two. And (as indeed must follow from any candid consideration of the basis upon which Art rests) how gracelessly and equally foolish are the assumption of the artist that in all differences he is right and the public is wrong, and his presumption to stand above popular criticism and comprehension. I do not think that I have overstated, and perhaps it would not be possible to overrate, the mischief which arises from the unfortunate estrangement of Art and popular feeling; neither of which, as it seems to me, can ever be wholesome or healthy without help and sympathy from the other. If, in saying what I have thought, I have laid blame almost exclusively upon artists, there is nothing in this which is unfair, or even uncomplimentary-were that the question. The position of the great mass of mankind towards Art can be but passive and receptive, it is from the artist alone that we may reasonably expect intelligent action, it is to the artist alone that it is worth while to address one's self in the hope of reform. And surely, it is from lack of moderation on the artist's part that all the trouble springs. Who would doubt that a substratum of truth underlies even the extremest views that are capable of being honestly held? Who would dispute a man's right to hold firmly to his own conviction? And who could refuse respect to the opinions of a man who had gained the right to be heard by the best of all claims -the ability to produce good work. But however firmly we may hold, and ought to hold, that which appears to us to be truth, we cannot but be in the wrong if we refuse to be satisfied unless all consciences are cut to our pattern. We might remember, even in our most excited moments, that bullying and persuading are two quite different courses, leading to totally dissimilar results; and we should not forget that the best of arguments are liable to be spoiled, if used as weapons wherewith to belabour our mortal foes. There is another way in which a similar forgetfulness of moderation, or perhaps in this case it would be better described as a loss of balance, appears to work an infinite mischief to Art. A mischief this, the more deplorable, inasmuch as it affects artist and public equally; and is, indeed, capable of producing evil in two opposite directions. Let me explain myself. It would seem to be a truism to assert that all Artpoetry, painting, sculpture, or what not-must necessarily spring from the union of two distinct faculties or powers; the conceptive power or faculty to conceive, and the craftsmanship or capacity to execute. Verse or prose, marble, wood, or canvass, the material in which we work must have been mastered by us before we can use it profitably; yet no mastery of workmanship can ever make that beautiful which came from the hands of the craftsman unhelped by the brain of the thinker. Of course these two powers, the power to conceive and the power to accomplish, are in no way incompatible; but the harmonious ease with which they blend tempts us often to forget that they are quite distinct. Either one may exist in a very high degree where the other is completely absent; and either one may be productive, alone, of much that is useful and pleasant; but of Art, assuredly not. Thousands of men and women in every age have the poet's mind, or whence would the poet draw his audience? Scarce one, perhaps, in a decade is born with the added capacity so to convey those thoughts to kindred minds as to cherish the hope that they may live. Hundreds of men and women in every age have the power of producing with pen, pencil, or graver, the very best and prettiest that can be made out of-nothing. Whence, otherwise, come the innumerable prettinesses which clothe the walls of our exhibitions, and in due time, of our houses? Whence, otherwise, the shower of melodious emptinesses which fall year by year, from a complaisant and prolific press-silent and transitory as the last snows of spring-but not always quite so pure? Did this affect the producers alone, or the public alone, we might very easily leave Time to produce its unfailing remedy; and leave to the curiosity of the antiquaries of the future, the task of collecting, with mute and uncomplimentary astonishment, the debris of the inanity of the present. Neither poems which are so completely questions of mere words that they might stand for the unaided product of a "rhyming dictionary," but for their sensuousness ; nor studies," as their authors are pleased to call them, in which the colour-box appears to have inverted the order of nature, and to have worked its own sweet will with the artist-could ever effect any permanent result whatever. These are but among the follies which are at once the offspring and the sustenance of fashion. Esthetics are in vogue to-day; yesterday it was—we have forgotten what; to-morrow it will be-who can say? Art has no concern in such whims, and why need we think twice of the vagaries of those who cannot think at all? But this is, unfortunately, by no means the end of the matter. When the practice of the artist becomes debased, the taste of the people becomes vitiated; nor can either result ensue without a reaction which intensifies the other—and so, from bad to worse. Here again the picture is a dark one; but to me, a mere outsider with much interest in—but no interest arising out of-Art, it assuredly does not seem overdrawn. Look for a moment at book illustration; not the loftiest, but beyond question one of the most influential and significant forms of art-work just now. Can anyone glance at the elaborate woodcuts so profusely used, and remember that every minutest line means a ridge cut with patient care and closest exactitude, without both wondering how men can carve wood so finely, and why they should do it? Let us take for example the woodcuts in Scribner's Magazine, perhaps in one way the finest examples of this particular art ever produced. In what does the "fineness" lie, save in the fineness of the lines, and in the undoubted fineness of the mere workmanship? As mere tours-de-force these achievements may attract a certain attention, and even command a certain respect, but unless Bewick and all past masters of the art were utterly mistaken, then the success attained by the proprietors of Scribner's Magazine must be a success precisely in the wrong direction. Every process of book illustration within reach is imitated by them as if in pure contempt alike of the fact that truth is the foundation of all real achievement in art, and of the probability that in wood-engraving, as in all other work, there is some distinctive advantage which may not be neglected, and some best way which cannot be bettered. Nothing can excel the smoothness of the paper and the glossiness of the impression,-if smoothness and glossiness were art The block has been tortured and worked until background and foreground are one shiny surface of printers' ink, and all the suggestive contrasts upon which artistic delineation so largely depends for its charm are necessarily ignored. The aid even of mechanical processes has been called in to replace by its spiritless minuteness and exactitude, so far as may be, the work of the nervous finger of the engraver. The craftsmanship has been permitted to become everything, and the conception nothing. Yet these tame prettinesses are the fashion, and are admired, copied, and envied, while the very principle upon which they are effected is radically wrong; and the editor speaks of them with a bland self-satisfaction as literally suffused with feeling," while their very system renders the expression of any real artistic feeling by them a simple impossibility. Nor are examples of the other extreme by any means lacking. Ideas the most crude, memoranda the most vague, sketches the most primeval, are hurried from their legitimate places in the artists' studios into publicity, with little consideration as to how anyone but the author can understand, or be profited by, mere scraps of his unfinished work. Foundations may be altogether perfect in their way, and walls rough from the builder's hand all sufficient so far as their intent extends, but they would certainly not be accepted as satisfactory structures. Why should such uncompleted commencements be forced into so untimely a birth in art ? Posterity may very properly collect with loving care the unfinished essays of the dead master, and may regard with something more than respect the evidences of patient labour, and the faint traces of noble conceptions never now to be carried into effect. It is a far different matter when a living artist obtrudes upon the public work which he has lacked either the time, the inclination, or it may even be the ability to finish. We accept "Denis Duval" and "Edwin Drood" with sorrowful reverence, for their author's hands almost stiffened upon the maimed page, and their minds were diligent to the last upon the never now to be accomplished work. What should we have thought of them had they been left unfinished of wilful choice-torsos, headless and handless, thanks neither to time nor to fate, but to the apathy of those who had undertaken them? What then shall we think of etchings so recklessly rough that they seem at first sight impressions from the buffer-plates of an engine after a violent collision; of studies in colour so formless that the bewildered workman knows not on which side he should affix the rings when he has framed them; of "harmonies" so unintelligible that it becomes doubtful whether the artist may not inadvertently have sent his palette for exhibition instead of his canvass; and of Shakespearian designs so hasty that some of the characters represented have bodies thirteen times the length of their heads—a proportion most providentially unknown to Nature. It would be pure waste of time to enlarge upon the manner in which these opposite errors, united only in their results, act and react upon artist and public mutually. The one, elbowed from the more popular and immediately influential phase of his art by the demand for mechanical prettinesses which lie within the reach of mechanical skill, designs only what can be accomplished virginibus puerisque, and ceases to cultivate a craftsmanship which demands both time and care, and which is neither appreciated nor recompensed. The public, always surely in matters of art a learner, and generally a patient and submissive learner, is left to piece together its notions of art as it may between highly-finished woodcuts in which skill is everything and meaning nothing, and highly unfinished pictures which leave him to conjecture anything or nothing as to their meaning. If English artists be (in the mass) notoriously deficient in technical skill, while the English public is quite equally notoriously deficient in artistic judgment-what is this but to state in other words that the former have ceased to possess-precisely what they have trained the latter to disregard. It would not be for a mere outsider to suggest the remedies for so grave a mischief, were not the remedies required so simple and so obvious in themselves. Moderation, prudence, common-sense-nothing more than these seems to be needed; and their effect, if neither sudden nor sensational, will at least be sure and wholesome. We ask that artists and architects would mercifully remember that they exist in the nineteenth century; and that, supposing that fact to be regrettable, it is neither chargeable to us nor alterable by them. Were they at liberty to put back the clock at their pleasure, and to choose their country and their age-their art might naturally be also a matter of choice. But they are not. Imperfect and unaesthetic, or, perhaps, worse stillæsthetic-as we may be, we are nevertheless necessary factors in their work, and the Art which neither elevates, nor interprets, nor even (except as a fashion) interests Us-labors under the disadvantage of being, for all practical purpose, no Art at all. If we are not so vain as to suppose that there is nothing for us to learn from the past, neither let our teachers be so absurd as to suppose there is nothing for us to admire in the present. Whatever there is in us that is commonplace and vulgar it is the very mission of Art to elevate and to refine; but this must be done by patient teaching, and not by impatient scolding. So that if we are sunken very low (which is a matter of opinion) needs must be that that which is to raise us higher should stoop the more to reach us-a humility which will answer much better in the end than any quantity of never so eloquent denunciations from the clouds far away above our heads. In fine, that art may be respected, it must respect both ourselves and itself. To treat the outer world as de haut en bas in all matters of taste and culture is not the way; and to fling it unfinished work and half expressed thought with the air of saying, "see what noble thir gs I could have done had I thought it worth while," is not the way. Art is indeed humiliated when we place ourselves before her, and think our hastiest work sufficient to serve her inspirations. She is indeed degraded when we conceive of her as though, like one of ourselves, she could consent to be elaborately dressed and to have nothing to say. But to bring her to satisfy the innate and universal longing for the beautiful in a way which the unlearned may understand; and to make her express the feelings common to all humanity with a patient regard to the special circumstances of our day, this is never to humiliate, or to degrade her ; it is to ennoble her, and to make her divine. ACHESPÈ. STANZAS. O SORRY change! how dull and dark O fleeting bliss! how full of gloom Where is the power can print on earth What art can reproduce the charm Of dreamland scenes the poet sees? C. |