Complete Works of George Moore

by George Moore

  A clever young man, a man of talent, labours at art in the manner I have described from eight to ten hours a day, and at the end of six or seven years his education is completed. During the long while of his pupilage he has heard, “first learn your trade, and then do what you like”. The time has arrived for him to do what he likes. He already suspects that the mere imitation of MM. Bouguereau and Lefebvre will bring him neither fame nor money; he soon finds that is so, and it becomes clear to him he must do something different. Enticing vistas of possibilities open out before him, but he is like a man whose limbs have been kept too long in splints — they are frozen; and he at length understands the old and terrible truth: as the twig is bent so will it grow. The skin he would slough will not be sloughed; he tries all the methods — robust executions, lymphatic executions, sentimental and insipid executions, painstaking executions, cursive and impertinent executions. Through all these the Beaux Arts student, if he is intelligent enough to perceive the falseness and worthlessness of his primary education, slowly works his way. He is like a vessel without ballast; he is like a blindfolded man who has missed his pavement; he is blown from wave to wave; he is confused with contradictory cries. Last year he was robust, this year he is lymphatic; he affects learning which he does not possess, and then he assumes airs of ignorance, equally unreal — a mild, sophisticated ignorance, which he calls naïveté. And these various execution she is never more than superficially acquainted with; he does not practise any one long enough to extract what good there may be in it.

  To set before the reader the full story of the French decadence, I should have to relate the story of the great schism of some few years ago, when the pedants remained at the Salon under the headship of Mr. Bouguereau, and the experimentalists followed Meissonier to the Champs de Mars.[Footnote: See “Impressions and Opinions.”]The authoritative name of Meissonier, the genius of Puvis de Chavannes, and the interest of the exhibition of Stevens’ early work, sufficed for some years to disguise the progress and the tendency of the declension of French art; and it was not until last year (1892) that it was impossible to doubt any longer that the great French renaissance of the beginning of the century had worn itself out, that the last leaves were falling, and that probably a long period of winter rest was preparing. French art has resolved itself into pedants and experimentalists! The Salon is now like to a library of Latin verses composed by the Eton and Harrow masters and their pupils; the Champs de Mars like a costume ball at Elyseé Montmartre.

  In England it is customary for art to enter by a side door, and the enormous subvention to the Kensington Schools would never have been voted by Parliament if the bill had not been gilt with the usual utility gilding. It was represented that the schools were intended for something much more serious than the mere painting of pictures, which only rich people could buy: the schools were primarily intended as schools of design, wherein the sons and daughters of the people would be taught how to design wall-papers, patterns for lace, curtains, damask table-cloths, etc. The intention, like many another, was excellent; but the fact remains that, except for examination purposes, the work done by Kensington students is useless. A design for a piece of wall-paper, for which a Kensington student is awarded a medal, is almost sure to prove abortive when put to a practical test. The isolated pattern looks pretty enough on the two feet of white paper on which it is drawn; but when the pattern is manifolded, it is usually found that the designer has not taken into account the effect of the repetition. That is the pitfall into which the Kensington student usually falls; he cannot make practical application of his knowledge, and at Minton’s factory all the designs drawn by Kensington students have to be redrawn by those who understand the practical working out of the processes of reproduction and the quality of the material employed. So complete is the failure of the Kensington student, that to plead a Kensington education is considered to be an almost fatal objection against any one applying for work in any of our industrial centres.

  Five-and-twenty years ago the schools of art at South Kensington were the most comical in the world; they were the most complete parody on the Continental school of art possible to imagine. They are no doubt the same to-day as they were five-and-twenty years ago — any way, the educational result is the same. The schools as I remember them were faultless in everything except the instruction dispensed there. There were noble staircases, the floors were covered with cocoa-nut matting, the rooms admirably heated with hot-water pipes, there were plaster casts and officials. In the first room the students practised drawing from the flat. Engraved outlines of elaborate ornamentation were given them, and these they drew with lead pencil, measuring the spaces carefully with compasses. In about six months or a year the student had learned to use his compass correctly, and to produce a fine hard black-lead outline; the harder and finer the outline, the more the drawing looked like a problem in a book of Euclid, the better the examiner was pleased, and the more willing was he to send the student to the room upstairs, where drawing was practised from the antique.

  This was the room in which the wisdom of South Kensington attained a complete efflorescence. I shall never forget the scenes I witnessed there. Having made choice of a cast, the student proceeded to measure the number of heads; he then measured the cast in every direction, and ascertained by means of a plumb-line exactly where the lines fell. It wasmore like land-surveying than drawing, and to accomplish this portion of his task took generally a fortnight, working six hours a week. He then placed a sheet of tissue paper upon his drawing, leaving only one small part uncovered, and, having reduced his chalk pencil to the finest possible point, he proceeded to lay in a set of extremely fine lines. These were crossed by a second set of lines, and the two sets of lines were elaborately stippled, every black spot being carefully picked out with bread. With a patience truly sublime in its folly, he continued the process all the way down the figure, accomplishing, if he were truly industrious, about an inch square in the course of an evening. Our admiration was generally directed to those who had spent the longest time on their drawings. After three months’ work a student began to be noticed; at the end of four he became an important personage. I remember one who had contrived to spend six months on his drawing. He was a sort of demigod, and we used to watch him anxious and alarmed lest he might not have the genius to devote still another month to it, and our enthusiasm knew no bounds when we learned that, a week before the drawings had to be sent in, he had taken his drawing home and spent three whole days stippling it and picking out the black spots with bread.

  The poor drawing had neither character nor consistency; it looked like nothing under the sun, except a drawing done at Kensington — a flat, foolish thing, but very soft and smooth. But this was enough; it was passed by the examiners, and the student went into the Life Room to copy an Italian model as he had copied the Apollo Belvedere. Once or twice a week a gentleman who painted tenth-rate pictures, which were not always hung in the Academy, came round and passed casual remarks on the quality of the stippling. There was a head-master who painted tenth-rate historical pictures, after the manner of a tenth-rate German painter in a provincial town, in a vast studio upstairs, which the State was good enough to provide him with, and he occasionally walked through the studios; on an average, I should say, once a month.

  The desire to organise art proceeded in France from a love of system, and in England from a love of respectability. To the ordinary mind there is something especially reassuring in medals, crowns, examinations, professors, and titles; and since the founding of the Kensington Schools we unfortunately hear no more of parents opposing their children’s wishes to become artists. The result of all these facilities for art study has been to swamp natural genius and to produce enormous quantities of vacuous little water colours and slimy little oil colours. Young men have been prevented from going to Australia and Canada and becoming rough farmers, and young ladies from following them and becoming rough wives and themothers of healthy children. Instead of such natu
ral emigration and extension of the race, febrile little pilgrimages have been organised to Paris and Grey, whence astonishing methods and theories regarding the conditions, under which painting alone can be accomplished, have been brought back. Original Kensington stipple has been crossed with square brush-work, and the mule has been bred in and in with open brush-work, and fresh strains have been sought in the execution at the angle of forty-five; art has become infinitely hybrid and definitely sterile.

  Must we then conclude that all education is an evil? Why exaggerate; why outstrip the plain telling of the facts? For those who are thinking of adopting art as a profession it is sufficient to know that the one irreparable evil is a bad primary education. Be sure that after five years of the Beaux Arts you cannot become a great painter. Be sure that after five years of Kensington you can never become a painter at all. “If not at Kensington nor at the Beaux Arts, where am I to obtain the education I stand in need of?” cries the embarrassed student. I do not propose to answer that question directly. How the masters of Holland and Flanders obtained their marvellous education is not known. We neither know how they learned nor how they painted. Did the early masters paint first in monochrome, adding the colouring matter afterwards? Much vain conjecturing has been expended in attempting to solve this question. Did Ruysdale paint direct from nature or from drawings? Unfortunately on this question history has no single word to say. We know that Potter learned his trade in the fields in lonely communication with nature. We know too that Crome was a house-painter, and practised painting from nature when his daily work was done. Nevertheless he attained as perfect a technique as any painter that ever lived. Morland, too, was self-taught: he practised painting in the fields and farmyards and the country inns where he lived, oftentimes paying for board and lodging with a picture. Did his art suffer from want of education? Is there any one who believes that Morland would have done better work if he had spent three or four years stippling drawings from the antique at South Kensington?

  I will conclude these remarks, far too cursive and incomplete, with an anecdote which, I think, will cause the thoughtful to ponder. Some seven or eight years ago, Renoir, a painter of rare talent and originality, after twenty years of struggle with himself and poverty, succeeded in attaining a very distinct and personal expression of his individuality. Out of a hundred influences he had succeeded in extracting an art as beautiful as it was new. His work was beginning to attract buyers. For the first time in his life he had a little money in hand, and he thought he would like a holiday. Long reading of novels leads the reader to suppose that he found his ruin in a period of riotous living, the reaction induced by anxiety and over-work. Not at all. He did what every wise friend would have advised him to do under the circumstances: he went to Venice to study Tintoretto. The magnificences of this master struck him through with the sense of his own insignificance; he became aware of the fact that he could not draw like Tintoretto; and when he returned to Paris he resolved to subject himself to two years of hard study in an art school. For two years he laboured in the life class, working on an average from seven to ten hours a day, and in two years he had utterly destroyed every trace of the charming and delightful art which had taken him twenty years to build up. I know of no more tragic story — do you?

  INGRES AND COROT.

  OF THE THIRTY or more great artists who made the artistic movement at the beginning of the century in France, five will, I think, exercise a prolonged influence on the art of the future — Ingres, Corot, Millet, Manet, and Degas.

  The omission of the name of Delacroix will surprise many; but though Delacroix will engage the attention of artists as they walk through the Louvre, I do not think that they will turn to him for counsel in their difficulty, or that they will learn from him any secrets of their craft. In the great masters of pictorial composition — Michael Angelo, Veronese, Tintoretto, and Rubens — the passion and tumult of the work resides solely in the conception; the execution is always calculated, and the result is perfectly predetermined and accurately foreseen. To explain myself I will tell an anecdote which is always told whenever Delacroix’s name is mentioned, without, however, the true significance of the anecdote being perceived. After seeing Constable’s pictures, Delacroix repainted one of his most important works from end to end.

  Of Degas [Footnote: See essay on Degas In “Impressions and Opinions”.] and Manet I have spoken elsewhere. Millet seems to me to be a sort of nineteenth century Greuze. The subject-matter is different, but at bottom the art of these two painters is more alike than is generally supposed. Neither was a painter in any true sense of the word, and if the future learns anything from Millet, it will be how to separate the scene from the environment which absorbs it, how to sacrifice the background, how to suggest rather than to point out, and how by a series of ellipses to lead the spectator to imagine what is not there. The student may learn from Millet that it was by sometimes servilely copying nature, sometimes by neglecting nature, that the old masters succeeded in conveying not an illusion but an impression of life.

  But of all nineteenth century painters Ingres and Corot seem most sure of future life; their claim upon the attention and the admiration of future artists seems the most securely founded. Looked at from a certain side Ingres seems for sheer perfection to challenge antiquity. Of Michael Angelo there can never be any question; he stands alone in a solitude of greatness. Phidias himself is not so much alone. For the art of Apelles could not have differed from that of Phidias; and the intention of many a drawing by Apelles must have been identical with that of “La Source”. It is difficult to imagine what further beauty he may have introduced into a face, or what further word he might have had to say on the beauty of a virgin body.

  The legs alone suggest the possibility of censure. Ingres repainted the legs when the picture was finished and the model was not before him, so the idea obtains among artists that the legs are what are least perfect in the picture. In repainting the legs his object was omission of detail with a view to concentration of attention on the upper part of the figure. It must not however be supposed that the legs are what is known among painters as empty; they have been simplified; their synthetic expression has been found; and if the teaching at the Beaux Arts forbids the present generation to understand such drawing, the fault lies with the state that permits the Beaux Arts, and not with Ingres, whose genius was not crushed by it. The suggestion that Ingres spoilt the legs of “La Source” by repainting them when the model was not before him could come from nowhere but the Beaux Arts.

  That Ingres was not so great an artist as Raphael I am aware. That Ingres’ drawings show none of the dramatic inventiveness of Raphael’s drawings is so obvious that I must apologise for such a commonplace. Raphael’s drawings were done with a different intention from Ingres’; Raphael’s drawings were no more than rough memoranda, and in no instance did he attempt to carry a drawing to the extreme limit that Ingres did. Ingres’ drawing is one thing, Raphael’s is another; still I would ask if any one thinks that Raphael could have carried a drawing as far as Ingres? I would ask if any of Raphael’s drawings are as beautiful, as perfect, or as instructive as Ingres’. Take, for example, the pencil drawing in the Louvre, the study for the odalisque: who except a Greek could have produced so perfect a drawing? I can imagine Apelles doing something like it, but no one else.

  When you go to the Louvre examine that line of back, return the next day and the next, and consider its infinite perfection before you conclude that my appreciation is exaggerated. Think of the learning and the love that were necessary for the accomplishment of such exquisite simplifications. Never did pencil follow an outline with such penetrating and unwearying passion, or clasp and enfold it with such simple and sufficient modelling. Nowhere can you detect a starting-point or a measurement taken; it seems to have grown as a beautiful tendril grows, and every curve sways as mysteriously, and the perfection seems as divine. Beside it Dürer would seem crabbed and puzzle-headed; Holbein would seem angular and
geometrical; Da Vinci would seem vague: and I hope that no critic by partial quotation will endeavour to prove me guilty of having said that Ingres was a greater artist than Da Vinci. I have not said any such thing; I have merely striven by aid of comparison to bring before the reader some sense of the miraculous beauty of one of Ingres’ finest pencil drawings.

  Or let us choose the well-known drawing of the Italian lady sitting in the Louis XV. arm-chair, her long curved and jewelled hand lying in her lap and a coiffure of laces pinned down with a long jewelled hair-pin. How her head-dress of large laces decorates the paper, and the elaborate working out of the pattern, is it not a miracle of handicraft? How exquisite the black curls on the forehead, and how they balance the dark eyes which are the depth and centre of the composition! The necklace, how well the stones are heaped, how well they lie together! How well their weight and beauty are expressed! And the earrings, how enticing in their intricate workmanship. Then the movement of the face, how full it is of the indolent south, and the oval of the face is composed to harmonise and enhance the lace head-dress; and its outline, though full of classical simplifications, tells the character with Holbein-like fidelity; it falls away into a soft, weak chin in which resides a soft sensual lassitude. The black eyes are set like languid stars in the face, and the flesh rounds off softly, like a sky, modelled with a little shadow, part of the outline, and expressing its beauty. And then there are the marvels of the dress to consider: the perfect and spontaneous creation of the glitter of the long silk arms, and the muslin of the wrists, soft as foliage, and then the hardness of the bodice stitched with jewellery and set so romantically on the almost epicene bosom.

  It is the essentially Greek quality of perfection that brings Corot and Ingres together. They are perfect, as none other since the Greek sculptors has been perfect. Other painters have desired beauty at intervals as passionately as they, none save the Greeks so continuously; and the desire to be merely beautiful seemed, if possible, to absorb the art of Corot even more completely than it did that of Ingres. Among the numerous pictures, sketches, and drawings which he left you will find weakness, repetitions, even commonplace, but ugliness never. An ugly set of lines is not to be found in Corot; the rhythm may sometimes be weak, but his lines never run out of metre. For the rhythm of line as well as of sound the artist must seek in his own soul; he will never find it in the inchoate and discordant jumble which we call nature.