Part 6

No one, surely, perceived more clearly that there is in every art an essential quality born of its material and resting with instinctive security upon its special resources and limitations, without which it can make no lasting claim to recognition. He never forgot that the painter or the poet who ventures to take upon himself added burthens of the spirit which he is unable to subdue to the conditions of the medium in which he works, can find no just defence for the violation of any of the conditions the chosen vehicle imposes, by an appeal to the intellectual or emotional value of the ideas he has sought to express. He looked perhaps with even excessive suspicion upon the interpretation through painting of subjects that suggested any sort of reliance upon the modes appropriate to other arts, with the result that the effects he achieved bear sometimes too strongly the stamp of calculated effort. Science was a word he was very fond of employing with regard to painting, and though it implied a just rebuke to those who were wont to make a merely sentimental appeal, it sometimes fettered his own processes and left upon some of the work he produced rather the sense of a protest against the false ideals of others than of the free and spontaneous enjoyment of the beauty in nature that he intended to convey.

But an artist, after all, is either something better or something worse than his theories, and Whistler was infinitely better. His instinct was sure, and within the limits he assigned to himself he moved with faultless security of taste. If the realm he conquered was not over richly furnished it was at any rate kept jealously free from the intrusion of inappropriate elements. Whatever was admitted there had an indisputable right to its artistic existence, and while he excluded much that other men, differently gifted, might equally have subdued to the conditions he was so careful to obey, such beauty as he found in nature was at least always of a kind that painting alone could fitly render.

To watch Whistler at work in his studio was quickly to forget that he had any theories at all. Nothing certainly could less resemble the assured processes of science than his own tentative and sometimes even timid practice; for although the result, when it received the final stamp of his approval, seemed often slight and was always free from the evidence of labour, labour most surely had not been absent, for the ultimate shape given to his design, though it may have represented in itself only a brief period employed in its execution, had in many cases been preceded by unwearying experiment and by many a misdirected adventure that never reached completion at all.

Whistler’s talk in the studio was not often concerned with the subject of Art, and even when Art was the topic it was nearly always his own. His admiration of the genius he unquestionably possessed was unstinted and sincere, and if he avoided any prolonged discussion of the competing claims of his contemporaries, it was, I think, in the unfeigned belief that they deserved no larger consideration. He had his chosen heroes among the masters of the past, but they were few, and their superior pretensions, in his judgment, were so manifest that it seemed sufficient to him to announce their supremacy without further parley as to the inferior claims of their fellows. The position they occupied in his regard was as little open to argument as the place of incontestable superiority he was wont to assign to himself in his own generation. I remember once, when a friend in his presence rashly ventured to accuse him of a lack of catholicity in taste, Whistler in swift response admitted the justice of the charge and excused himself on the ground that he only liked what was good.

But there were causes, apart from the convinced egotism of his nature, which led him by preference towards other topics of conversation. He has written in his lectures and in his letters both wisely and wittily of the proper mission of painting; so wittily, indeed, that his humour and satire are apt sometimes to obscure the sound and serious thought which, on this subject, coloured even his most playful utterances. For, underlying all he said or wrote, was a conviction he took no pains to conceal--that the principles of Art, together with its aims and ideals, were the proper concern only of artists and could scarcely be debated without impropriety by that larger and profaner circle whose praise and appreciation, however, he was by no means disposed to resent. At times he was even greedy of applause, and provided it was full and emphatic enough, showed no inclination to question its source or authority. There were moments, indeed, when, if it appeared to lack volume or vehemence, he was ready himself to supply what was deficient.

It was partly therefore upon principle that he forbore to discuss at any length subjects with which he deemed the layman had no proper concern; partly also because in intimate conversation his innate and powerful sense of humour so loved to assert itself that he wandered, by preference, into fields where it found unfettered play. And so it happened in the long and intimate talks in the studio, while he was at his work, he loved to speak of things that belonged to the outer world, and to let his wit play vividly, sometimes mischievously and even maliciously, upon the qualities and foibles of his friends. Here he was never reticent, and so relentless were his raillery and his sarcasm that one was sometimes tempted to think that his acquaintances, and even his friends, only existed for the purpose of displaying his powers of attack and annihilation. I remember very well, when he was decorating what afterwards became known as the “Peacock Room” in Mr. Leyland’s house, that I used often to visit him at his work, and sometimes shared with him the picnic meals which a devoted satellite would prepare for him in the empty mansion. He was certainly very proud of the elaborate scheme of blue and gold ornament he had devised, but I believe this unalloyed admiration of his own achievement was scarcely so great or so keen as his delighted anticipation of the owner’s shock of surprise when he should return to discover that the handsome and costly stamped leather, which originally adorned the walls of the apartment, had been completely effaced to make room for the newly fashioned pattern of decoration. He already scented the joy of the battle that impended, and this added a peculiar zest to his labours in the accomplishment of a purely artistic task. As he had hoped so indeed it happened, and in the long controversy and conflict that ensued, he found, I believe, the most perfect and unalloyed satisfaction.

His nature, in short, at every stage of his career was impishly militant, and whereas other men are so constituted as to desire peace at any price, there was with Whistler scarcely any cost he deemed too great to secure a hostile encounter. To baulk him of a controversy was to rob him of his peace of mind, and so deeply implanted in him was the fighting spirit that he was sometimes only half-conscious of the wounds he inflicted. Certain it is that, the lists once entered, he was relentless in attack, and availed himself without scruple of any weapon that came to his hand. And yet even in his most saturnine sallies there was an underlying sense of humour that yielded to the onlooker at least a part of the enjoyment that he himself drew from the encounter; while his after recital of the tortuous ingenuity with which he had whipped a harmless misunderstanding into a grave estrangement was always irresistible in its appeal.

But though pitiless in combat, Whistler was not without a chivalrous side to his nature. He was fond enough, to use his own expression, of “collecting scalps,” but his tomahawk was never employed against members of the gentler sex. His manner towards women was unfailingly courteous and even deferential. In their company he laid aside the weapons of war, exhibiting towards them on all occasions a delicacy of sympathy and perception which they instinctively recognised and appreciated. It set them at their ease. They felt they could listen with interest and amusement to his recital of those fearless and sometimes savage contests with the male, in complete security from any danger of the war being carried into their own country. They were conscious, in his presence, of an enduring truce between the sexes: a truce so artfully established and so chivalrously conceded as to arouse no suspicion that they were being treated with the indulgence due to inferiors. There was, indeed, in his own character and personality something of the charm, something also of the weakness, that is commonly supposed to be exclusively feminine. The alertness of his temperament betrayed an intuitive quickness in identifying himself with the mood of the moment that found in them a ready response; and his natural vanity, though it might sometimes seem overpowering to members of his own sex, was so exercised as to leave no doubt that he still held in reserve a full measure of the admiration which was due to theirs.

Even as a craftsman there was something delicately feminine in Whistler’s modes of work. I have often watched him at his own printing-press when he was preparing a plate of one of his etchings, and it was always fascinating to follow the deft and agile movements of his hands as he inked the surface of the copper and then, with successive touches, graduated the varying force of the impression to be taken. Here, as I used to think, his method seemed more assured, his alliance with the mechanical resources of his art more confident, than when he was struggling with the subtler and more complex problems of colour.

I have already spoken of those physical peculiarities with which he had been liberally endowed by nature. They were such as to make him a marked figure in any company in which he appeared, and, so far from being a source of embarrassment to himself, he regarded them as a substantial asset to be carefully cultivated and artfully obtruded upon public notice. He even went so far as to enforce and emphasise what there was of inherited eccentricity in his personal appearance. The single tuft of white hair which lay embedded in the coiling black locks adorning his brow, he regarded with a special complacency and pride; and I was amused one evening in Cheyne Walk, while I watched him dressing for dinner, to observe the infinite pains he bestowed upon this particular item of his toilet. It was already past the hour when we should both have been seated at our friend’s table, but this fact in no way abbreviated the care with which he cultivated and arranged this unique feature in his appearance.

And yet it would be wrong, perhaps, to ascribe the delay only to vanity, because to be late for dinner was with Whistler almost a religion. Certain it was, however, that he took a childish delight in any little studied departures from the rules of ordinary costume. At one time he ostentatiously abandoned the white neck-tie which was the accepted accompaniment of evening dress; at another, a delicate wand-like cane was deemed to be a necessary ornament to be carried in his walks abroad; and yet again he would announce an approved change in fashion by appearing in a pair of spotless white ducks beneath his long black frock-coat. These calculated eccentricities induced in the minds of the crowd the conviction that Whistler deliberately sought a cheap notoriety, and it must be conceded, even by those who recognised the serious side of his nature, that he exhibited at times a strange blend of the man of genius and the showman. And yet this admission might easily be made to convey a false impression. He was in a sense both the one and the other, but their separate functions were never merged or confused. Till his task as an artist was completed no man was more serious in his purpose or more exacting or fastidious in the demands he made upon himself. There was nothing of the charlatan in that part of him which he dedicated to his work; and it was not until the artist was satisfied that he availed himself of such antics as attracted, and perhaps were designed to attract, the astonished attention of the public.

One charge that was often urged against him by his enemies, arose out of the singular choice of titles for his pictures. But it was not, I think, in any spirit of affectation that he elected to describe some of his works in terms only strictly appropriate to music. His “Harmonies” and his “Nocturnes,” though they seemed at the time to indicate a certain wilful perversity, had in reality a true relation to principles in Art which he was earnestly seeking to establish. It has been rightly held of music that, in its detachment from the things of the intellect and its independence of defined human emotion, it stands as a model to all other modes of expression by its jealous guardianship of those indefinable qualities which are of the essence of Art itself. And in a sense it may be said of Whistler that he discharged a like function in the realm of painting. For all appeal made through other means than those strictly belonging to the chosen medium he had neither sympathy nor pity. It was for the incommunicable element in painting, incommunicable save through the unassisted resources of painting itself, that he was constantly striving, and it was his revolt against all alien pretensions that led him to seek and to adopt the analogy of music wherein the saving efficacy of such elements is never questioned.

THE ENGLISH SCHOOL OF PAINTING AT THE ROMAN EXHIBITION[1]

The British Section of the International Fine Arts Exhibition, to the study of which these pages are designed to serve as introduction, may claim to possess one or two features of exceptional interest. It is the first time that in any exhibition held outside the British Isles a serious endeavour has been made to illustrate the progressive movement of the English school of painting. The works of English painters have time and again been shown in the different capitals of Europe, and it is no longer possible to allege that the masters whose achievements we prize are unknown beyond the limits of our own shores. But the present occasion is the first wherein a serious and successful experiment has been made to render the chosen examples of the art of the past truly representative of the birth and growth of modern art in England and of the distinctive developments of style which have marked its history. And it is peculiarly fitting that this connected panorama of English art should be offered in the capital of a kingdom to whose example the art of every land has at some time owned its indebtedness. If it be true that every road leads to Rome, it is no less true that, since the dawn of the Renaissance, the footsteps of the artists of all northern lands have worn the several ways that make for Italy; and it will be seen, as we come to trace the story of painting in England, that, not only in its earlier appeal but again and again in the successive revolutions of style and method that have marked its progress, it has found renewed encouragement and fresh inspiration in the splendid and varied achievements of the great Italian masters, from Giotto to Michael Angelo, from Bellini to Tintoretto.

The history of painting in England precedes by more than a century the history of English painting. The force of the Reformation had unquestionably the effect of suddenly snapping the artistic tradition. At an earlier time England could boast of a race of artists who, as the illuminated manuscripts of the period clearly show, were able to hold their own with the most perfect masters in that kind that Europe could show; but with the advent of the Reformation the imaginative impulse of our people found a different channel. The strength of our Renaissance sought expression in our literature, and for a considerable period we became and remained indebted for all expression of pictorial design to a race of foreign artists who enjoyed the hospitality of our land. Even before the Reformation was complete Holbein had found a home at the English Court, and at a later period Rubens and his great pupil Van Dyck were invited to our shores. They brought with them to England the great tradition in portraiture that may be traced back to Italy--a tradition having its spring in the style and practice of the masters of Venice, whose devotion to Nature survived as an inheritance to Northern Europe when the more imaginative design of the school of Florence had fallen into decay.

It may be said of all modern art in whatever land we follow its story, that its master currents flow in the direction of portrait and landscape, and it was in these twin streams that the English school, when a century later it came into being, was destined to prove its acknowledged supremacy. But the realistic spirit which from the first had stamped itself upon the great Venetians, even at a period when they seemed to be labouring wholly or mainly in the service of religion, had gathered in its passage towards our shores yet another impulse, which found its first expression in the art of the Low Countries.

Of the painting of _genre_--that art which dwells lovingly upon the illustration of the social manners of the time--there is already a hint even in Venice itself; but it was in Holland that it first claimed a separate and secure existence; and it was to the examples in this kind, perfected by the Dutch masters, that we owe the achievement of the great painter who may be claimed as the founder of the modern English school. That school may be said, indeed, to date from the birth of William Hogarth. English painters--not a few--had practised before his time, but their work only followed, without rivalling, that of foreign contemporaries under whose influence they laboured. Hogarth was the first who by the independence of his genius gave the seal and stamp of national character to the pictorial illustration of the manners of his age. It was the fashion at one time to dwell almost exclusively upon Hogarth’s qualities as a satirist, to the neglect of those more enduring claims which are now conceded to him as a great master of the art he professed; but the criticism of a later time has repaired that injustice, and Hogarth takes his place now not merely in virtue of the social message he sought to convey, but even more by reason of his great qualities as a colourist and a master of tone. Not that we need underrate or ignore those dramatic elements by which he still makes so strong an appeal to our admiration. It is rare enough, even among the supreme painters of _genre_, to find so faithful, so penetrating an insight into character. Of all the great Dutchmen whom he succeeded Jan Steen alone can, in this particular, claim to be his rival; and although the English school is specially rich in the class of composition which his genius and invention had initiated, there are none of all those who have practised in a later day who would not still own him as their master.

The two examples secured for the present exhibition show Hogarth at his best, both as a painter and as an inventor. “The Lady’s Last Stake”--contributed by Mr. Pierpont Morgan--even when our admiration has been glutted by the rich evidence it affords of Hogarth’s unrivalled control of a kind of truth that might have found expression in an art other than the art of the painter, still draws from us the unstinted homage due to a great colourist whose chosen tints are submitted with unfailing skill to every delicate and subtle gradation of tone; while in “The Card Party,” lent by Sir Frederick Cook, where these qualities are not less clearly announced, we are left at leisure to follow and appreciate the unflagging observation which registers every detail that serves for the dramatic presentation of the chosen theme.

From the time of Hogarth to our own day this particular style, which he may claim to have originated, has never lacked professors. As it passed into the hands of Wilkie satire is softened by sympathy, the foibles of character are touched with a gentler and more tender spirit, and the adroitly ordered groups, with which he sometimes loves to crowd his canvas, tell, in their final impression, of the presence of a kind of sentiment, sometimes perhaps even of a measure of sentimentalism, which scarcely came within the range of Hogarth’s fiercer survey of life. And, again, in the later work of Orchardson sentiment and satire have both yielded to another ambition that was content to render with unfailing sympathy and distinction of style the finer graces of social life. In the superb picture of “The Young Duke” we may note how clearly the gifts of the painter dominate the scene, his eye ever on the alert for the opportunities of rich and delicate harmonies supplied by every chosen accessory of costume and furniture; and no less eager to exhibit and to record by means of the subtle resources of his art those finer shades of social breeding that the subject suggests. In this power of granting a nameless dignity to the art of _genre_--a dignity resident in the painter which by some strange magic he contrives to confer upon the people of his creation--Sir William Orchardson sometimes recalls the art of Watteau, who indeed remains unrivalled in his power to perceive and his ability to register those slighter realities of gesture and bearing which give to the rendering of trivial things a distinction which only style can bestow.

It is interesting to turn from this characteristic example of Sir William Orchardson’s style to the work of an elder contemporary in the person of Frith. The two artists--though both may be said to be engaged in the same task--make a widely contrasted appeal. With the former, whatever other message he may intend to convey, the claims of the painter stand foremost. We are conscious of the controlling influence of the colourist and the master of pictorial composition before we are permitted to study or to enjoy the human realities that he has chosen to depict. With Frith, on the other hand, it is the human element in the design that first arrests our attention. Gifts of a purely artistic kind he undoubtedly possessed, as the example here exhibited sufficiently proves--gifts which at one time criticism tended to ignore or to undervalue; but it remains finally true nevertheless that it is as a student of manners, presented in a form sometimes recalling the arts of the theatre, that Frith makes his first appeal to our attention. In this respect he claims kinship with Hogarth himself, whose influence, I doubt not, he would have been proud to acknowledge.

“Coming of Age in the Olden Time,” necessitating, by the choice of its subject, the employment of historic costume, illustrates only one aspect of Frith’s varied talent, and he will perhaps be best remembered by such works as “The Railway Station” and “Ramsgate Sands,” where he is called upon to render with unflinching fidelity those facts of contemporary dress in which painters differently gifted find no picturesque opportunity; and whatever may be Time’s final judgment upon Frith’s claim in the region of pure art, it cannot be questioned that such richly peopled canvases must for ever remain an invaluable record of the outward realities of the generation for which he labored.