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I




THE DESIRE OF BEAUTY




I
I
I
I
I




THE


DESIRE OF BEAUTY
BEING INDICATIONS FOR
/ESTHETIC CULTURE
BY
THEODORE CHILD


*.
LONDON
JAMES R. OSGOOD, McILVAINE & CO.
45 ALBEMARLE STREET, W.
1892
[All rigtts reserved




I  14 a




) - 2he     7
Co XTe& CTS
Page
I. The Solitude of the Soul...   I
II. The Invention of Beauty...   8
III. Various Kinds of Criticism.. 38
IV. The Joy of Art.... 74
V. The Error of Realism... 96
VI. Papier Ingres..... I9
VII. An Art Critic of the Fifteenth Century.....      135
VIII. The Education of the Eye.. 49




I




I


THE SOLITUDE OF THE SOUL
WHAT a difficult thing it is to discuss
orally with one or more persons! How
difficult to make them understand one's
own thoughts and to understand theirs
in turn! Above all things, how difficult
and how full of snares and of pitfalls is
a discussion on some aesthetic subject,
for in the domain of the sensations and
emotions produced by art and its manifestations there seems to reign nothing
but confusion, ambiguity, and misunderstanding. On almost every point that
can be raised, clear comprehension is
rarely attained by those who discuss.
If we ask what is meant by the art
A




2       -The Desire of Beauty


sentiment, what is the nature of the
artist, what the nature of the critic, and
what the role of criticism, the replies
will be innumerable; but, for the want
of the leisure and method of Socrates
and his tenacious pupils, those who take
part in the argument generally lose sight
of truth and of the question at issue, and
their discourse soon degenerates into a
flux of words without serenity.
The souvenir of many such empty
discussions and of the sensations of
loneliness, disappointment, and irritation
which one feels when the argument ends,
as it must end, in a fiasco, has prompted
me to endeavour to write out clearly in
the tranquillity of my closet some of
the affirmations and suggestions that I
would fain have made in many a past
debate had my tongue been readier and
had my interlocutors been more calm and
tenacious of truth.




t'he Solitude of the Soul    3
First of all, let us ask what is our
object and hope in entering upon the
discussion of an aesthetic subject. But
before attempting to answer, let us
beware of the illusions of unprecise language, and let us resolve at once to
define the adjective " aesthetic " as signifying that which is concerned with the
sentiment of beauty. As for the noun
"' aesthetic," meaning the science which
determines the character of beauty in
the productions of Nature and of art, let
us remember that this nebulous invention
of a German specu latist is no real
science at all, but simply a conglomeration of dogmas, moral principles and
scientific truths, the mixture of which in
countless permutations and combinations
has mightily increased the sum of confusion in which the modern intellect
flounders, as it were, in a dark morass.
The philosophy of taste is a science of




4      The Desire of 5Beauty


no consistency whatever, if we endeavour
to submit its essence to definite axioms
instead of purely and simply ascertaining
and recording its phenomena.
These points being determined, we may
return to our question: Why does one
discuss?
First of all, let us put out of account
such paltry motives as the desire to
display our learning, to show off our
superior wit, and to triumph over our
interlocutors. A sophist might obey incentives of this nature, but it is only
when the sophist is an Apuleius that
such motives become respectable. We
will also put out of the question the
desire to convince and to proselytise,
which is indicative of primitive culture.
We will furthermore agree to neglect
those who discuss with a view to learning; for in asthetic matters, properly so
called, there is little to be learnt; the




tfhe Solitude of the Soul


5


novice must seek suggestion rather than
doctrine; the true critic is a mystagogue
who lifts the veil, and not a professor or
a judge who indoctrinates or chastises.
Generally, it would appear, we are
led into a discussion by accident, from
habit, from the instinctive desire to contradict or contest a statement which may
seem to us erroneous or unmeasured.
Now, supposing that the discussion
reveals complete want of sympathy
between the interlocutors, or supposing
that it has a more favourable issue and
shows the existence of partial or intermittent sympathy; in the end the feeling
is invariably the same in kind. In an
extreme case we are more or less consciously ruffled and irritated; we feel
that our personality, our ego, has been
diminished by an unworthy contact; our
soul experiences a sensation of humiliation, of indignation, and of wounded




6      The Desire of TBeauty
pride, analogous to that which might be
felt by a courteous, humane and benevolent gentleman who should find himself
hooted and stoned by an unappreciative
and brutal crowd. In the intermediate
case where intermittent or partial sympathy is encountered, one is still disappointed; the soul seems to protest
against being forced into the society of
other souls from contact with which it
can expect no complete joy; or else it
feels irritated to have demonstrated to
itself once more that its own dream of
the world is fated to be a solitary
prisoner ringed round by the thick wall
of personality. And yet these mingled
feelings of solitude, irritation, disappointment and humiliation testify to the presence in the soul of an instinctive desire,
the desire for sympathy.
It is the desire for sympathy alone
which induces the harmonious soul to




9the Solitude of the Soul


7


risk the interruption of its noble serenity
and to quit for a while the solitude of its
palaces of Memory and Imagination.
By sympathy the soul hopes to augment that intense consciousness, that
wide comprehension and that tender
reverie which is the ideal of the inner
life-of that sumptuous experience, grave
even unto melancholy, which consists in
the endeavour to realise the superior
being which is within each one of us.
The cultured soul is necessarily egotistic. Its credo is the indefinite perfectibility of the ego; its aim is happiness, the
pursuit of which is itself happiness, inasmuch as the means in this case are more
precious than the end-if, indeed, they are
not themselves the end. Convinced that
things have only the importance which
we deign to attribute to them, the cultured
soul, seeking to live harmoniously, does
not allow its serenity to be at the mercy




8      The Desire of Beauty
of eventualities. Self-possessed, duplex,
bilateral, the cultured soul's existence
is passed in seeking incessantly new
motives of aesthetic activity, and in finding delicate pleasure in the perpetual
contemplation of this activity as it is
manifested in states of soul with their
concomitant emotions and sensations.
A common example will illustrate
what we mean by the solitude of the soul.
Suppose that you find yourself in a mixed
company of men, as happens, for instance,
in travelling, on shipboard, in hotels. You
know none of these men, but, by dint of
observing them, you discriminate roughly
between those who are clearly unsympathetic, or at any rate negligeable, and
the few that seem to invite friendly relations and to be humanly sympathetic.
With these latter, after various discreet
essays and trials of manners and sentiments, you gradually enter into relations




ihe Solitude of the Soul


9


generally of a very superficial kind, it
is true, but nevertheless of the same
order as the closest relations of friendship and of domestic affection, which are
commonly reputed to come from the
heart. In the formation of relations of
the aesthetic and intellectual order, the
process is similar.  To take a simple
case: imagine yourself at the theatre, and
by some accident or other you have got
into conversation with your neighbour.
Very gently you feel your ground, and
generally, not with a view to discovering
subjects of common admiration, but
rather with a view to ascertaining subjects of common contempt, which is far
easier and more expeditious; so that
when you find you are agreed in despising the audience, the play, the authors
and the actors, you may push the hazardous experiment further, and take footing
on this basis of common contempt in order




Io     fhe Desire of TBeauty
to feel the ground inversely, with a view
to discovering subjects of common admiration. Thus we might enunciate the
pleasant paradox that superficial manifestations of artistic and literary, or, to
be more comprehensive, let us say, of
aesthetic sympathy, spring generally from
a basis of common contempt.
In the contingencies of real life cultured souls form acquaintance in the
manner roughly indicated above. They
begin by eliminating subjects of contempt,
and then very cautiously reveal their most
cherished idols to one another, not all at
once as if they were of small value or
importance, but little by little in proportion as the one discovers reasons to hope
that the other will comprehend and appreciate.  Sometimes, it is true, the revelation of potential sympathy is due to the
accidental discovery of a common object of
admiration, but this discovery can inspire




The Solitude of the Soul


I I


but very limited confidence until it has
been succeeded by minute and prolonged
explanations and annotations in the aesthetic, the intellectual, and the emotional
order. The negative process is the more
usual, perhaps, both in the commerce of
conversation and in the commerce of
books.
Andl this is natural, for the cultured
soul is constantly impressed with its own
solitude; it feels itself enveloped in
mystery and imprisoned in the confused
conditions of its immaterial existence,
inseparably linked to the dark materiality
of the body; it is conscious of noble
longings and limpid aspirations; but
not only does it fail to find the means of
completely satisfying these longings and
aspirations, it cannot even give to them
adequate expression, it cannot explain its
feelings in such a perfectly lucid manner
as to be integrally comprehended by




12    VThe Desire of Beauty
other souls;-there always subsists an
element of doubt and mistrust. There is
no perfect sympathy in the aesthetic order.
The soul that seeks to communicate
with another soul suggests the comparison of a chimera buzzing vaguely in
space in pursuit of another chimera.
One soul calls to the other and gazes
upon it vaguely through the envelope of
matter, and the other gazes in turn and
responds.  But the response is not clear,
the sound of the voice is muffled, the expression is halting and incomplete; the
vision which each soul has of the other
is partial; an indestructible element of
unintelligibility floats like a veil between
the two souls, preventing complete contact and rendering perfect sympathy unattainable; for it is impossible to ascertain the exact identity of the ideas,
emotions, and sensations which the same
words evoke in different souls.  In the




T'he Solitude of the Soul


I3


obscure dungeon of the body, the soul
lurks unrestful; in vain it endeavours
to reveal itself phase after phase; like the
moon, it has other phases which are
hopelessly concealed. By the mysterious
processes of heredity, of physiological
accidents and of culture, the soul develops a complex individuality composed of
instinctive and acquired delicacy, of
habits of thought and refinements of
vision, of vague and precise ideas, of intellectual and aesthetic formulae, which
another soul can never completely control, because there is no veritable common measure.   Hence the great store
we set by definitions, and hence the
desire to remake the dictionary, which we
often hear expressed by ingenuous interlocutors whom experience has not yet
convinced of the inevitable illusion of
dialectics. By remaking the dictionary,
beginning at the beginning, and agreeing




14     T'he Desire of Beauty


as to definitions, we hope to arrive at
complete comprehension, and it is this
hope that keeps man eternally interested
in intellectual speculations, ever ready to
recommence the Sisyphaean task, never
disheartened in spite of incessant disappointment, and yet rarely having the
courage to confess that the secret charm
and profound attraction of transcendental
questions consists wholly in the pursuit
of unknown truths which ever escape
our grasp. In the sublime and serene
intellects of the golden age of Greek
philosophy, in the intellects of a Xenophanes, a Democritus, and an Epicurus,
the universe appeared to be unknowable
in itself. The conclusions of physiological psychology, of the doctrines of evolution and transformism, of the philosophy
of modern science, are identical in spirit
with those of the old Greek philosophers
and of their Latin poet, Lucretius. The




The Solitude of the Soul


5


universe, as it appears to us, is a cerebral phenomenon; such is the formula
at which the eminent French psychologist,
M. Jules Soury, has arrived, and which
he has summed up in the following passage of sublime sadness:
"Certainly, Nature exists; she is our
mother; we issue from her bosom, and
to her bosom we return. The grain of
wheat cast into the furrow germinates
and rises out of the ground, the ear of
wheat becomes bread and is transformed
in man into flesh and blood, into the
pregnant ovule whence is developed
the embryon, the child, the man; then
the corpse fertilises the soil, which will
bear other harvests, and so through
centuries of centuries, without our being
able to say or to understand why.
" For, if there is anything vain and
useless in the world, it is the birth, the
existence, and the death of the innume



i6     The Desire of Beauty
rable parasites, fauna and flora, which
vegetate like mould and act on the surface
of this humblest of the planets, which is
being dragged along in the wake of the
sun towards some unknown constellation.
Indifferent in itself, necessary in any case,
since it is, this existence which has for
its conditions violence or ruse, love that
is bitterer than death, the desperate
struggle of all against all, will appear, at
least to every being who is truly conscious,
a sinister dream, a painful hallucination,
compared with which annihilation would
be a blessing.
" But if we are the sons of Nature, if
she has created us and given us being, it
is we, in our turn, who have endowed
her with all the ideal qualities that adorn
her in our eyes; it is we who have
woven the luminous veil beneath which
she appears to us. The eternal illusion
that enchants or torments the heart of




tihe Solitude of the Soul


I7


man is entirely his own work. In this
universe, where all is darkness and silence,
man alone watches and suffers, because,
with his inferior brothers, he meditates
and thinks."


B




II


THE INVENTION OF BEAUTY
THAT all is illusion, and that the only
thing permanent and eternal is illusion
may seem at first sight a saddening doctrine. But when we remember its remote
antiquity, and the fact that it has been
held by some of the most sublime, the
most gentle and the most polished intellects which the world has ever seen,
it appears rather a source of consolation
and of superior joy. To think that the
intellect of man has draped Nature in veils
of beauty, and endowed with ideal qualities and with all the enchantments of
poetry and reverie a force which is blind,
horrible, incomprehensible and hostile to




The Invention of Beauty


I9


man, is no small inducement for man to
bow down and worship his intellect, or
at least to regard it as the most precious
of his possessions, the most worthy of all
respect, of all honour and of all love.
But the intellect alone, however full
and glorious its conscious development
and activity may be, is not supreme.
Above intellect is instinct, the unconscious, that mysterious impulsion beyond
all analysis, that something mightier than
reason, which makes the future and forms
the world. It is the unconscious which
saps theories as fast as philosophers
make them, and renders classification imperfect, so that they endure but a day.
For reason does not facilitate what we are
about to become, nor does it even suspect
what the future will bring forth.
And yet this irresistible power of the
unconscious, of the world-spirit, of the
zeitgeist, of the soul of the race, does nct




20      The Desire of Beauty


disturb the serenity of the individual
intellect. Why should it be expected to
do so? The tendency of culture is to
develop an attitude of gravity free from
astonishment in presence of the phenomena of the universe. The cultured
soul is full of inexhaustible curiosity, of
that inestimable condition of the intellect
which enables us to conceive the universe
as an immense rebus, the key to which
we are incessantly seeking with the
moderate ardour of one who hopes not
for success, but yet enjoys the incidents
of the search; just as one may take pleasure in billiards without ever winning a
game, and be a passionate angler without
being sure of filling one's basket with fish.
Curiosity is the source of the infinite joys
of science and of all kinds of analysis,
whether abstract or applied. It is curiosity which makes the cultured mind broad
in its interests, enabling it to appreciate




T'he Invention of ~Beauty


21


at once the most modest and the most
considerable efforts of humanity; the
eternal contradictory experiments of practical politics and the continual renovation
of art; the transcendental speculations
of the philosophers and the detailed experiments of the practical scientists; the
ephemeral inquisitiveness of the newspaper reporter and the more reasoned
and durable records of the novelist, the
sociologist and the historian; the noblest
productions of the poets and the frivolous
and yet symbolic couplets of the popular
song-writers; the pictures, the statues,
and the music of the men of genius, and
the gaudy print, the vulgar fetich, or the
commonplace refrain that contributes to
the joy and the happiness of the uncultured masses.  Nothing is more alien
to culture than the positive or scholastic
spirit which makes a man believe that his
own way of thinking and feeling is alone




22      The Desire of IBeauty


reasonable, and that all others are affectation, foolishness, and hypocrisy. While
the categoric mind despises all ideas
which it does not share, the cultured
mind is content to ascertain ideas and
to comprehend them. The former seeks
to impose its will; the latter accepts,
comprehends, and classifies always with
reference to its own harmony.
Therefore is it alien to the modern
spirit of culture to sustain that there are
fixed laws in the aesthetic domain, forming as it were a sacred code of which
criticism is a sort of jurisprudence confirming and explaining those laws. The
artist, both in his essence and in his
manifestations, has to be considered in
his relation to the eternal and universal
illusion. Painting appears to us to be
an art of representation, but not a mimetic
art; its object is not the exact imitation
of Nature, but the reproduction of an




The Invention of Beauty


23


artist's vision of Nature, and in the determination of the character of that vision
various physical, emotional, and intellectual qualities intervene. These qualities
again determine the importance of the
artist and the interest of his work. The
base of all artistic genius, it has been
said, is the power of conceiving humanity
in a new, striking, rejoicing way, " of
putting a happy world of its own creation
in place of the meaner world of common
days, of generating around itself an atmosphere with a novel power of refraction, selecting, transforming, recombining
the images it transmits, according to the
choice of the imaginative intellect." The
artist is an inventor of beauty, and the
invention of beauty itself is an operation
of mysterious complexity defying ultimate
analysis; for, although we are able to
note certain concomitant and conducive
circumstances which the inventor of




24      ihe Desire of PBeauty


beauty resumes, dominates and makes
the foundation or starting-point of his
own creations; and although we are able
to establish a co-ordination of phenomena,
conditions and consequences which we
call the philosophy of art; yet in the end
we are perpetually deceived, and the last
effort of our analysis dashes itself vainly
against the blind wall of the inexplicable,
whether it be named " genius," "beauty,"
or " nature," all three words being mere
syllabic and illusory strongholds by
means of which thought seeks to deceive
itself and to assert an unreal empire over
the unknowable.
The great artist is a man of rare and
exquisite composition, who looks at Nature
through his special temperament and sees
beautiful personal visions such as none
have ever before beheld; he has particular physical gifts of eye and of hand,
which are developed by exercise, and




tJhe Invention of Beauty


25


certain gifts of sentiment, of passion and
of intellect, the origin of which is lost in
the mystery of heredity and accident;
he has above all things an intimate personality, the solitary prisoner of his soul,
the lord and master of his peculiar visual,
intellectual, and psychic processes, the
secrets of which he can never communicate to another.  Therefore, we say that
the truly great artist depends upon himself
and is surety for himself alone: his own
works are all that he can promise and
bequeath to the future; he cannot teach
others to become great; his essence is
inexplicable like that of his productions;
for no critical analysis can ascertain what
is the vital principle of a work of art, any
more than chemical analysis can surprise
the vital principle of works of animate
nature. We can observe, examine, describe, and admire them, but we cannot
ultimately explain.  The great artist, in




26      rhe Desire of ~Beauty
painting his personal visions of Nature,
reflects into the artist's representation
something of his own soul and of the
soul of his country or of his times; for
the painter, like the poet, is not wholly his
own master, but, as the ancients expressed
it, the servant of the Muses.  In other
words, we must admit an element of unconsciousness, of inspiration, of destiny
in the great artist, an element that we
cannot analyse, but which seems to
emanate from the great Maya herself,
from that all-pervading and immortal
Illusion which is the mother of the world.
Thus it happens that in the works of the
great artists, or, as we would prefer to
call them, of the inventors of beauty,
which abound in these mysterious qualities of soul, we find charms and beauties
that the artist himself doubtless never
perceived, while our successors on the
earth will perhaps in their turn find in




the Invention of TBeauty


27


them new charms which are unsuspected
by us. Therefore, the signification of
great works of art is inexhaustible and
their suggestiveness lasting; there is an
element of life in them which their
creators cannot know.
The great painters of the category implied by the above speculations are rare,
and their works shine eternally in the
history of human culture as landmarks
and perpetual sources of joy and refinement. Such are the supreme inventors
of beauty, the mighty and truly original
geniuses. But the majority of painters
are not of this calibre; they are men
who follow in the paths which the inventors have traced, or at best in by-paths
which the inventors have indicated but
disdained to follow; this majority forms
the throng of imitators, pupils, or artists
of secondary merit.  Each age has its
inventors of beauty or its strongly per



28    YThe Desire of Beauty
sonal spirits, and in each age the imitators and the artists of feebler personality
find themselves embarrassed in the choice
of an idol.
" Which is the true path? " they ask
in those vague discussions which are
generally fruitless because the interlocutors do not speak the same language.
" Who is the true master?  In whose
gospel shall we place our faith? " And
the names of the most reputed innovators
of the day are bandied back and forth,
and condemned or applauded with equal
vehemence by one or the other.
"Which is the true path in art?"
Surely there is no one true path, but
many paths. If there were one true path
there would be but one kind of painting,
whereas the kinds of painting have been
innumerable in the past, and seem likely
to be extremely various in the future, if
we may judge from the multiplicity, of




7ihe Invention of Beauty


29


the efforts of the present. To condemn
or to ridicule those painters of to-day
who are seeking the adequate expression
of their personal vision in manners that
seem perhaps strange, is easy indeed; but
the wiser course would be to try to comprehend those efforts and to grant to
them somewhat of that intelligent appreciation and reasonable sympathy for
which their souls and our own are longing.
Certainly all sincere convictions have a
right to be respected. On the other hand,
it will be always allowable to suggest to
those exclusive spirits who see the accomplishment of the conditions of art in one
manner only, that they thus deprive
themselves of varied and abundant sources
of admiration and joy. And this seems
to us true as applied to painters as well
as to the lovers of painting, though in a
lesser degree. The great masters, the
inventors, even the sincere artists of




30     'The VDesire of ~Beauty
secondary merit, who are developing and
expressing their personality within the
measure of their talent, are bound to be
firm in the pursuit of their own ideal,
swerving neither to the right nor to the
left, exclusive, and even intolerant. The
man who has conceived an ideal and
determined to realise it may justly content himself with the arduous and absorbing task that lie has before him, and
seek to remain isolated in his dream, free
from the detraction or the discouragement
which the contemplation of the works of
others might provoke. On the other
hand, for those who pretend to contemplate pictures and to speak of their qualities, whether they be simply cultivated
citizens or professional critics, toleration
becomes an indispensable condition of
equity, and an attitude which self-interest
and the pursuit of pleasure demand.  It
is the business oi these men not to in



T'he Invention of Beauty


31


vent beauty, but to appreciate and enjoy,
and to facilitate the enjoyment of others.
Therefore, without falling into the indifference of languid dilettantism, it is desirable to embrace all the aspects of art,
and to apply to their study and enjoyment the reasonable sympathy of the
most liberal and lucid culture.
From the point of view here adopted,
that criticism which says absolutely
" this is good " or " this is bad," has no
reason to exist.  As regards recognised
manifestations of art we have terms of
comparison and classification in those
works of the past with which they may
present points of resemblance.  In the
case of novel manifestations of art, we
can seek to comprehend, we can ascertain merits and aspirations, and, in the
measure of our sympathy, we can
appreciate and enjoy. We might take
as an instance some of the extreme




32     The Desire of Beauty
groups of the young French painters of
the present day whose pretensions are
similar to those of the musicians, and
who seek to express by colour rather
than by form, vaguely and without precision as the matter demands, certain
aspirations of the modern soul and
certain modes of sensibility. To some
few souls these painters are eloquent,
while to others their pictures are mere
foolishness. But who shall condemn
them? Who shall judge? Who shall
decide whether the painters in question are morbid and unprofitable, or
whether they are the precursors, if not
the rising geniuses, of a new artistic
evangel?
Every truly personal artist has seemed
strange at first until the eyes of his
contemporaries grew accustomed to his
work and conveyed to their minds its
newly discovered charm. Giotto was a




The Invention of Beauty


%3 3


revolutionist from the point of view of
those whose ideal of pictorial art remained the hieratic images of the Byzantine school. The naturalist painters of
Florence, Masaccio and Lippo Lippi,
were violent innovators and rank heretics
in art from the point of view of those
who were satisfied with the mystic
visions of Fra Angelico and the painters
of Siena. Leonardo was an innovator
and a revolutionist, inasmuch as he
pursued the rendering of light and shade,
whereas the classical art of the day was
content with the flatness of frescopainting. In their day all great artists
have been exposed to the more or less
violent attacks of the self-constituted
guardians of supposedly immortal principles of art manifested in the works of
the past, and therefore exacted in the
works of the present. Modern humanity
has not changed in this respect.  There
C




34     the 'Desire of Beauty


are still self-imposed guardians of the
immortal principles; it is still the tendency of the majority to scoff at that
which is unusual and nonconformist; it
is still the fate of the innovator to be
held in suspicion, until the times become
ripe when he will be comprehended and
classed with the masters, if such be his
deserts.
Modern criticism will beware of falling
into the errors of the uncultured, knowing that its business is the sympathetic
and intelligent ascertainment of qualities
and aspirations which it finds expressed
in a work of art, with more or less intensity and in adequate conditions of
beauty. It will beware also of venturing
to point out the true path, knowing that
the great men trace paths for themselves
and follow them in all the plenitude and
exuberance of their personality. Likewise the critic will refrain from desig



The Invention of 5Beauty


35


nating the true master, because there is
no one true master. There are inventors
and there are imitators, and the inventors form a noble family which increases
slowly, and all of whose members have
marked memorable epochs in the development of humanity. As for the imitators
and the subordinate geniuses who have
not introduced an absolutely new note
into art or revealed a truly novel vision
of Nature, their lot in life is often
brilliant and their fame widespread, but
the judgment of ultimate criticism relegates them to the second, the third, and
lower ranks of glory, if not to definitive
oblivion according to the degree of their
personality. Of mere slavish imitators
it is useless to take account.  We refer
rather to those painters whose personality is more or less weak, and who
submit to the influence of the great
masters so far as to be constantly mind



36     The Desire of Beauty
ful of what has been accomplished, and
to be endeavouring consciously or unconsciously to work in the spirit and
manner of those artists of the past whose
productions most strongly appeal to them.
By men of such temperament, in whom
the faculty of memory is generally developed in a marked degree, no truly
original and vehemently personal work
can be achieved; their pictures always
evoke the phantom of the dead master;
they may have talent, power, charm, but
they are never true inventors of beauty
and artists of the supreme lineage.
Instances will at once suggest themselves
of eminent contemporary portrait painters
whose memories are for ever haunted by
the pictures of Velasquez. An example
of the influence of a single master of
special temperament upon a collectivity
is offered by the modern Munich school
during the long period while it was




The Invention of Beauty


37


animated by the misguided study of
Rembrandt. In both cases the error is
the same in kind, and proceeds from the
unintelligent admiration of the past; for,
as Taine has told us, every century,
with its peculiar circumstances, produces
sentiments and beauties that are peculiar
to it, and as humanity advances it leaves
behind forms of society and sorts of
perfection that it will not find again. No
age has the right to impose its beauty
on succeeding ages; no age is bound to
borrow its beauty from preceding ages.
Therefore Taine concludes: "We must
neither depreciate nor imitate, but invent
and comprehend. History must be respectful and art original.  We must
admire what we have and what we lack;
we must do otherwise than our ancestors
and praise what our ancestors have
done."




VARIOUS KINDS OF CRITICISM
IN general every man believes himself
capable of judging a priori all creations
of man; however, if there be question of
certain artistic productions in which imagination prevails-for instance, music
or poetry-many will frankly proclaim
their incapacity to appreciate; but if the
work be a picture, all will be ready to
give an opinion, and none but the most
severely disciplined and self-critical intellects will conceive doubts as to their
competency.
This universality of appreciation in
the matter of painting, facilitated by the
instantaneity of the communication estab



Various Kinds of Criticism 39


lished by means of the eye between the
picture and the brain of the spectator,
proceeds from the fact that the majority
of people derive their criterion from the
relations which the work in question
presents with Nature. They base their
judgment on the ideas which they form
as to the resemblance or dissemblance
between the picture and the model as
they see it or as their memory recalls it.
The whole philosophy of current opinion
is summed up in these supposed principles
of common sense which, when carried
out to their logical conclusion, make the
excellence of a picture to consist in the
exactness of the imitation and reduce
painting to the rank of a mimetic art.
Such is the realist theory of painting as
it might be strictly interpreted.
Other critics who sneer at so gross a
conception as the theory of exact imitation, take up their position in the strong



40      Tfhe Desire of Beauty
holds of dogma and tradition, and, in
virtue of supposed principles and canons
of criticism, they award praise or blame,
controlling the practice of the artist,
giving him advice as to future conduct,
and otherwise acting as if they were the
possessors of the indisputable theory of
art, the guardians of the ideal, and the
sole dispensers of truth. The attitude
of these critics, whose criterion is the
work of the past as it appears when
looked at through the obscurity of traditional admiration, is necessarily hostile
to new efforts; all that is not in conformity with what has been done by the
masters of the past seems to them heretical and abominable; they are the blindly
conservative spirits who seek, not to
enjoy, but to gauge and to verify whether
or not a picture be executed according
to the traditional formulae. Of critics of
this category Sir Joshua Reynolds has




Various Kjnds of Criticism   41
discoursed very pleasantly in The Idler
(No. 76), in a passage which we beg
leave to quote at length, for it will aid
us greatly in our argument.
" I was much pleased," writes Sir
Joshua, "with your ridicule of those
shallow critics, whose judgment, though
often right as far as it goes, yet reaches
only to inferior beauties, and who, unable
to comprehend the whole, judge only by
parts, and thence determine the merits
of extensive works. But there is another
kind of critic still worse, who judges by
narrow rules, and those too often false,
and which, though they should be true,
and founded on Nature, will lead him but
a little way toward the just estimation of
the sublime beauties in a work of genius;
for whatever part of art can be executed
or criticised by rules, that part is no
longer the work of genius, which implies
excellence out of the reach of rules.




42      The Desire of Beauty


"For my own part, I profess myself
an Idler, and love to give my judgment,
such as it is, from my immediate perceptions, without much fatigue of thinking,
and I am of opinion that if a man has
not those perceptions right, it will be
vain for him to endeavour to supply their
place by rules, which may enable him
to talk more learnedly, but not to distinguish more acutely. Another reason
which has lessened my affection for the
study of criticism, is that critics, so far
as I have observed, debar themselves
from receiving any pleasure from the
polite arts, at the same time that they
profess to love and admire them, for these
rules being always uppermost give them
such a propensity to criticise, that instead
of giving up the reins of their imagination into their author's hands, their frigid
minds are employed in examining whether
the performance be according to the rules
of art.




Various Iinds of Criticism 43


"To those who are resolved to be
critics in spite of Nature, and at the same
time have no great disposition to much
reading and study, I would recommend
them to assume the character of connoisseur, which may be purchased at a much
cheaper rate than that of a critic in
poetry.  The remembrance of a few
names of painters with their general
characters, with a few rules of the
Academy, which they may pick up among
the painters, will go a great way towards
making a very notable connoisseur."
Yet another curious species of critic,
of which Ruskin is a type, seems to base
his talk upon the idea that the practice
of painting breeds corrupt propensities
to indolence and vicious conventionalism,
and fosters certain pernicious instincts
which lead the artist from the true path.
Therefore this critic praises an artist
when he seems to be struggling against
the bad tendencies that are in him, and




44    qihe Desire of Beauty


when his work shows evidences of careful,
sincere, and conscientious labour, which
presupposes a conflict between good and
evil, and indicates the triumph of the
former. Criticism of this kind may be
interesting, suggestive, and eloquent as
it is in the writings of Ruskin, but it
has more to do with morality than with
art.
Let us refrain for the moment from
enumerating other varieties of criticism,
in order to enunciate the truism that
pictures are made to be looked at rather
than to be criticised or even talked about.
The deepest admiration is silent. It may,
however, be useful to bear in mind those
two opposite modes of thought which
are called observation and contemplation.
Observation, according to the psychologists, is the mode which has its origin
in the sense of touch, while contemplation
is derived from the sense of sight. As




Various Kjnds of Criticism   45
those who have not cultivated a taste for
natural scenery do not readily fall into
the passive state of contemplation which
is required for the enjoyment of it, but
busy themselves with the observation of
details and allow their attention to be
absorbed in materiality; so those who
have not developed by exercise the
faculty of resthetic enjoyment cannot
command that habit of passive receptivity
which the positive passion of works of
art demands, but proceed immediately to
observe, to inquire, and to ascertain,
instead of accepting and communing with
beauty in the spirit of conciliation which
is based upon comprehension, and which
eschews comparisons made with a view
to depreciation of one work and the
exaltation of another.  The common
tendency of mankind is to be sectarian
and specialist, to make classifications by
order of superiority and inferiority, to




46     The Desire of Beauty


forget the allusions of relativity, to observe rather than to contemplate.  It is
to this tendency that we may trace the
eternal conflict between idealism and
realism, and it is for reasons of this order
that the majority of writers about the
fine arts have hitherto sought their
criterion in the domain which lies between
the two extreme points of fidelity to
tradition and fidelity to Nature. Meanwhile, although the real question has
been veiled in rhetoric and metaphor, a
pretence has been kept up to the effect
that there is a kind of science of taste,
and that some sort of demonstration can
be given of the qualities of pictures, and
a certain test applied.
In connection with this much desired
test to which artists and critics could
alike appeal, ingenious speculatists, from
Burke and Coleridge down to Charles
Blanc, have undertaken to frame a science




Various Kinds of Criticism   47
of taste, and to enunciate its principles and
rules. Of such speculatists the original
was the German professor, Alexander
Gottlieb Baumgarten, to whom we owe
the invention of the adjective " aesthetic,"
which by use has acquired rights of
citizenship, and now renders good service
in designating all that is connected with
that sense-cognition of which, according
to Baumgarten's theory, there is a science.
It remains, however, to be proven that
there can ever be such a science, though
we can well understand that Baumgarten
was tempted to speculate in that direction
when we remember that he lived in the
early part of the eighteenth century, at a
moment of the deepest interest and importance for modern culture.  It was
then that the modern art sentiment first
began to manifest itself with its strong
admiration of the past, and its regretful
consciousness that the greatest achieve



48      tihe Desire of Beauty


ments of the art of painting have probably
been achieved once for all. It was then
for the first time that men remarked and
sought to account for the strange fascination which music and painting exercise
upon their votaries-a fascination which
seemed both incomprehensible and ridiculous to gross, subaltern, or incurious
minds.
Thus Goldsmith in his " Letters of a
Citizen of the World," speaking of " The
present ridiculous passion of the Nobility
for Painting," says with commendable
honesty:
" It is true, painting should have due
encouragement, as the painter can undoubtedly fit up our apartments in a
much more elegant manner than the
upholsterer. But I should think a man
of fashion makes but an indifferent exchange who lays out all that time in the
furniture of his house which he should




Various kinds of Criticism 49


have employed in the furniture of his
head. A person who shows no other
symptoms of his taste than his cabinet
or gallery, might as well boast to one of
the furniture of his kitchen. I know no
other motive but vanity that induces the
great to testify such an inordinate passion
for pictures.  After the piece is bought
and gazed at eight or ten days successively, the purchaser's pleasure must
surely be over."
In The Tatler (No. 4) a protest of a
similar kind was made against music,
which, like painting, appeared in England
as an exotic, after the grand purging of
the land by the puritanical cataclysm
of the seventeenth century. In The
Tatler we read: " Letters from the Haymarket inform us that on Saturday night
last the opera of Pyrrhus and Demetrius
was performed with great applause. This
intelligence is not very acceptable to us
D




50     The Desire of Beauty
friends of the theatre; for the stage
being an entertainment of the reason and
all the faculties, this way of being pleased
with the suspense of them for hours
together, and being given up to the
shallow satisfaction of the eyes and ears
only, seems to arise rather from the
degeneracy of our understanding than
an improvement of our diversions. That
the understanding has no part in the
pleasure is evident from what these
letters very positively assert: to wit,
that a great part of the performance was
done in Italian."
The objection to painting and music
implied in the above remarks is that
these arts are unintellectual and sensual,
and therefore despicable-an argument
which underlies nearly all that has been
written by northern critics, even up to
the present day, the adversary maintaining the inferiority of the pleasure which




Various kjnds of Criticism  5i


painting affords, because it is unintellectual, and the champion of painting demonstrating, on the contrary, that this
pleasure is of a purely intellectual kind,
or at least it would be so if the art were
rightly understood and practised. To
venture into this useless discussion as to
the greater or less intellectuality of the
pleasure afforded by painting would be
waste of time, the question itself being
based upon a mistaken view of the
nature and end of art. It will suffice
here to call attention to the fact that the
majority of people all over the modern
world are not naturally and spontaneously
artistic in their tastes. In presence of a
picture or a statue they feel, or rather
they judge, successively and analytically
instead of at once and synthetically.
Where beauty alone should impress them
they look for every-day truth.  In the
same spirit those many painters who are




52      The Desire of Beauty


not naturally artists aim at an obvious
kind of commonplace and superficial truth
rather than at beauty, and their general
tendency is to seek to astonish by means
that are entirely foreign to art.  In
England more particularly the art of
painting, it has frequently been observed,
does not seem to correspond to a sensual
want of the nation, to a real sentiment
of plastic beauty or expression.  Indeed,
the English artists appear to have singularly small faith in art itself, if we may
judge from the ingenuity with which
they seek to disguise it as though it were
a bitter pill, coating with the sugar of
anecdotic subjects and comic or sentimental titles the small dose of art that
their pictures may contain. Even the
Royal Academy itself does not exist for
the glory of art and for the exhibition of
pictures by the most eminent living English artists, as people generally suppose.




Various kinds of Criticism 53
The so-called Royal Academy of Arts
pays little attention to art, and its real
and effective mission seems rather to be
political, social, literary, and even religious. The case is so curious and so
instructive that it seems worthy of more
lengthy consideration than our argument
would at first sight appear to justify.
The great event of the year at the
Academy is not the exhibition of pictures,
but the dinner that precedes the opening;
and the great feature of that dinner is
not the daintiness of the food, but the
quality of the post-prandial eloquence, for
the object of the dinner is to enable the
ministers of the Crown to make speeches
about the political situation on neutral
ground. Thus the institution is wholly
illogical, and its existence is anomalous,
inasmuch as, being nominally a Royal
Academy of Arts, its chief business is to
give an annual dinner, not for the glory




54      The DJesire of Beauty


of gastronomy, but for the display of parliamentary eloquence.
The Royal Academy of Arts plays a
social role on the day of the private view,
when London society goes there, not to
view the pictures, but to view society.
As for the religious role of the Royal
Academy, it is intimated by the inscription written on a gold ground under the
cornice of the great octagon room. This
carefully chosen and poorly rhymed verse
gives the key-note of Royal Academic
views of art. As the usual guide-books
have hitherto neglected these four precious
lines, we venture to transcribe them for
the reader's benefit:
The hearts of men which fondly here admire
Fair seeming shows may lift themselves up
higher,
And learn to love with zealous humble duty
The eternal fountain of that heavenly beauty.


After reading this inscription we are




Various Kinds of Criticism 55


not astonished to find that the Royal
Academy pays considerable attention to
poor literature. The moment that we
open the catalogue we are struck by its
contents.  It is a veritable repertory of
quotations, a florilegium of choice poetry,
a promptuary of proverbs and a dictionary
of conundrums. The poets, the Gospels,
Domesday Book, and Foxe's Book of
Martyrs are all laid under contribution
by the artists in the construction of their
puzzles and  rebuses.  The simplest
subject, for instance, a vernal landscape
peopled by children and ducklings, will
be poetically entitled "When all was
young; " while another picture, representing geese in a landscape with a man in
the distance (presumnably a portrait of the
artist), will inevitably and fittingly be
called " Birds of a Feather."
The Exhibition of the Royal Academy
annually exasperates one into irreverence




T 9he Desire of Beauty
by the manifest Philistinism, of the ma'Jority of the painters whose works are hung
on the walls, and yet it is full of character and a veritable mirror of English
life and tastes.  It reflects the English
love of the country, of outdoor life, of
sport, of cats and puppies, of horses and
children, of homes and gardens, of lords
and ladies, of archbishops and cabinet
ministers.
The critic whose business it is to write
about the Exhibition of the Royal Academy will rarely have to concern himself
with the complicated groups of feeling
which he would seek to analyse if he
were studying the work of Leonardo or
Mantegna or Duccio. His task is simple,
but it is interesting, and the mention of
it will enable us to specify a familiar kind
of current criticism-namely, the description of pictures interlarded with a few
phrases of praise, blame, or encouragement




Various KInds of Criticism    57
such as we read in the daily newspapers.
When this kind of so-called criticism is
sincere and unpretentious it is generally
satisfactory and adequate to the occasions
which produce it-namely, those exhibitions now held in all the great centres of
civilisation for the display and sale of the
current art products of the day, for the
most part, alas! soulless pictures about
which there is nothing to be said except
that they correspond to an unceasing
demand for coloured wall ornaments on
the part of a public having little or no
aesthetic education.  But the art critic of
a daily journal addresses himself precisely
to the great Philistine public, to that
average humanity which is not always
possessed of even average cult, e.  His
business therefore is not to treat of the
philosophy or of the archaeology or of
the history of art, nor yet to appeal to
tradition or to supposed eternal principles




58    qThe Desire of Beauty
about which there can be no agreement.
It is his duty to inform rather than to
judge; to fix the attention of the spectator
rather than to praise or blame the artist;
to be the impersonal and concentrated
echo of the voice and also of the unexpressed impressions of the public rather
than the personal exponent of individual
opinions and sensations.  In short, the
ideal art critic for dealing with the
current picture exhibitions of the day
would be an intelligent, receptive and
cultivated reporter, having some special
information, a certain education of the
eye and the gift of adequate and even
brilliant literary expression. That the
art critics of the ephemeral press should
endeavour to refer the particular to the
general is desirable, for to do so is a
characteristic of the thinking man. But
the general propositions on which most
stress should be laid are perhaps not so




Various KlJnds of Criticism 59
much the results of profound and universal aesthetic research as those of contemporary sociology and psychology, if
not of contemporary commerce.  Painting
is a trade as well as an art. In an
average exhibition one can expect rarely
to find a single work that will remain
and take its place among the eternal
masterpieces; but one can always feel
sure of seeing a score of pictures that
reflect some parcel of the tendencies and
aspirations of the contemporary soulpictures that interest the public of the
hour, for reasons which the intelligent
critic, being in touch with his public, that
is to say, with average humanity, can
expound, and so help the public to comprehend and therefore to intensify its
enjoyment. The ideal art critic of the
newspaper press will be above all things
appreciative, suggestive, human, and of
the hour, an interpreter rather than a




6o     The Desire of Reauzy


judge, a writer animated by curiosity and
the desire to comprehend rather than a
partisan, even though it be of the noblest
and most sublime views.
To resume: we may say that the
current criticism of the essayists of the
last century and of the present day
consists in approving or disapproving a
work of art in the name of the personal
taste of the writer, which is supposed to
be shared by the majority of his accustomed readers, it being implied that the
work in question would have been approved or disapproved by certain persons
deceased, beginning with Aristotle or
Quintilian, in virtue of a hypothesis
confirmed by such and such a passage of
their writings. This kind of criticism is
that of the immense majority of literary
men of all nations who are well read,
whose minds are more or less open to
aesthetic impressions, and who have a




Various Kinds of Criticism         61


certain moderateness in their tastes which
enables them to be the representatives
of a large section, if not of the majority,
of the public.
Now beside this traditional criticism,
there have gradually grown up within
the past fifty or sixty years other kinds
of investigations and speculations upon
works of art which cannot be exactly
designated by the same name. Thus,
Villemain, having to speak of the works
of antiquity, conceived the idea of joining
to his literary judgments certain considerations concerning the history of the
authors and of the epochs in which they
lived, and so the critic became at the
same time biographer and historian.
The example set by Villemain was followed almost immediately by SainteBeuve and Taine, who shared the field
of biographical and sociological researches
in connection with books. " The critic,"




62     The Desire of Beauty
said Sainte-Beuve, " is a man who knows
how to read and who teaches others to
read." And elsewhere: " My desire has
been to introduce into criticism a sort
of charm and at the same time more
reality than men put into it formerly-in
a word, some poetry and at the same
time a little physiology..... What I
should like to constitute is literary
natural history..... There is more
than ever room for judgments proceeding
from true taste, but there is no longer
any profit in rhetorical judgments. Nowadays literary history is being built up,
like natural history, by means of observations and collections." Sainte-Beuve
thus confounds two kinds of researches,
the one literary and the other biographical; he wishes to judge an author as
a producer of literature, and to know him
as a man, anecdotically and physiologically, although this knowledge cannot




Various Kinds of Criticism  63


affect the esthetic pleasure proper which
is given by the author's books.
Taine, with his prodigious powers of
thought and generalisation, his scientific
studies, and his inventive audacity, has
constituted criticism in a form that has
the appearances of a science. Taine
refrains from appreciating the works and
the writers of whom he speaks. The
fact that he writes about them suffices
to indicate that they are eminent or
significant, and having assumed once
for all this attentive or admirative
attitude, he proceeds to solve the two
problems which he sets himself on the
subject of books and of artists-namely,
the relations between the author and his
work, and the relations of the authors
with the social ensemble of which they
form part. Taine endeavours to demonstrate instead of pronouncing judgments,
or defending or attacking an esthetic




64     The Desire of feauty


theory. He analyses instead of praising, and comprehends instead of blaming.
He considers the work of art, not in
itself, but as the sign of the man or
of the people that he wishes to know.
Without consulting it as to its beauties,
or as to the pleasure or emotion that it
can procure, he looks upon it as a means
of knowing the soul of its author, and
thence of knowing the soul of those of
whom the author was the contemporary
and the compatriot.
As in the criticism of literature, so in
the criticism of pictures; the critic,
according to the views of Taine, is
bound to be discreet, and to remember
that those who read newspapers, reviews and books, are no longer schoolboys to whom he can announce ex
cathedrd that such and such a passage
or such and such a morceau is fine,
marvellous, and to be admired merely




Various Kfnds of Criticism 65
because he says so. The critic is not
a professor, but rather a commentator
whose office it is to collect such documents and facts as may be of service
in enlightening the reader, to show the
causes of the ideas and sentiments of
the author, and to replace the work of
art in the conditions and circumstances
which produced it. Then, having done
this, the critic retires and leaves the
reader to judge and enjoy. Such is the
method recommended by the inventor of
the theory of the race, the milieu, and
the moment-a method which is applicable to subaltern souls who submit
to be formed by the various influences
in the midst of which they may be
born and educated.   In the case of
the  greatest  artists,  however, the
theory of the milieu seems applicable
in the reverse way, inasmuch as they
revolt against, or at any rate dominate,
E




66     T'he Desire of Beauty


the milieu instead of being dominated
by it.
Questionable as this theory of the
milieu may be in any systematic and
comprehensive application, it is neverLheless by this innovation in particular
that Taine's works mark a new era in
criticism.  Indeed, we may say that
since the publication of his " History of
English Literature," and his "Philosophy
of Art," no tentative worthy of special
mention has been made in the domain
of critical method.  Pater alone of the
English critics has displayed marked
creative personality in his critical studies,
which are, however, of the historical and
rhetorical category. We may therefore
say that, so far, art criticism has assumed
an interesting scientific character in the
works of Taine alone. On the other
hand, while we can correctly speak of
Taine's method as scientific, we cannot




Various K inds of Criticism 67


say  that  the  employment of that
method has resulted in a science, but
merely in the more or less scientific
notation of some of the phenomena of
artistic  production  and  of  esthetic
pleasure.
And yet of what avail are the ingenious notations and the audacious generalisations of Taine, except in so far as
they bear glorious testimony to the power
of the human intellect and to its inexhaustible fertility in the service of the universal
Illusion? To analyse a work of art
with a view to discovering in it the
history of an epoch seems difficult, and
Taine's brilliant volumes are far from
convincing us that the method is practical.
Truly it would be precious if we could
read in the thoughts of a writer the
complete thoughts of his epoch.  But,
as we have already intimated, this is
surely a chimerical hope, for the artists




68     ithe Desire of {Beauty
worthy of the name are men of exceptional souls who owe little to their
epoch, and much to themselves and to
the mysterious qualities of their special
and abnormal temperament. The artists
of the same epoch and the same country
differ widely from the men who are their
contemporaries and their compatriots,
and very widely from one another.
Therefore it would appear that the
sociological criticism of Taine takes too
little account of individualism, which is
certainly one of the most striking characteristics of that modern spirit which
began with the Renaissance. We cannot affirm that the ancients were free
from the mental heterogeneousness which
is noticeable in modern times when the
various classes of society have entirely
different ways of feeling and thinking.
We are, however, tempted to believe that
the citizens of Athens in the age of




Various KJnds of Criticism    69


Pericles lived in a general way the same
life; that the same political, religious,
and philosophical reasonings maintained
their souls in noble tranquillity; and that
Phidias or Plato are merely the most
complete and typical specimens of the
men whose civilisation they at once
resumed and directed.   At any rate,
when we compare the works of art of
the epoch of the Renaissance with the
masterpieces that have come down to us
from the age of Pericles, we cannot fail
to be struck at once by the strong impress
of personality and of individualism which
marks the pictures and statues of Italy
as compared with the abstract form, the
generalisation, and the perfect completeness of the art of Greece, where Phidias,
Scopas, and Praxiteles were, perhaps, not
so much the inventors and chiefs of the
schools that bear their names, but rather
the most illustrious representatives of




70     T'he Desire of 2Beauty
the ideas and tendencies which characterise those schools.
Recently certain French writers have
foreseen the possibility of a kind of
criticism which would be more especially
psychological rather than sociological.
A work of art can in truth give us but
little exact information as regards the
contemporaries of its author, but it might
seem to contain much information as to
the exceptional soul of the author himself; indeed, it is the only means that
we have of becoming acquainted with
his soul, within the vague limits which
the essential solitude of the soul allows.
The psychological critic considers a
picture or a literary work as an
ensemble of phenomena to which he
applies the processes of scientific observation, experiment, and induction, and so
discovers some general laws which are
the peculiar and constant laws of thought




Various Kinds of Criticism   7'


in the artist in question, and which may
be compared with the laws of the same
kind discovered by means of a similar
study of other artists.  In this way it
is hoped a special branch of psychology
may be constituted. Hitherto, however,
this method has not given any serious
results, so far as scientific precision is
concerned.  Indeed, we can    scarcely
place confidence in any theory of
scientific criticism when we reflect how
undecipherable, how unattainable, how
intangible is the matter under examination. The theory that a work of art
contains the revelation of the soul of
the artist does not distinguish between
the artistic function and the every-day
function of the man.   The   habit of
artistic  labour  determines  faculties
special to that labour.  Artists in the
exercise  of  their  creative  function,
whether of painters, sculptors, writers,




72      T'he Desire of Beauty


or musicians, see and think otherwise
than they see and think in their commonplace every-day life. The qualities
of soul that psychological criticism
might discover in a work of art might
be unstable, provisional not essential,
accidental even, and unsuspected by the
artist; for, as we have intimated in a
previous chapter, there is an element of
the unconscious, of destiny, of the
world soul, in great works of art, and a
peculiar inherent life of which the artist
himself is unaware. Evidently it may
be objected that the soul of the artist,
which is alone worthy of study, is not
that of every-day life, but that which
rules over the artistic function. This
we will admit, but then how limited
becomes the field which psychological
criticism can explore in the mysterious
domain of the artist's soul.  Is it not
reduced merely to ascertaining the state




Various Kjnds of Criticism 73
of soul and the dispositions of the
artistic function as they are manifested
in each individual work or in a group of
works? The more complex and subtle
is the soul of the artist, the more
unstable it is, and the more various its
manners of expression. This being the
case, it would appear that psychological
criticism cannot give us precise results;
and this is not surprising, for up to the
present day the general science of the
simple and normal phenomena of ordinary souls has only been imperfectly
sketched out after twenty centuries of
research.  How then can we hope to
study efficaciously the psychology of
the exceptional and abnormal soul of
the artist without the solid basis of a
general elementary science?




IV


THE JOY OF ART
THAT art criticism should have been
influenced by the dominant intellectual
processes of a scientific age, is natural.
The idea of creating a science of criticism
and the attempt to realise that idea were
equally inevitable in this nineteenth
century. But now that the experiment
has been made, and that the results
obtained by the sociological and by the
psychological critics appear to be excellent, not on account of the pretended
scientific method employed, but rather in
spite of that method, what course remains
open to the art critic?
The question is difficult to answer,




The Joy of e/rt


75


because, in answering it, one has the air
of proposing a new system and of
challenging comparison with the systems
of the past, which in the opinion of
many are still solid enough to remain
the systems of the present. In reality
our intention is not to expound or advocate any system of art criticism, but
simply to indicate certain intellectual and
psychic attitudes which seem to us to be
conducive to culture and to the propagation of the joy of art.
As we have seen above, except in the
unconscious writings of persons who
have never reflected upon this special
subject, there is no longer any art criticism worthy of the name based upon
universally recognised principles. The
principles to which one critic appeals
are disdainfully rejected by another.
There is no science of taste, no science
of aesthetics, no such thing as laws of




76      7ihe Desire of Beauty


taste or canons of criticism.  In short,
there appears at first sight to be no other
basis for the judgment of a work of art
than opinion, dogma, or tradition. But
just as new necessities of life and the
progress of science have broken through
the theological rules by which morality
was of old contained, so new aesthetic
sentiments, new emotional requirements,
and new ideas of the universe have
broken down the barriers with which tra..
dition had enclosed the domain of taste
-a tradition, be it remembered, which
grew up after the golden age of art had
passed, and which, so far as painting is
concerned, was built up chiefly by the
connoisseurs of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, with the
supreme admiration of Raphael as its
foundation-stone. This tradition having
become a mere embarrassment and nuisance, and there being no certitude to




ih e Joy of 4Art


77


fall back upon such as a science of
aesthetics  might have  afforded,  the
modern art lover is tempted to take
refuge in a sort of individualism, in the
promptings of instinct developed and
controlled by reason, or, in other words,
in culture.
There exists in man an instinct which
inclines him to admire beauty. What
beauty is has not yet been satisfactorily
defined.  It is one of those words, like
genius and nature, by which we designate the inexplicable and the ultimately
unanalysable. Nevertheless, although no
precise definition has yet been given,
the word beauty serves to designate
something alien to utility, something
superior, intense and exhilarating, something ideal and mysterious that gives
joy, some excellence or perfection that exhales grace, charm, and radiant splendour,
whether it be inherent in animate or




78     The Desire of ~Beauty


inanimate objects, whether in a beautiful
woman, a picture, a statue, a natural site,
or some other of the multifarious forms
which its presence may ennoble.
This instinct which inclines man to
admire beauty may remain latent: we
may even say that in the majority of
men it is actually undeveloped, so that
they comprehend only the utility of
things and are insensible to beauty.
The utilitarians are the artisans of material progress. The lovers of beauty
are the artists, the sculptors, the painters,
the poets, the musicians, the writers, the
people of refined life who have created
civilisation and culture.
Horace, in his "Art of Poetry," proclaimed a great truth when he said that
the poets were the authors of civilisation.
Orpheus, the sacred spokesman of the
gods, converted primitive man from a
life of bloodshed and grossness.  In the




The 7oy of Art


79


beginning we always find the Word.
By observing in themselves or in others,
rare, delicate, and refined sentiments
which it was not the privilege of ordinary
men to feel the poets conceived and externalised noble ideals, which awakened
in the hearts of common men the desire
to realise in their own persons and in
their own lives the qualities which the
poets celebrated. Thus, for instance, in
the course of innumerable ages and in
the successive conditions of many civilisations, the poets, by the care which
they took to observe and describe the
most generous movements of the soul
and to present refined sentiments in an
exquisite form, created an ideal of love
which became a reality, and which men
accepted and strove to achieve according
to the degree of their culture.  The
ideal of love of the ages of Chivalry,
compared with the mere animal instinct




8o     The Desire of Beauty
of the primitive man, marks the vast
conquests won by the poets in the domain
of Illusion by the efforts of thousands of
years.  Modesty again is doubtless not
an actual creation of the poets, but it is
the poets who have fostered its development by setting forth its value, dignity,
and charm. So, too, art in general in
the multiple manifestations of painting,
sculpture and music, has ennobled man
by revealing to him the riches of human
nature which might otherwise have remained latent. Art has magnified man
by magnifying his physical perfections
and moral energies, while, by depicting
him in his glory, it has inspired him
with the ambition of not remaining inferior to the possibilities of his nature.
Art has transformed the savage into the
civilised man, and by its continuous
action in its nobler manifestations it
renders more agreeable, more prolonged,




Yrhe Joy of    fArt


8I


and more intense the spontaneous sensations which Nature procures for us.  It
consoles us by visible dreams for the
infirmities of the actual world. It is at
once a pleasure, a cordial, an aspiration
and a means of perfection.
The end of art we believe to be disinterested pleasure and not deliberate
moralisation. The whole question of
morality in art is summed up in the
words of Saint Paul in his Epistle to the
Philippians, where he says:   Finally,
brethren, whatsoever things are true,
whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever
things are just, whatsoever things are
pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there
be any virtue, and if there be any praise,
think on these things."
In art there is nothing immoral but
that which is ugly, base, false, common;
or, as the Greeks would have said,
F




82     The 'Desire of Teauty
offensive to the Graces and the Muses.
The effects of art should not be intentionally moral, but they should be noble.
The origin of the fine arts is ideal,
and their whole object is the glorification,
the elevation and the consolation of man.
In sculpture, it may be said, man admires the idealisation of his own form,
the projection into materiality of three
dimensions of all that perfume of superior
beauty of contour and character which
the creative imagination distils from the
imperfections of reality.  In painting,
man delights in the idealisation of himself
and of all the manifestations of Nature
in line and colour; while in music he
finds joy in the idealisation by means of
sound of the vague murmurings and
ejaculations of the soul that are beyond
the subtlest expressions of verse or
prose.  So again in history, poetry, and
the drama, man enters into communica



Trhe yoy of Afrt


83


tion with the past, the present, and even
the future, and seeks to feel his soul
vibrating with the emotions of others as
well as with his own. He incarnates
himself in the heroes of the past and in
the heroes of the present, whether they
be great or humble. He shares the joys
and the woes of all mankind; he animates inanimate Nature with his own
human sentiments; he externalises the
element of the unconscious and watches
with palpitating interest the mysterious
manceuvres of the world-spirit directing
the destinies of man towards the inscrutable domains of the future.  So, by
the manifestations of art as well as by
the speculations of the philosophers,
mankind fosters that pervading moral
sentiment of reciprocal interest which, as
a French essayist, Constant Martha, has
suggested, is perhaps ultimately analysable into a sentiment of mutual com



84      The Desire of Beauty
passion. Thus we may say that the
noblest and most abstract sentiment
provoked by art is human sympathy.
The critical spirit, the love of beauty,
taste, whether in the individual or in
the collectivity, are instincts or latent
faculties that may be rendered conscious
by the action of the poets, the artists,
the superior spirits. The Word initiates
as an excitant to the intellect, awakening
attention, and suggesting effort and
experience.  Repeated examination of
works of art accumulates in the memory
a store of observations and comparisons
which lead to judgments and to the
ascertainment of sources and sensations
of pleasure.  The essential condition
for the cultivation  of taste is the
existence of accessible and abundant
points of comparison.   The refined
connoisseur, to use an old-fashioned
word, which is nevertheless a good word,




7ihe 7/oy of 4rt         8


85


is a man possessed of memories of the
greatest possible number of fine works
of art, and a reasoned knowledge of the
pleasure which they are capable of producing with reference to certain faculties
of enjoyment of the aesthetic order.
These memories furnish him with ready
and numerous comparisons, which enable
him to appreciate, enjoy, and classify
rapidly and surely. The greater the
connoisseur's refinement and the wider
his aesthetic experience, the less will he
think of expressing what are called likes
and dislikes, or, in other words, personal
tastes. De gustibus non disputandum is
a practical truth.  There is no discussion possible about personal tastes. A
man may ascertain and affirm his tastes,
and proceed to reason about those tastes,
inasmuch as he can refer his appreciation and enjoyment of a work of art to
certain qualities which it contains, and




86     The 'Desire of Beauty


to certain other qualities within himself.
He can explain to himself the conditions
of the work of art in relation to his own
state of soul, and in relation to the state
of soul of the artist and of his epoch.
Hence it has been said with partial
truth that what we admire in a picture
is not the painting or the subject, but
the state of soul of the artist as manifested in the picture. The joy of the
true connoisseur consists at once in the
physical joy which his educated and
perfected natural faculties allow him to
feel, and in a large intellectual and
psychic comprehension-the comprehension of culture, the comprehension of
wide and intelligent sympathy.
Taste, as we understand it, thus
becomes a question not of knowledge
of precepts, principles, or laws, but
rather of personal culture and education.
Therefore equality of physical gifts com



The yoy of cArt


87


bined with equality of education and of
culture, can alone render possible more
or less complete coincidence of judgment
and identity of appreciation between two
or more persons as regards a work of
art. Without this condition of equality
there cannot be theoretically integral
communication between soul and soul.
Much less can there be useful discussion;
because, if this equality be wanting, the
interlocutors will never speak exactly
the same language. Furthermore, supposing the rare and almost inconceivable
case of communication between souls of
equal culture and identical temper and
education, discussion would be impossible for want aliment, or possible
only as regards shades of appreciation.
In practical life, on those happy occasions when the soul discovers a more or
less sympathetic soul with which to
converse through the prison bars of its




88    VThe {Desire of Beauty


solitude, the notation of shades of feeling and refinements of appreciation will
alone suggest itself.
It is a common error to confound
refinement with artificiality, eccentricity,
or malady. The man of refined taste is
not sick, for the sick man is not master
of himself; whereas the refined man, as
we conceive him, has that great virtue
of the Holy Grail-self-mastery, selfpossession. He is the ideal man.
On the other hand, while the solitude
of the soul renders communication with
other souls difficult, so far at least as
concerns the refinements of esoteric
emotion and appreciation, the soul's perpetual and unconquerable thirst for sympathy produces this phenomenon, that
the sort of enthusiasm which we call the
joy of art is magnified by the consciousness that others seem to share it, although we can never know exactly how




tlhe 7oy of A rt         9


89


complete is the identity of aesthetic
emotion between one soul and another.
And this is natural when we consider
the extreme complexity and mixed
nature of what are called the aesthetic
emotions-groups of feeling, be it remarked, in which all the elements are
feeble in their individual action in such
a manner that no one sensation or idea
is so intense as to become exclusively
predominant over the others, paralyse
the imagination, and consequently destroy the aesthetic-that is to say, the
mixed emotion. The reader may illustrate our meaning for himself by endeavouring to realise and to analyse the
state of mind which a work of art
excites, whether picture, statue, poem,
architecture, musical composition or
choregraphic representation.  Another
illustration may be found in the feelings
produced by a natural landscape, which




90     The Desire of Beauty
have been admirably described by
Herbert Spencer in his Principles of
Psychology in the page which we beg
leave to quote as follows:
"A like explanation may be given of
emotions which leave the subject of them
comparatively passive, as, for instance,
that produced by scenery. By compounding groups of sensations and ideas
there are at length formed those vast
aggregations which a grand landscape
excites and suggests. An infant taken
into the midst of mountains is totally
unaffected, but is delighted with a small
group of attributes and relations presented in a toy.  Children can appreciate and be pleased with the more
complicated relations of household objects
and localities-of the garden, the field,
and the street.  But it is only in youth
and mature age, when individual things
and small assemblages of them have




7The Joy of AJrt


91


become familiar and automatically cognisable, that those immense assemblages
which landscapes present can be adequately grasped, and the highly integrated states of consciousness produced
by them experienced. Then, however,
the various minor groups of states that
have been in earlier days severally produced by trees and flowers, by fields
and moors and rocky wastes, by streams,
by cascades, by ravines and precipices,
by blue skies and clouds and storms, are
aroused together. Along with the immediate sensations there are partially excited the myriads of sensations that have
been in times past received from objects
such as those presented; further, there
are partially excited the multitudinous
incidental feelings that were experienced
on these many past occasions, and there
are also excited certain deeper but now
vague combinations of states which were




92     the Desire of Beauty


organised in the race during barbarous
times, when its pleasurable activities
were chiefly among the woods and
waters. And out of all these excitations,
some of them actual, but most of them
nascent, is composed the emotion which
a fine landscape produces in us."
Such mixed emotions are those which
compose the pleasure given by the contemplation of works of art, and, as we
were saying above, this kind of pleasure
is intensified by the consciousness that
others seem to share it. An obvious
instance of this truth may be found in
the communicative emotion that animates
an audience in a theatre. A less striking but equally conclusive example is
the undoubted pleasure which we experience when we find that our enjoyment of a picture or any other work
seems to be shared by others, although
sad experience has demonstrated the




the Joy of A rt


93


impossibility of ascertaining the precise
extent of presumed psychic sympathy.
But still this element of sympathy
remains all-important.  Intense culture
of the ego tends to intensify our consciousness of the solitude of the soul,
but the instinctive desire for sympathy
causes us to seek to clarify the thick
and clouded atmosphere that intervenes
between ourselves   and  others.  The
ideal therefore is not to cultivate our
souls and to despise humanity in general,
but to strive after communion with
humanity by expressing ourselves lucidly,
definitely, and objectively. Such expression is found in the manifestations of art
which are efforts to externalise passion.
To aid this expression is the role of
noble criticism which is interpretation,
exegesis, comprehension, both in the
service of self-culture and in the service
of the culture and the pleasure of




94     The 7Desire of Beauty
humanity. Thus we are tempted to
look upon the critic as a mystagogue, a
revealer of mysteries. The majority of
men being creatures of reflection, do not
feel the emotions of things directly, and
if placed in immediate communication
with the masterpieces of art they would
probably distinguish nothing at all. In
the literary domain few of us read the
classics in the original text, and even
translations and adaptations are perhaps
less efficacious in making them known
than the writings of the literary commentators. So in sculpture and painting,
admirers would perhaps be few if they
had to acquire their enthusiasm  for
themselves in presence of the chipped
marbles of the British Museum and of
the cracked and faded pictures of the
National Gallery.  It is to be feared
that Landseer's dogs would be even
greater fascinators of humanity than they




iThe Joy of vArt       95
are if there were no commentators to
expound the mysteries of Turner's visions
of the poetry of light, and to initiate the
profane into the sublime serenity of the
genius of Phidias.




V


THE ERROR OF REALISM
THE more transcendental criticism, for
which "criticism" itself is an inexact
term, that criticism we mean which is
the work of the aesthetic mystagogue, is
essentially sympathetic and exegetical;
it interprets the works of the past and of
the present in the light of the present,
and with reference to the results of
universal culture; furthermore, it treats
the great work of art as having an independent life of its own, beyond that of
the artist and beyond that of the epoch
in which it was produced, a life that
continues with the ages and acquires in
each succeeding age a new meaning; for




The Error of 2tealism


97


as in the time of Bouddha so in our own
days, Maya, Illusion, is the mother of
the universe, and the beauty and meaning
of created things exist as much in the
soul of those who behold them as in the
soul of him who made them or in the
actual material things themselves. Thus
in its highest manifestations and in its
noblest pages aesthetic criticism of the
kind intimated is itself a creative art.
Of less abstract and less general pretensions is militant criticism, a manifestation of that prophetic spirit which from
time immemorial has given voice to the
confined desires of the superior contemporary conscience, preaching the
gospel of reaction, upbraiding the unrighteous, and fostering aspirations towards salvation.  But, like the prophets
of Israel, the prophets of art criticism
can never say salvation is surely here or
surely there; they must be content to
G




98     The Desire of Beauty


hope eternally and to be eternally disappointed, for the reign of perfection is
perhaps not of this world any more than
the reign of justice; everything is relative, and the absolute is but one of the
mirages of Illusion. The moment the
art sentiment became conscious in man
the spirit of militant criticism was born,
now thundering against excessive idealism
and now against excessive realism, for
between these two extremes the manifestations of art have always oscillated, and
will doubtless continue to oscillate until
art ceases to exist.  The camps of
Classicism and of Romanticism are permanently pitched, and the battle is being
incessantly waged in petty skirmishes
that develop from time to time into
vehement warfare. At the beginning of
the present century the Romancists
began by protesting against a form of
art which had become mummified by tne




The Error of realism


99


abuse of periphrasis and lost in the
misguided admiration of a newly revealed
antiquity.  The discovery of Pompeii,
combined with the influence of the
writings of Lessing and Winckelmann,
produced an art so far removed from
Nature and so alien to the healthy aspirations of living humanity, that the cry of
the reaction was for humanity alone and
for the representation of the scenes and
the men of the day. To carry out this
programme was the effort of the so-called
realist school, whose principles have persisted to the present time, and against
which militant criticism is now beginning
to protest in the name of the nobler
conscience of humanity, in the name of
the ideal, and in the name of good taste.
For reality having been proclaimed and
for a while acknowledged to be the true
domain of art, it was argued that nothing
that is real is unworthy of artistic repre



Ioo    tfhe Desire of BTeauty
sentation; and, inversely, that nothing
which is not real is worthy of artistic
representation. This proposition might
easily be shown to be based upon
fallacious definition, a shortcoming which
is not uncommon in controversy concerning aesthetic problems. But an influence
more disastrous than that of the misconception as to the meaning of the
word reality, was that of the doctrine of
art for art's sake-a doctrine which was
first formulated in the present century,
when art began to claim its rights in
reply to certain narrow moralists who
had spoken too exclusively of its duties.
Art for art's sake was the motto of a
revolution which, like most revolutions,
demanded more than its due. These
two theories-namely, that of realism and
that of art for art's sake-have persisted
down to our own days, and under their
guidance, and at the same time being




rhe Error of RTealism     101


encouraged by the examples and methods
of contemporary science, the artists,
whether novelists, playwrights, painters,
or even sculptors-the latter, however, to
a small degree, because they are restrained
by the austere practice and the severe
traditions of their art-would hear of
nothing but reality and of minute scientific exactness in its representation. In
pursuit of this new ideal the French
artists passed rapidly from the noble to
the familiar, and thence to the vulgar
and the coarse, and many of them to
the ignoble, the vile, and the abjectly disgusting.  The consequence is that much
of the art of contemporary France has
become the calumniation rather than the
idealisation of man and of Nature, and,
instead of exhilarating the soul and filling it with the joy of intenser life, the
productions of this desecrated art sadden,
defile and harden the heart.




102    The ~Desire of Beauty
To explain this most regrettable diversion of art from its true functions would
lead us into a study of the altered condition of modern French society. Such
an investigation is beyond our present
purpose. It will suffice to remark that
the inquiry suggested, supposing that
we are speaking of France, would bring
before our notice such circumstances as
the growth of a newspaper and periodical press unrestrained by public opinion;
the decadence of moral and literary education; the invasion of the domain of
literary art more especially, by men who
have not enjoyed the benefits of that
educational discipline which our ancestors designated by the gentle name of
literce humaniores. With few exceptions,
the French literary men of the past fifty
years, and the French painters too, have
been lacking in culture, in taste, and in
moral discipline, and while continuing




I'he Error of I(,ealism   I03


blindly a movement of revolt and reaction, which had its reason to be for a
while, but not for a longer while, they
have made the hatred of the bourgeois
the chief article of their credo, and
developed into a system the ingenious,
puerile and irritating defiance of common
opinion. The result of these tendencies
carried to an extreme degree has been
to make the profession of art a sort of
mandarinate, and the productions of art a
source of peculiarly esoteric joy mingled
with regret, a joy at once incomplete,
confused, and narrow-minded, because
it is severed from the noble sentiments
of human sympathy and broad human
culture.
That some of the joys of art are of an
esoteric nature may be admitted in the
sense that they are dependent upon the
general culture and special education of
the person who feels them, and are




Io4     the Desire of Beauty


therefore hardly accessible to the common democratic public. At the same
time, we can hardly allow that the
sublimest works of art are essentially
ineloquent to the vulgar, much less that
it should be the aim of the artist to be
an undecipherable puzzle and a stumbling-block to humanity in general. In
presence of the greatest works of art, of
the past at any rate, such a proposition
can with difficulty be sustained.
As regards the theory of realism in
art, it seems obvious that art cannot live
by reality alone. The essence of art is
to combine and transform real things, to
animate them, and make them the
vehicles of ideas and sentiments, or at
any rate vehicles of beauty.  In a work
of art that which is most precious and
most charming is not that which is
formally  expressed, but rather  that
which is suggested without being ex



the Error of 2Realism     I05
pressed; it is the thought and the moral
impression which emanates from the
work always in combination with the
aesthetic impression, for a work of art
implies a work accomplished in adequate
conditions of beauty, otherwise it cannot
be artistic, nor can the impression that
it gives be aesthetic. The eyes are the
windows of the soul: they feel a
pleasure  of their own; they    enjoy
physically; but the soul remains the
true master, and it is to the soul that
the work of art must ultimately appeal.
There is something in a picture or a
statue beyond material representation
and technical excellence, something that
we do seek and that we must seek, and
that something is an emanation or an
expression of the soul of the artist.
Therefore the more a picture appears to
be the result of the work only of the
eye and the hand of the artist, the more




io6    the Desire of Beauty


nearly it approaches to a mere transcription of reality, the smaller is its interest.
The pleasure that such a picture can give
is instantaneous and lasts but a moment, if it please at all.
On the other hand, if the artist has
meditated before taking up his brushes;
if he has felt some emotion in presence
of his subject; if his vision has been
modified by joy or sadness; if he has
transformed his subject, even unconsciously or involuntarily, his picture
will be more and more interesting in
proportion to the intensity of his feelings
and to the finer temper of his soul; and
instead of captivating our attention for a
moment, it will act upon us gradually,
it "will grow upon us," to use an expression frequently employed by those
unsophisticated spectators whose sincere
ejaculations are always worthy of respect.
Nevertheless, technical excellence re



The Error of Rtealism


Io07


mains indispensable in a picture, being
as it is one of those conditions of beauty
which we exact in works of art.
The pleasure of art is sensual beyond
a doubt, and sensual first of all, inasmuch as it cannot exist except in
adequate conditions of beauty; but if the
pleasure it gives were merely sensual
and nothing more, its domain would be
indeed  limited.  Art speaks to the
senses, but it speaks not less eloquently
to the intellect; and it is on this twofold
condition that painting and sculpture take
rank with poetry in the Palace of the
Muses. Whatever the processes employed, all the productions of the imagination have emotion as their supreme
end: melody of verse, charm of colour,
perfection of line are the means-and
means that have a beauty of their own,
worthy of admiration, and capable of giving exquisite pleasure-but the noblest




Io8    The Desire of Beauty


art captivates the ear or the eye only
to reach the vestibule of the mind, and
thence to penetrate into the sanctuary
of the soul.
Thus there are two points of view
from which the masters of art can be
studied, the one general, intellectual,
and emotional; the other, technical or
relative to  methods, processes,  and
material results.  This distinction  is
not clearly made by the advocates of
realism whose programme is summed up
in the fallacious admonition: " Copy
Nature.  Copy Nature sincerely.  Paint
what you really see."
This doctrine, as it is generally understood, is the enemy of art, inasmuch as
it prohibits entirely the action of the
imagination in the sense, not of the
fancy, but of the constructive imagination
which, in the words of Baudelaire, "has
taught man the moral signification of




T'he Error of fRealism      I09


colour, contour, sound, and perfume.
Imagination, in the beginning of the
world, created analogy and metaphor.
It decomposes all creation, and, with the
materials gathered and arranged according to rules of which the origin can be
found only in the most secret depths of
the soul, it creates a new world and
produces the sensation of novelty." And
the same writer, commenting upon the
favourite phrase of a great artist who
said " Nature is only a dictionary," continues thus: "In order to comprehend
the wide meaning implied in this phrase,
we must remember the numerous and
ordinary usages made of a dictionary.
We seek therein the meaning and the
etymology of words; we find in it all
the elements which compose a phrase or
a narrative; but no one ever looked
upon a dictionary as a composition in
the poetical sense of the word. Painters




HIo    The Desire of iBeauty
who obey imagination seek in their
dictionary those elements which are in
harmony with their conceptions, and by
arranging them with a certain art they
give them an entirely new physiognomy.
Those who have no imagination copy
the dictionary. The result of this is a
very great vice, the vice of commonplaceness, which is more peculiar to those
painters whose special path brings them
nearer to exterior Nature-for instance,
the landscape painters, who generally
consider it a triumph to make no show
of their personality. By dint of contemplation they forget to think and
feel." Then proceeding to sum up the
true formulary of art, Baudelaire goes on
to say: "The whole visible universe is
a storehouse of images and signs to
which the imagination gives a relative
place and value; it is a kind of pasture
which the imagination has to digest and




the Error of Realism      I I I
transform. All the faculties of the human
soul ought to be subordinated to imagination, which brings them into requisition
all at once. Just as a good knowledge
of the dictionary does not necessarily
imply the knowledge of the art of composition, and as the art of composition
itself does not imply the universal imagination, so a good painter is not necessarily a great painter.  But a great
painter is necessarily a good painter,
because the universal imagination comprises the intelligence of all means and
the desire to acquire them.
" From the above notions it is evident
that the immense class of artists-that is
to say, of men who have devoted themselves to the expression of art-may be
divided into two distinct camps: the one
who calls himself a realist, a word of
double meaning and of imperfectly determined sense, and which we, in order




I i2   the ~Desire of Beauty
the better to characterise his error, will
call a positivist, says: ' I wish to represent things as they are, or else as they
would be, supposing that I do not exist.'
The universe without man. The other,
the imaginative artist, says: 'I wish to
illuminate things with my mind, and
project the reflection thereof upon other
minds.' Although these two absolutely
contrary methods can magnify or diminish
all subjects from the religious scene
down to the most modest landscape,
nevertheless the imaginative artist has
generally been led to manifest himself in
religious or creative painting, while genre
painting and landscape offered in appearance vast resources to lazy and hardly
excitable minds."
The controversy cannot be stated
more clearly and fairly than it is in the
above lines which Baudelaire wrote in
his study of the exhibition of the Paris




7ihe Error of RPealism


I I 3


Salon  of I859. We may, however,
suggest the curious reflection that the
artists who profess the realist theory are
working in the spirit of an age which is
not their own, they are late learners as
it were, who would seem to have just
discovered what Verrocchio and Leonardo
discovered three centuries ago.  It was
natural and useful that Italian art in its
second stage, by placing the end of
endeavour in technical excellence and
anatomical accuracy, should have made
representation an object in itself independently of its spiritual signification.
It was thus that painting became emancipated from the service of the Church
and was enabled to pursue beauty for its
own sake.  It was natural, too, that the
charm of a new discovery like that of
painting in oil colours, as perfected by
the brothers Van Eyck-combined with
the fascinations of those other novelties
H




114    The Desire of Beauty
geometry, perspective, and the art of
modelling by means of light and shadeshould have carried men away and
caused them to make the ideal of their
art to consist in a kind of painting which
might almost produce the illusion of the
corporeity of sculpture. Thus Leonardo,
in his treatise on painting, expressly
defines the province of the art as being
above all things the reproduction of the
relief of objects. "The first intention of
the painter," he says, "is to make the
flat surface of his picture look like a
body in relief and detached from the
background, and he who in this point
surpasses the others deserves to be
esteemed the greatest master of the
profession. Now this research of relief,
or rather this perfection and crowning of
art, proceeds from the just and natural
distribution of the shadows and the
lights, which is called light and shade,




The error of Realism


115


so that if a painter spares the shadows
where they are necessary he dishonours
himself and renders his work contemptible in the eyes of sound judges,
and all that merely for the sake of
gaining a false esteem among the vulgar
and the ignorant, who in a picture consider only the brilliancy and gaudiness
of the colouring without paying any heed
to the relief."
In this passage Leonardo was preaching doubtless against such painting as
that of Fra Angelico and of the primitive
fresco painters, whose works nevertheless retain for us so much charm that
the sympathies of our own age perhaps
tend more towards them than towards
the fascinating and complete beauty of
the pictures of their prodigious critic.
The naturalism advocated by Leonardo
was practised by himself under the
control of such a mighty soul that the




116   qThe Desire of Beauty
results are eternal marvels above all
doctrine and superior to all theory.
But the development of the principles
set forth by Leonardo in the hands of
craftsmen devoid of his imagination, of
his exquisite spirit of selection and of his
love of beauty, led to the glorification of
mere material execution, to the apotheosis
of the morceau, to the brilliant technique
and strong realism of Caravaggio. So
far as concerns fine drawing, exact
modelling, the delicate observation of
values and the splendour of the morceau,
no realistic painter of modern times has
surpassed Caravaggio, and it is not easy
to mention one who has equalled him.
But why try to equal him? Painting
like that of Caravaggio, in his " Death
of the Virgin," for instance, in the
Louvre, may be the despair of the
apprentice and the touch-stone of the
master, but the joy it gives is of short




Tfhe Error of Realism   I17
duration and without spiritual intensity.
The painter who proposes to imitate Nature is vanquished before he has opened
his paint box, for Nature herself is always better than his imitation. In vain
a Van Huysum paints flowers to the life
and makes the dew pearl on their petals,
the real flowers and the real dew are
more beautiful than his imitation, be he
never so skilful. Therefore we demand
in painting something other than imitation and something other than material
representation, while the mode of expression advocated by the realists by no
means impresses us as the most desirable, much less as the only true mode.
We feel more in sympathy with the great
French painter Poussin, when he says in
his strong way: "Painting is in love
with beauty, and it is the image of consummate beauty which it seeks to trace."
We accept, too, the doctrine of idealism




ii8    The Desire of Reauty
in art as it has been stated by the German philosopher Hegel in the following
words:
" As regards forms and modes of
expression, the artist does not take all
that he finds in Nature, and because he
finds it thus. If he takes Nature for a
model, it is not because Nature has
made such and such a thing in such and
such a manner, but because she has made
it well. And this ' well' is something
more lofty than the real itself such as
our senses perceive it."




VI


PAPIER INGRES
"IN order to be an artist a man must
above all things abandon himself to his
originality and await the inspiration
which results from sincere and personal
emotion, and which finds expression in
the measure of that emotion. But in
order to give it expression in a proper
manner, all the preparatory studies
recommended by all the schools of all
ages are absolutely necessary. There
is no school, or rather there is but one
school-namely, conscientious workuntil the inspiration comes." So wrote
Delacroix, in his essay on the " Teaching of Drawing."




I20    The Desire of Beauty


There is no more debated question
among artistic specialists than this of the
education of painters. How is drawing
to be taught?   We confess incompetence to speak of this matter and beg
leave merely to call attention to a
curious fact which is revealed by a
comparison of the drawings of the
ancient masters and the drawings of
the art students of the present day all
over the world. The studies of the old
masters are on a very small scale.
Perugino, Botticelli, Leonardo, Raphael,
rarely need more than a square foot of
paper whereon to compose their greatest
pictures; their nude studies are always
small; their drawings are just as often
of fragments, of parts, as of the whole
figure. Within the space of two or
three square inches Rembrandt made
admirable drawings which might be
enlarged to any scale and still remain




Rapier Ingres


I12 I


perfect.  The modern student, on the
contrary, is placed before the model with
a sheet of " papier Ingres " on his easel,
and the professor requires him to draw a
complete figure, an Academy as it is
called, about five times as large as the
largest drawing of the same kind made
by the old masters. The obvious inconvenience of an " Academy " of this size
is the difficulty of seeing the ensemble of
one's drawing; the size is an obstacle
to the intelligent study of the model
and to the rapid and exact rendering of
what the eye can observe and carry in
its special memory.
Is it not obvious that in drawing
from the living model the desideratum is
to record immediately, in all their freshness and in the shortest possible time,
the details of line and form which the
eye is striving to seize?  Is it not clear
that, in seeking to record those subtle




122    The Desire of Seauty


and fugitive modifications of typical contours which constitute character and expression, the eye has as much as it can
do to note the phenomena, and that the
responsive indication recorded on paper
must be instantaneous, otherwise it will
be inferior?  In other words, in this
particular question of drawing, the longer
the time taken ito record what the eye
perceives, the less exact and the less
crisp and vigorous is the record likely
to be. Therefore, as it takes longer to
draw a long line than a short one, and
as the eye and the hand can more easily
control a small drawing than a large
one, it would seem not unreasonable to
conclude that the dimensions of the
studies and sketches of the ancient
masters are more logically and more
practically chosen than those of most of
our modern draughtsmen of academic
training.




Papier Ingres


I23


Nevertheless the fact is patent: the
sheet of paper of the kind and dimensions known by the name of Ingres is
now used for " Academies " all over the
world. Not that Ingres was the inventor
of these dimensions. On the contrary, it
seems that we owe the modern dimensions of drawing-paper for nude studies
to Lebrun, who, being charged with the
organisation of the Academy of painting
in the reign of Louis XIV., doubtless
felt it to be his duty to establish everything, even the sketches of the pupils, on
a scale in proportion with the magnificence and grandeur of the monarch of
whose splendour he was the servant.
At any rate, the curious may find in the
Library of the Ecole des Beaux Arts at
Paris the collection of " Academies"
drawn by the French masters from
the reign of Louis XIV. down to the
Presidency of M. Carnot, and they




124     The Desire of Beauty


are all of the dimensions of "papier
Ingres."
Until recently the French art students
drew their " Academies " on their knees;
at present they have easels, and are so
able to grasp the ensemble of their drawing more conveniently. Thus certain of
our objections to the dimensions of
"papier Ingres" disappear; for the
purposes of study, where the pupil
spends generally four sittings in making his drawing from the nude model,
" papier Ingres " and all that it implies
may be free from grave disadvantages,
and it may have positive advantages,
though this remains to be proved. On
the other hand, the "Academy" itself,
the drawing in which a living model is
copied like a piece of still-life, is an
incomplete means of education, and
whatever may be the degree of its usefulness it can never take the place of




Papier Ingres


I25


the sketches of the partial studies, of the
croquis from living and vibrating Nature
such as the old masters employed. The
best draughtsmen, the most intensely
artistic observers of modern times, have
rarely been those who drew the best
"( Academies " when they were at school,
but those who, contrary to the usage,
trained their eyes and hands by persistent  sketching,  by  interminable
studies, by innumerable croquis from
real and moving life, and not from the
mere nude model immobolised in an
academic posture.
In the eyes of the world in general,
the Ecole des Beaux Arts of Paris is the
centre of ideal technical instruction in
art. Theoretically it is doubtless an
admirable institution, and its programme
is most complete in conception, inasmuch
as it includes at once technical instruction in all branches of fine arts, and at




I26    the Desire of Beauty


the same time the means of acquiring
culture of a general kind. In practice,
however, it is a poor school, and those
who would take the trouble to ask the
leading French painters of the day what
is their opinion as to the merits of the
system of instruction in vogue in the
ateliers of the Ecole des Beaux Arts
might be astonished to find those opinions unanimously condemnatory.  Indeed, one might go so far as to say that
so far as the section of painting is concerned, the Ecole des Beaux Arts is
gradually working out its own confusion.
The reasons which militate in favour
of this conclusion are of a technical
order which it is scarcely within our
competence to state in detail; there are,
however, certain general reasons and
broad principles upon which it may be
interesting to dwell with reference to




Rapier Ingres


I27


what may be called the philosophy of
artistic education.
In one of his " discourses" delivered
before the students of the Royal Academy
of London, Sir Joshua Reynolds remarked: " Every seminary of learning
may be said to be surrounded with an
atmosphere of floating knowledge, where
every mind may imbibe somewhat congenial to its own original conceptions.
Knowledge thus obtained has always
something more popular and useful than
that which is forced upon the mind by
private precepts or solitary meditation."
Such an atmosphere of floating knowledge certainly exists in Paris, but it can
scarcely be said to surround the reputed
seminaries of artistic learning, which are
in truth rather seminaries of artistic
ignorance. The charm and usefulness
of Paris to the art student lie not so
much in the schools, whether official or




128    She Desire of Beauty
private, but in the consciousness of an
ever active artistic striving, and of ever
new aspirations that are seeking adequate
expression, though rarely finding it-the
consciousness that there is a living
artistic movement and a few noble artists
who are leading and forming that movement; the consciousness that there is
great glory to be obtained hardly and by
dint of incessant effort backed by special
gifts. But this consciousness is accompanied by the conviction that no good
can come out of the recognised schools
and that the effort must be independent,
personal and rather subversive than conservative.  Indeed, in Paris there is always some sanctuary to be violated, some
throne to be upset, some stronghold
of conventionality to be stormed, captured, and transformed into a paradise of
art. All is flux, change, and eternal becoming. Things never remain stationary




Papier Ingres        129
And in this perpetual clashing of endeavours, of ideals and of opinions,
there is produced a certain intensity of
intellectual and aesthetic excitation which
is healthful and invigorating to strong
temperaments, providing that they have
been prepared to take advantage of it by
the gymnastic of technical training, and
by the habit of a certain degree of
culture.  As physical gymnastics develop the muscles and make the movements of the body easy and harmonious,
so do technical training and mental
culture render the painter, considered as
the instrument of his genius, comparable
to an excellent and perfectly trained
horse that carries its rider according to
his will and desire, joyously, swiftly,
without resistance, strain or effort. The
hand obedient to the intellect, as Michael
Angelo put it: such is the ideal.
Nowadays unfortunately both the hand
I




130    the Desire of Beauty


and the intellect of the painter are
neglected.  Sufficient importance is not
attached to the preparation of the one
or of the other, and the consequence has
been the reign of vulgar realism which
seems happily to be coming to an end,
the glorification of the morceau, the disdain of intellect in painting and the
triumph of ostentatious cleverness of
facture. Not that the joy of painting
should be primarily intellectual; on the
contrary, the art of painting is frankly
sensuous in its means and capable of
producing an exhilaration that is almost
purely physical.  But has not all art a
sensuous element?   In  painting  the
sensuous element is colour; in sculpture
it is form; in music, sound; and in
poetry a suggestion of all these combined
with the joyful sensuousness of motion.
But each of these sensuous elements is
insufficient as an end in itself, but derives




Rapier Ingres


I3


a raison d'etre and a noble signification
only by being the vehicle of the ideal
and the medium of the pulsations of the
artistic temperament which uses it.
What is more eloquent than great drawing, that drawing which is full of personality and soul? What is more rich in
aesthetic suggestiveness than colour when
used by painters of exquisite sensitiveness?  Far from condemning the pleasure of painting because it seems to be
primarily sensuous, let us endeavour by
the control of intellect, and by the
nobleness, the serenity, and the generality of our souls, to refine and intensify
the sensuous pleasure it gives.
As for questions of technical instruction, let it be remembered that the end
of the drawing school is to cultivate the
eye and not the hand, to develop the
visual perception and not to form the
style. In he same way the object of




132    The Desire of 7Beauty
the painting school should be to cultivate
the eye, to awaken the colour sense and
to refine it.  In other words, the ideal
school will not inculcate rules, but rather
seek to develop and form artistic technical facility, leaving taste to form itself.
Taste in art, like all other tastes, forms
itself by experience and comparison upon
a basis of natural faculties; and when
the artificial nature joins hands with the
inherited nature, taste, it has been said,
rises to the rank of genius.
Above all, it would be desirable to
impress  upon  the  contemporary  art
teachers and art students the necessity
of culture. To awaken curiosity and to
direct it are the chief aims of aesthetic
education, for intelligent curiosity is the
motive which prompts all useful endeavour to acquire both knowledge, comprehension, and technical skill.
" Curiosity and the desire of beauty,"




Papier Ingres


133


says Pater, " have each their place in art,
as in all true criticism. When one's
curiosity is deficient, when one is not
eager enough for new impressions and
new pleasures, one is liable to value
mere academical proprieties too highly;
to be satisfied with worn-out or conventional types; to miss those places
where the handiwork of Nature, or of the
artist, has been most cunning; to find
the most stimulating products of art a
mere irritation. And when, on the other
hand, one's curiosity is in excess, when
it overbalances the desire of beauty, then
one is liable to value in works of art
what is inartistic in them; to be satisfied with what is exaggerated in art; not
to distinguish jealously enough between
what is admirably done and what is
done not quite so well. To preserve the
happy mean is the aim of culture, and to
acquire culture has been the aim of the




134     the Desire of Beauty
greatest artists of all ages, and particularly
of those painters of the Italian Renaissance whose works have such enduring
charm for us. Indeed, it seems a truism
to add that without culture there can be
no great art.




VII


AN ART CRITIC OF THE FIFTEENTH
CENTURY
THE end of the fifteenth century in Italy
was one of those happy eras of intellectual activity, like the age of Pericles,
which are productive of complete types
of general culture and in which, to quote
the words of the subtle author of
" Studies in the Renaissance," " Artists
and philosophers and those whom the
action of the world has elevated and
made keen, do not live in isolation, but
breathe a common air, and catch light
and heat from each other's thoughts.
There is a spirit of general elevation
and enlightenment in which all alike




136     VJhe Desire of Jeauty


communicate. It is this solidarity which
gives unity to all the various products of
the Renaissance, and it is to this intimate alliance with mind, to this participation in the best thoughts which
that age produced, that the art of Italy
in the fifteenth century owes much of its
grave dignity and influence."
It is for these reasons that the epoch
in question remains so suggestive, and
that in days of doubt and hesitation we
turn towards it not with a view to imitation, but in order to find repose, encouragement and indications for conduct.
Hegel, in his lectures on the Philosophy
of Art, speaking of Winckelmann, says:
" Winckelmann by contemplation of the
ideal works of the ancients received a
sort of inspiration through which he
opened a new sense for the study of art.
He is to be regarded as one of those
who in the sphere of art have known




Jfn eArt Critic


I 37


how to initiate a new organ for the
human spirit." Goethe, in his Fragments
on Art, classes Winckelmann with certain
works of art possessing an inexhaustible
gift of suggestion, to which criticism may
return again and again with undiminished
freshness.  Thus, as suggestiveness is
one of the chief privileges of the fine
arts, so it is the privilege of noble
criticism, for the ideal of criticism of a
positive kind is to reveal new sources
of pleasure, to create a new sense, to
develop a new organ or to bring into
activity a latent one.
Doubtless this ideal of criticism is
comparatively modern, at any rate in
such a conscious and deliberate form,
but the spirit of it is ancient, and we
shall find the beginning of it in the discussions of the members of that Platonic
Academy which Cosimo dei Medici
founded.  In the fair gardens around




138    9ihe Desire of Reauty
Florence we may imagine the members
of this Academy resuscitating the scene
of Plato's Phkedrus, while the learned
and universally gifted Leone Battista.
Alberti, like another Socrates, with young
Lorenzo dei Medici for his interlocutor,
charmed the listeners with mellifluous
discourse on the contrast of the active
and the contemplative life. Alberti,
among other writings, left a Latin treatise
on painting which is the most brilliant
specimen that we have of the criticism
of the Renaissance-a criticism which is
familiar with the most subtle -esthetic
questions, and which shows that those
who talk so glibly about the naivete' of
the Florentine painters make an egregious
mistake.
Awaiting the time when some pious
student shall give us a complete English
translation of this treatise on painting,
we propose to submit a few extracts




vfn vfrt Critic


139


from it which seem to confirm the doctrines that we have ventured to set forth
in our own humble essay, for no stronger
partisan of culture in art can be cited
than Alberti. But first of all we may
preface the extracts by reminding the
reader that the treatise in question is
anterior by fifty years to that of Leonardo
and almost contemporary with that of
Cennino Cennini, who wrote his curious
book in the prison delle Stinche in the
year I437. Alberti, who was born about
the year 1400, was then in the maturity
of his age and talent. He lived in the same
town as Cennino, and yet how wide the
difference between the books of the two
men. Cennino is a pure primitive, still
embarrassed by the stiffness of Byzantine and hieratic traditions, ignorant in
matters of perspective, and legendary in
his ideas of anatomy, insomuch that he
requires the left-hand side of a man to




140    T'he Desire of Beauty
be represented with one rib less than that
of woman. Alberti, on the other hand, is
full of the spirit and the knowledge of
the Pagan Renaissance. He is one of
the great masters who have expounded
the theory of the plastic arts, and next
after Leonardo da Vinci he is perhaps
the most original and exceptional figure
which the Renaissance produced, from
the point of view of universal accomplishments, being an encyclopaedist by
temperament as well as by education.
Painter, sculptor, architect, jurisconsult,
poet, platonist, moralist, engineer, inventor and athlete, Leone Battista Alberti,
as Vitale says in the epitaph quoted by
Paulus Jovius,
princeps fuit eruditiorum,
Princeps ut Leo solus est ferarum.
First of all, on the nobleness of the
art of painting, Alberti relates that Zeuxis




ffn 4Art Critic


I4I


was accustomed to offer his works as
presents, saying that no money could
buy them, for he thought that no price
could satisfy the man who, in painting
or sculping animated beings, considered
himself as a god among mortals. Then
he tells us that painting was held in
such high esteem by the Greeks that
their laws did not allow slaves to study
the art, and this was just, continues
Alberti, "for the art of painting is so
worthy of the most liberal and noble
minds, that, for my part, I have always
judged to be provided with the best and
loftiest intellect those whom I have seen
taking delight in it.  Painting is agreeable both to the wise and to the ignorant.
Indeed, it is rare that when painting
gives pleasure to the connoisseurs it does
not also move those who are not expert,
and you will not find a man who is not
most anxious to excel in it..... So




I42     T'he Desire of (Beauty


the cultivation of painting will be a
cause of pleasure to you, and, if you
excel in it, a source of praise, riches
and perpetual renown. This being so,
and painting being the best and the most
antique ornament of things, worthy of
free men, agreeable to the learned and
to the ignorant, I exhort with all my
might young men to devote themselves
to the practice of it, as much as they
can. Above all things, I exhort those
who are in love with this art to employ all
their studies and all their zeal in carrying it to perfection.  But if you seek to
become distinguished in painting, desiring above all other things the renown
and the glory which you know were so
dear to the ancients, you will remember
that avarice has always been the adversary of honour and virtue. The mind
that is inclined to this vice will rarely
gather the fruit of posterity.  I have




efAn    frt   Critic


143


seen many who, at the moment when
they were best learning, having given
themselves up to gain, were never able
for that very reason to acquire even the
shadow of glory or the smallest fortune;
whereas if they had applied their minds
to study, they would have attained to
that reputation which would have given
them both riches and happiness."
Alberti is no partisan of exact imitation for imitation's sake; or, in other
words, of unintelligent realism; he requires painting to charm and to move
the mind; in the subject of a picture he
demands abundance and variety, moderated by dignity and grace.  " It may
be," he says, " that he who seeks dignity
will seek sobriety; for as in a prince the
sobriety of his words adds to their majesty, provided of course that the meaning be clear, so too, in the subject of a
picture, a limited number of personages
*:. "*^*




144     Tfhe Desire of lBeauty


gives dignity. Variety gives grace.  I
do not approve poverty in a composition, but I should still less approve an
abundance that would be incompatible
with dignity. In my opinion, there is
no subject so complicated that it cannot
be rendered with nine or ten personages."
Then again, speaking of expression, he
says that a subject will be capable of
moving the spectators when the figures,
though motionless, manifest strongly the
movements of their souls; and in words
of which the innumerable drawings of
Leonardo da Vinci are the best comment,
Alberti continues:
"The movements of the body must
therefore be perfectly known to the
painter, who must study them in nature.
This is a very difficult thing, because
the infinite movements of the soul produce infinite variations in the movements




a~n   4frt   Critic


I45


of the body. What painter, if he is not
very expert, will be able to believe how
difficult it is, when one wants to paint a
laughing face, not to make it crying
instead of joyful?  Much more, who
will feel himself capable, without infinite
study and application, of rendering a
face, in which the mouth, the chin, the
eyes, the cheeks, the forehead, the eyebrows, harmonise together to express
grief or joy? Therefore must Nature
be consulted and imitated always in her
most fugitive aspects. But we must
paint that which gives an impression to
the soul in preference to that which
strikes the eyes only."
Alberti insists constantly upon the
qualities of charm and grace in painting,
and upon the intelligence and personality
of the artist, and upon the nobleness ot
art. "' The aim of painting," he says,
is to attain to glory and to win gratitude
K




146    The Desire of Beauty


and esteem rather than to seek riches.
The painter will obtain this result the
more readily if his painting captivates
and touches the eyes and the mind of
the spectator." The painter, he maintains, should be a good man, honest,
humane and courteous, and well informed
in literature and in all the liberal arts.
He would have the painter take delight
in the poets and orators, "who have
certainly many beauties in common with
him; and if he is a man of literary
culture and abundantly provided with
the knowledge of many things, he will
find no small pleasure in establishing
elegantly a historical composition. The
glory of such works consists above all
things in the invention. Now invention
has such importance that it has charm
alone, even independently of painting."
And as an instance Alberti translates
Lucian's description of the picture of




J4n    ir t Critic


I47


Apelles representing Calumny, a description which Botticelli has materialised in his famous picture in the Uffizi
Gallery at Florence. Above all things
the painter must seek beauty. " It is
well to seek resemblance in all parts,
but also and above all things beauty.
For beauty in painting is no less agreeable than it is desirable. Demetrius,
that ancient painter, greatly impaired his
glory because he was more jealous of
expressing resemblance than of attaining
beauty. We must therefore choose all
the esteemed parts of the finest bodies.
We must endeavour first of all, by study
and by art, to comprehend and express
beauty, although it be that which is most
difficult in the world, inasmuch as its
splendours are not gathered together at
one point, but remain rare and dispersed.
Nevertheless, all zeal must be employed
to seek and to know beauty.....




148    the Desire of {Beauty
Whether you are studying sculpture or
painting, you must always determine to
look at and to imitate some elegant and
rare model." And then, as a final and
most excellent piece of advice, Alberti
recommends painting of noble and serious
dimensions. " Let us always take from
Nature," says Alberti, "the things that
we intend to paint, and let us choose in
them always that which is most beautiful
and most distinguished. Beware, however, of reproducing them in too small
pictures, as most painters do. I would
have you accustom yourself to large
figures as nearly as possible of natural
size, for in small pictures great faults
are easily concealed, whereas in large
pictures small faults are immediately
visible."




VIII


THE EDUCATION OF THE EYE
SAYS Cicero: Multa vident pictores in
umbris et in eminentia, quce nos non
videmus. Painters see in shadow and
in relief-that is to say, in form and
effect-many things which we ordinary
men do not perceive. Man at his
birth, it is believed, has an unrectified
vision; instinct does not suffice to
familiarise him with the phenomena of
aerial perspective, and so the babe puts
out his hand to grasp a star. Thus
a series of operations, a process of
experience, is necessary in order to
provide the intellect of man with a
notion which his senses at first refuse




150    T'he Desire of Beauty
him. In short, there is an education
of the eye.
A moment's reflection will suggest
obvious illustrations of this fact without
our going far back into the history of
art. We need not suggest the thought
of how many centuries of education are
represented in the difference between the
drawings on bone of the lake-dwellers,
the hunting scenes of the great Assyrian
sculptors now in the British Museum,
and the marbles of the Parthenon. We
have only to remember the differences
that exist between the works of the
childhood of modern painting, the intermediate productions and the consummate
masterpieces, between the visions of
Giotto, Masaccio and Leonardo da Vinci,
between the art of the fourteenth century,
which sought to become a medium of
universal expression, and the art of the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which




The Education of the Eye  151


possessed the secrets of anatomy, of
perspective and of light and shade, and
became synthetised in masterpieces of
consummate beauty that were no longer
means to an end, but an end in themselves. And yet in their day the pictures of Cimabue were proclaimed to be
beyond all praise, and the eyes of the
painter's contemporaries were satisfied
with his figures, all stiff, ugly and conventional as they were. In the same
way, the absence of perspective was no
obstacle to those who admired the works
of Giotto, while the fact that Gentile da
Fabriano placed his figures in rooms so
small that if they rose from their seats
and stood upright their heads would need
to pass through the ceiling, was no
cause of embarrassment to the critics of
his day. But after Paolo Uccello had
passed the greater part of his life in
analysing the phenomena and in formu



I52   YJhe Desire of Beauty


lating the laws of perspective, it became
obvious to all that the works of the
painters of the fourteenth century were
wanting in this respect; cultivated
humanity was henceforward gifted with a
new sense; the education of the modern
eye took a giant's step in the path of
progress.
Another illustration of our theme may
be found in the development of the
sense of beauty between the Middle Ages
and the Golden Age of Italian painting.
At one time, in the thirteenth century,
the Madonnas of Cimabue were found to
be supremely beautiful; in the fourteenth
century the Madonnas of Giotto were
considered marvels of art; in the fifteenth century, under the various influences of the rediscovery of antiquity,
of the revival of learning, and of the
growth of a national poetic literature in
the vulgar tongue, which gave expression




The Education of the Eye 153


to the new thoughts, emotions and aspirations of a humanity that had been
formed by the combined spiritual forces
of Christianity and Chivalry, a new ideal
of feminine beauty was evolved and
realised in the diverse types of the
Madonnas of Lippo Lippi, Botticelli,
Perugino, Bellini, Leonardo and Raphael.
Between the conventional type of the
Madonnas of Cimabue and the subtle
fascination and incomparable beauty of
the Madonnas of Leonardo, how great
the difference! What treasures of delicate perception the eye of the latter
artist had amassed, and what a revelation of beauty his works contain for
the eternal education of the eyes of humanity!
A third illustration may be chosen in
the history of landscape painting. The
process of art is from the ideal to the
real, from hieratic stiffness to frivolous




154    the Desire of PReauty
charm. The first essays of all nations
have the same physiognomy. In the
beginnings of the art of Greece, of Italy,
of Flanders and of France we find the
same general characteristics as in the art
of ancient Egypt.  Faith takes the place
of talent in those archaic artists who
paint upon the walls of temples the
sacred symbols of religion; and, when
painting becomes more familiar, the
artists pass from the divine to the human
and from the sacred to the profane, and
so after reproducing the features of gods
they reproduce those of historical or
real personages, always with a certain
ideal. Then comes the reign of the
naturalists, when landscape begins to
assume importance, first of all taking
the place of gold or blue backgrounds
and gradually aspiring to an independent existence. Thus, contrary to
apparent logic, in painting, the ideal is




T'he education of the Eye 15 5
the starting-point and Nature is the
goal.
So in landscape painting itself, we
begin with the ideal backgrounds of the
primitive painters of Italy and Flanders,
sweet visions of blue hills, sunny lakes
and flowery meadows, and come successively to the ideal decorative landscapes
of Poussin and Claude Lorraine, the
picturesque landscapes of Salvator Rosa,
the more truthful landscapes of Ruysdael,
Hobbema and Cuyp, and finally to the
naturalist landscapes of Constable and
Gainsborough, and of the French landscapists Corot, Rousseau, Daubigny,
Courbet, Chintreuil, whose successors
are the more scientifically naturalist landscape painters of the present day. For
the sake of brevity and rapidity of
argument we cite only a few typical
names, and we select those names with
a view to concentrating the reader's




156    T'he {Desire of Beauty


attention upon the particular point of the
education of the eye and the augmentation of its sensibility.
As typical modern landscapists we
may mention J. C. Cazin and Claude
Monet. Compare a picture by either of
these men with a picture by Corot,
Constable, Hobbema or Claude Lorraine,
and the difference not merely of the personal vision but of the physical vision
of these four artists will be found to
be singularly striking. The perceptive
powers of the eyes of Cazin and of
Monet will appear to be of prodigious
intensity as compared with those of their
predecessors. Cazin's pictures charm us
by the distinction of their tone and by
profound poetic qualities with which we
are not concerned here, and when we
compare them with the more simple
visions of Constable or of Hobbema we
are struck by Cazin's exquisite study of




The education of the Eye   15 7


the phenomena of light and shade, by
his delicate endeavour to render diffused
light, by the qualities of atmosphere and
ambience which he puts into his work.
Less consciously poetic in his aspirations
than Cazin and more deliberately scientific, Claude Monet has carried the study
of the diffused vibrations of light in the
open air further than any painter up to
the present day. Upon one single theme,
a couple of hayricks in a field, or a
vista of river with tall poplars lining its
banks, Monet will compose fifteen or
twenty colour harmonies, painting the
same scene at different hours and expressing in each variation the joy, the
gaiety, the dramatic expressiveness, the
infinite poetry of light.
In the landscapes of Cazin and of
Monet we remark immediately a photometric quality which leads us to conclude
that the eye of these painters is sensitive




158    T'he Desire of Beauty


to many phenomena which their predecessors did not perceive, and as we go back
step by step we are led to conclude that
the education of our visual organs has
been progressive, and that Nature has
not always appeared to man in the colours
which she now wears. In other words,
it appears that the sense of colour has
its history in the same way as an idea,
a principle, a religious or philosophical
dogma has its history. The colour sense
of ancient Egypt, of Assyria, of Hellas,
of Rome, of Byzantium and of Italy in the
fifteenth century was not identical. In
confirmation of our?esthetic speculations,
we refer to the scientific researches of
Hugo Magnus, of Breslau, which tend to
demonstrate that sensitiveness to different
colours has been perfected in man gradually in the course of ages, and that this
evolution is probably still far from being
complete. In this opinion we may well




The education of the Eye   I59
join when we think of the immense influence which a precursor like Manet has
had upon contemporary painting and
when we examine the curious results
which are being obtained by many living
painters whose minds, framed analytically
after the model of modern rationalism,
have led them to use their eyes scientifically-to decompose colour and to fix the
real effect by establishing rigorously the
series of relations or values.
Not that the old masters like Velasquez, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Pieter de
Hooch and the Dutch genre painters
neglected that law of values about which
we have heard so much in the art criticism of late years, but the application of
it by Manet and his successors is more
complete, more deliberate, and more
regardful of the increased sensitiveness
of our modern eyes. Manet's dominant
purpose was to see how an object exists




i6o    T'he Desire of ~ieauty
in the broad daylight of contemporary
reality; he looked at Nature simply,
made no composition, painted some familiar scene, either one or two figures or a
swarming crowd, guided only by the idea
that light draws as well as colours an ob-.
je ct, and that light puts each thing in its
proper place.  Hence the intense colour
notes of his work, the abbreviation of the
drawing, the simplification of the figures,
the treatment of all objects as masses and
not as outlines, the intense and direct
"1impression" which constitutes in the
mind of the artist a picture sufficiently
composed and drawn, and requiring only
to be painted logically and implacably.
From Manet proceeded the group of socalled "1Impressionists " who led a militant existence in Paris between the years
1877 and 1882, and who endeavoured
not merely to interpret Nature sincerely,
ingenuously and without regard to con



The Education of the Eye   i 6


vention, but more particularly to fix upon
canvas the momentary impression, the
fugitive aspect of things, however strange
it may be, and even however unpleasant,
for the Impressionists, being reactionaries
and enthusiasts of a new ideal, were remarkable for their neglect of beauty.
Here, perhaps, it may be convenient
to remark the influence upon art of what
may be called aesthetic fashion, and of
those modish elements which tend to
develop themselves in incomplete current
work at the expense generally of other
qualities which give durable interest. At
one time the realism of the early Florentines was all the rage; at another time
perspective and anatomy engendered corresponding mannerisms;   then  again,
light and shade, chiaroscuro, was very
much a la mode, and then came at various
epochs the turn of values, of open air, of
diffused light and of a dozen of manners,
L




162   9The Desire of Beauty
mannerisms and fads which the public
and the superficial connoisseurs demanded, and in which the painters sought
to excel, because such was the will of
aesthetic fashion. So long as the qualities
in favour are talked about, it seems to the
simple-minded painter that in them alone
lies salvation, and that the art of the
past is of no account except in such of
its manifestions as contain equivalent
qualities. The attitude of ephemeral
criticism is similar to that of the painters,
and therefore it is that from time to
time artists of the past are resuscitated
from long oblivion and placed upon lofty
pedestals before which the modish
aesthetics bow the knee and do homage,
because these artists have been discovered to contain certain qualities that
are for the moment once more a la mlode.
In due time these enthusiasms subside,
because man is inconstant and grows




The Education of the Eye   I63


tired of worshipping always in the same
way, and also because the spirit of criticism at length enlightens him and reveals
the forgotten truth that nothing is stable
and that art changes like everything else.
All of which goes to show that the charm
of a picture is as much in the state of
mind of the spectator as it is in the picture itself; that it is we spectators who
give to works of art their fascination;
and, in short, that in the aesthetic as in
all other domains we are the victims and
the lords of Illusion. Meanwhile, from
the point of view of the more transcendental criticism, we remark that amidst
the fleeting variations of ephemeral art
the great inventors of beauty arise and,create works that are complete, and in
which certain manifestations of art are
expressed once for all. The beauty of
the paintings of a Botticelli, of a Perugino,
of a Bellini, or of a Mantegna can never




I64     VThe Desire of Beauty


again be achieved. The secret of the
expression of a woman's smile, which
Leonardo discovered, perished with his
pupils of the Milanese school. Furthermore, we observe that all these works
of art of the past, which have resisted
the passage of time, and retained the
supreme gift of eternal human eloquence,
are in themselves things of beauty,
admirable and mysterious in technique,
materially exquisite, delicate and fascinating in aspect. Therefore, although we
admit that the spectator, in a certain
metaphysical way, imparts to a picture
the beauties which he desires to find
in it, yet we insist upon the necessity
of material exquisiteness in the picture
itself, and protest against that grossness
and brutality of technique and of presentation, against that ostentatious display
of clever brush work, and against that
parading of pretended scientific juxta



The Education of the Eye 165
position of masses of paint, which have
been among the modish vagaries of the
painting of recent years. Whether the
object of the artist be to create beauty
or to render character, we require his
picture to be itself a materially beautiful
object.
But apart from this question of
material beauty, with which we are for
the moment only incidentally concerned,
we cannot fail to remark that the colour
sense of certain contemporary French
artists is different from anything hitherto
known.   While feeling  the emotion
which colour provokes-an emotion felt
by the great Venetians who came in the
wake of Giorgione-these French painters have a more complex and a more
scientific perception of colour than any
who have preceded them. In the enthusiasm of their new scientific consciousness, for instance, they seek to perceive




I66     T'he Desire of iBeauty


that incessant mobility of light which
physics demonstrate, but which is not
yet visible to the ordinary eye in its
actual state of education. Thus in what
we call shade it has been observed that
there floats a sort of impalpable dust of
coloured atoms which colour the shade.
Therefore these painters colour their
representations of shadow, and by their
works are gradually educating the eye
of the public to the perception of infinitely delicate nuances, and so modifying
the hereditary vision of man by artificially developing and refining its latent
powers.
Examples of the modification of the
modern vision through the influence of
particular artists might also be found in
the literary order. We might cite pages
of the writings of Goncourt, J. K. Huysmans and other descriptive novelists,
which reveal on the part of those writers




T'he e~ducation of the Eye x67
a singularly exasperated vision, attentive
not to line but to coloured form, to the
spot, the patch, the tache, the hole which
objects make in the uniform background,
of daylight. The eyes of these literary
artists are not affected by the shape and
delimitation of objects, but by the little
luminous movement which makes colour.
In the same spirit a painter like Monet is
engaged almost exclusively in noting moments of light, or, in other words, spots
of colour, and his aim seems to be to
constitute around persons and objects a
network of luminous sensations and to
make painting as it were the orrhestration  of luminous atmosphere.  Thus
having remarked the phenomena of the
predominance at successive moments of
the day of one of the intermediary or
entire colours of the spectrum, grey,
mauve, violet, &c., Monet will find the
rendering of these phenomena sufficient




i68    T9he Desire of Beauty


to form the principal subject of a picture,
the more obvious subject being treated
with contempt as a mere pretext or leitmotiv for chromatic variations.  An
example has been mentioned above in
the two hayricks upon which Monet
painted more than twenty variations
without so much as changing his point
of view. The subject was colour. The
ricks, the field, the horizon and the sky
were merely the pretext.
Now the Impressionists have ceased
to exercise influence as a group, and the
spirit of reaction is incarnated in more
mild and often mystic groups with
vaguely defined aspirations that bear the
strange names of pointillistes, chromoluminaristes, neo-traditionnistes, &c. The
productions of these groups have hitherto
appeared to be of interest not as works
of art, but rather as researches, experiments, and essays towards the




T'he Education of the &ye i69
realisation of theories, which all bear
witness to the analytical and scientific
tendencies of the age. With these
painters the education of the eye has
become more conscious, and we might
almost say more scientific, than it ever
was in the past. While Cazin and
even Monet are comparatively intuitive
and the creatures of delicate instincts,
many of the younger theorists are precisely dogmatic and full of somewhat
vague doctrine, based upon the speculations and discoveries of Chevreul, Helmholtz and Ch. Henry.
The efforts of these new seekers are
worthy of being watched with interest,
for they are evidently helping the evolution of our perceptions of colour and
intensifying our sensitiveness to the
phenomena cof light; they are doubtless
pioneers in the education of the human
eye, and living proofs that there is no




I70      ihe Desire of Beauty
last word in art. Evidently nothing is
more vain in this matter of colour than
exclusive enthusiasm over the chromations of Titian, Giorgione, Veronese, or
Velasquez. Generation after generation
the painter's vision of the eternal illusion
of Nature varies and the tendency seems
to be from line to light, from intellect to
sensation. Nevertheless, it may be well
to refrain from unreserved approbation,
especially in the case of those innovators
who are all eyes and all science, who are
content with the simple notation of an
effect or of an impression, or who record
strange visions in conditions devoid both
of selection and of beauty. To augment
the perceptive powers of our visual
organs, to reveal to us new joys of
colour and new refinements of light, to
create chromatic harmonies of unprecedented delicacy, is laudable, but insufficient as an end.  In the great artist




t'he education of the Eye I7I


the eyes are the servants of the soul,
and not the mere searching organs that
direct the skilful workman's hand of the
painters of externality.  It is not in the
propitious fever of a mere happy moment
that great works of art are created; it is
not by being content with felicitous
suggestions of Nature and with amusing
notes of passing sensations; but by the
long effort of an imaginative and receptive mind tenacious of its ideal, and by
the mature and untiring energy of a
temperament richly and delicately endowed both physically and emotionally.
Therefore, in presence of the multiplicity
of notes, of essays, of scientific researches
which contemporary painting has produced, in presence of the mass of evidence that has been accumulated to prove
the increased intensity of our modern
perceptions of colour, we are beginning
to ask whether it is not time to demand




I72   VThe Desire of {Beauty
the synthesis of these detailed results in
works of grand eloquence in which the
soul will resume its empire and speak
in imposing compositions, presenting the
spectacle of idealised Nature and noble
human form.
Or may we conclude from the nature
of many of these modern theories that art
is destined to be devoured by science,
and the instinctive voice of the soul to be
reduced to silence? Having ascertained
that the education of our visual organs
has progressed singularly within the past
four centuries and is still progressing,
may we anticipate that the psychology of
the artist will one day be explained and
analysed like an ingenious piece of
machinery?   M. Renan has foreseen
this possibility in one of his philosophical
dialogues and predicted the time when
art will be a thing of the past, a creation
of the non-reflective ages which people




The Education of the Eye   173


will adore while recognising the fact that
it can be created no longer. Greek sculpture, architecture and poetry are already
in that condition. In comparison with
these ancient masterpieces our art is as
a rough stone house compared with a
marble palace. The reign of sculpture
ended when men ceased to walk about
half naked, and when beauty of form
became of secondary importance. The
epopee disappeared with the age of
individual heroism; with artillery the
epopee is impossible. Thus every art,
except music, is attached to some past
state of civilisation, and music itself,
which may be considered as the peculiar
art of the nineteenth century, will one
day be completely developed and exhausted. Meanwhile, however, there is
no vehement reason to despair. Doubtless modern painting can no longer give
form to the ideas that rule the world, and




174   9the Desire of Beauty
the role that it still plays is not in the
life of nations, but in the life of individuals and groups. Painting nowadays is
often the pleasure of dilettanti, and at its
best the joy of refined culture and almost
the religion of special aesthetic development; but at the same time it is not
impossible that the conditions may again
be created when painting will be able
once more to play a grand civilising role
in the life of the community by becoming a noble vehicle for the display of
sensuous beauty, mundane pageantry or
mystic reverie.
Indeed, in this latter direction, there
are already symptoms of a new movement in France, and in Belgium also,
where the realist theory of painting has
fallen into discredit simultaneously with
the naturalist school of literature. The
symptoms to which we refer reveal in
the young painters that we have in mind




ithe Education of the Eye      7 5


tendencies of soul and of intellect analogous to those of Rossetti, Burne Jones
and the English pre-Raphaelites, but of
a broader scope and of greater aesthetic
intensity corresponding to more acute
and  delicate faculties  of perception.
More than thirty years ago Baudelaire,
in a passage which we have quoted on a
preceding page, spoke of the moral signification of sounds, colours and perfumes,
and the wiseacres of the time at once
pronounced him to be mad. And yet,
in the winter of I89I, the Parisians
witnessed with interest a dramatic representation of the Song of Songs accompanied by a quadruple orchestration of
verse,  music,  colour  and  perfume.
Twenty years ago the colour of the
Japanese seemed to us either crude or
childish, but now we find their prints
and their paintings full of exquisite
charm, while no art has exercised a




176    T'he lDesire of 7eauty


greater influence upon the modern European palette than that of the compatriots
of Hokusai. We must therefore beware of hasty judgments, the more so as
there is good reason to believe that our
eyes have not yet acquired the refinement and intensity of perception which
the cultured connoisseurs of the East
enjoy, more especially the Persians and
the Japanese.  Far from accepting M.
Renan's gloomy previsions, we may, perhaps, hope that the continual education
of the eye, accompanying and aiding the
development of new intellectual and
psychic qualities and aspirations, reserves
for the art of painting a future as
glorious as its past. In the hands of
men of genius, who knows what splendid, tender or magniloquent visions of
modern life painting may yet conceive
and depict? At any rate, let us console
ourselves with the reflection that hitherto




The education of the Eye 177
at least the desire of beauty and the
courage to pursue it have made of this
narrow world a rich sanctuary of meditation.
Printmed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON AND Co.
London and Edinburtgh
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