, take the form of violent opposition, but that of indifference. Contemporaries did not gainsay their beauty; but it escaped their attention, because this was claimed by other fashions and styles. No work of plastic art that is nowadays accepted without dispute was rejected, when it appeared, with such anger as certain products of the “Secession” are at the present day.

That is natural. The conditions of art production were half a century ago absolutely different to what they are now. The artist gave his personality full scope, and sought to please only a few customers of rank, without troubling himself about the people at large. To-day he wants to excite a sensation at any price, and he looks, for this end, not into himself, but about himself. By creating he is not satisfying his impulse to give form and shape, but his hunger for success.

Vain amour propre, swaggering, conceited vanity and cunning “pushfulness” are the motives that far too often guide the artist’s brush or chisel. The coarse vulgarity of the means corresponds with the coarse vulgarity of the motives and aims. One must make a sensation, and that is attained most easily by a rowdy rebellion against taste, truth, and healthy human intelligence. If he annoys his contemporaries, the ruthless advertiser finds his account more surely than if he praised them. Only he who startles dares hope to be noticed in our present huge exhibitions with their three thousand numbers. That is why the unscrupulous competitor works with the object of startling, and only with that object. His natural allies are writers who seek by aggressive criticism to satisfy the same hysterical impulse towards sensation as he, and the snobs who hope to justify their claim to be un-Philistine by pretending to discover and appreciate hidden beauties, where the thick-headed majority of their fellow-men observe and condemn only unblushing outrages on the sense of beauty.

The necessity for creating a sensation has arisen only in our times of over-production in all fields of intellectual creation, and of frightfully murderous competition for success. In the earlier days of art it played hardly any part at all. On this account it is fallacious to try to deduce from the, after all, extremely rare romances of works, originally misjudged but afterwards recognised, in the past, an argument in favour of certain creations of the present day, which a large proportion of educated men rejects, not because they do not understand, them, but because they understand them only too well.

Let men only have the quiet courage not to allow themselves to be put out of countenance; they will carry their point even before posterity.