by George Moore
And now, in a very rough and fragmentary fashion, hardly attempting more than a hurried transcription of my notes, I will call attention to some three or four drawings which especially arrested my attention. In No. 10 we have a cab seen in wonderful perspective; the hind wheel is the nearest point, and in extraordinarily accurate proportion the vehicle and the animal attached to it go up the paper. The cabman turns half round to address some observation to the “fare”, an old gentleman, who is about to step in. The roof of the cab cuts the body of the cabman, composing the picture in a most original and striking manner. The panels of the cab are filled in with simple straight lines, but how beautifully graduated are these lines, how much they are made to say! Above all, the hesitating movement of the old gentleman — how the exact moment has been caught! and the treatment of the long coat, how broad, how certain — how well the artist has said exactly what he wanted to say! Another very fine drawing is No. 11. The fat farmer stands so thoroughly well in his daily habit; the great stomach, how well it is drawn, and the short legs are part and parcel of the stomach. The man is redolent of turnip-fields and rick-yards; all the life of the fields is upon him. And the long parson, clearly from the university, how well he clasps his hands and how the very soul of the man is expressed in the gesture! No. 16 is very wonderful. What movement there is in the skirts of the fat woman, and the legs of the vendor of penny toys! Are they not the very legs that the gutter breeds?
No. 52: a big, bluff artist, deep-seated amid the ferns and grasses. The big, bearded man, who thinks of nothing but his art, who lives in it, who would not be thin because fat enables him to sit longer out of doors, the man who will not even turn round on his camp-stool to see the woman who is speaking to him; we have all known that man, but to me that man never really existed until I looked on this drawing. And the treatment of the trees that make the background! A few touches of the pencil, and how hot and alive the place is with sunlight!
But perhaps the most wonderful drawing in the entire collection is No. 89. Never did Keene show greater mastery over his material. In this drawing every line of the black-lead pencil is more eloquent than Demosthenes’ most eloquent period. The roll and the lurch of the vessel, the tumult of waves and wind, the mental and physical condition of the passengers, all are given as nothing in this world could give them except that magic pencil. The figure, the man that the wind blows out of the picture, his hat about to leave his head, is not he really on board in a gale? Did a frock coat flap out in the wind so well before? And do not the attitudes of the two women leaning over the side represent their suffering? The man who is not sea-sick sits, his legs stretched out, his hands thrust into his pockets, his face sunk on his breast, his hat crushed over his eyes. His pea-jacket, how well drawn! and can we not distinguish the difference between its cloth and the cloth of the frock of the city merchant, who watches with such a woful gaze the progress of the gathering wave? The weight of the wave is indicated with a few straight lines, and, strangely enough, only very slightly varied are the lines which give the very sensation of the merchant’s thin frock coat made in the shop of a fashionable tailor.
It has been said that Keene could not draw a lady or a gentleman. Why not add that he was neither a tennis player nor a pigeon shot, a waltzer nor an accomplished French scholar? The same terrible indictment has been preferred against Dickens, and Mr. Henry James says that Balzac failed to prove he was a gentleman. It might be well to remind Mr. James that the artist who would avoid the fashion plate would do well to turn to the coster rather than the duke for inspiration. Keene’s genius saved him from the drawing-room, never allowing his gaze to wander from where English characteristics may be gathered most plentifully — the middle and lower classes.
I find in my notes mention of other drawings quite as wonderful as those I have spoken of, but space only remains to give some hint of Keene’s place among draughtsmen. As a humorist he was certainly thin compared to Leech; as a satirist he was certainly feeble compared to Gavarni; in dramatic, not to say imaginative, qualities he cannot be spoken of in the same breath as Cruikshank; but as an artist was he not their superior?
NATIONALITY IN ART.
IN LOOKING THROUGH a collection of Reynolds, Gainsboroughs, Dobsons, Morlands, we are moved by something more than the artistic beauty of the pictures. Seeing that peaceful farmyard by Morland, a dim remote life, a haunting in the blood, rises to the surface of the brain, like a water-flower or weed brought by a sudden current into sight of the passing sky. Seeing that quiet man talking with his swineherd, we are mysteriously attracted, and are perplexed as by a memory; we grow aware of his house and wife, and though these things passed away more than a hundred years ago, we know them all. That other picture, “Partridge Shooting”, by Stubbs, how familiar and how intimate it is to us! and those days seem to go back and back into long ago, beyond childhood into infancy. The life of the picture goes back into the life that we heard from our father’s, our grandfather’s lips, a life of reminiscence and little legend, the end of which passed like a wraith across the dawn of our lives. For we need not be very old to remember the squire ramming the wads home and calling to the setter that is too eagerly pressing forward the pointer in the turnips. A man of fifty can remember seeing the mail coach swing round the curve of the wide, smooth coach roads; and a man of forty, going by road to the Derby, and the block which came seven miles from Epsom. And so do these pictures take us to the heart of England, to the heart of our life, which is England, to that great circumstance which preceded our birth, and which gave not merely flesh and blood, but the minds that are thinking now. We have only to pass through a doorway to see sublimer works of art. But though Troyon and Courbet were greater artists than Morland, Morland whispers something that is beyond art, beyond even our present life; as a shell with the sound of the sea, these canvases are murmurous with the under life.
That young lady so charmingly dressed in white, she who holds a rose in her hand, is Miss Kitty Calcraft, by Romney. Do we not seem to know her? We ask when we met her, and where we spoke to her; and that mystic when and where seem more real than the moment of present life. The present crowd of living folk fades from us, and we half believe, half know, that she spoke to us one evening on that terrace overlooking those wide pasture lands. We see the happy light of her eyes and hear the joy of her voice, and they stir in us all the impulses of race, of kith and kin.
Romney is often crude, but the worst that can be urged against this portrait is that it is superficial. But what charm and grace there is in its superficiality! Romney was aware of the grace and charm of the young girl as she sat before him in her white dress: he saw her as a flower; and in fluent, agreeable, well-bred and cultivated speech he has talked to us about her. The portrait has the charm of rare and exquisite conversation; we float in a tide of sensation. He was only aware of her white dress, her pretty arm and hand laid on her soft lap. But while we merely see Kitty, we perceive and think of Gainsborough’s portrait of Miss Willoughby. We realise her in other circumstances, away from the beautiful blue trees under which he has so happily placed her; we can see her receiving visitors on the terrace, or leaning over the balustrade looking down the valley, wondering why life has come to her so sadly. We see her in her eighteenth-century drawing-room amid Chippendale and Adams furniture, reading an old novel. No one ever cared much about Miss Willoughby. There is little sensuous charm in her long narrow face, in her hair falling in ringlets over her shoulders; and we are sure that she often reflected on the bitterness of life. But Kitty never looked into the heart of things: when life coincided with her desires, she laughed and was glad; when things, to use her own words, “went wrong”, she wept. And in these two portraits we read the stories of the painters’ souls.
But the question of nationality, of country, in art detains us. Beautiful beyond compare is the art of Tourguenieff; but how much more intimate, how much deeper is the delight that a Russian finds in his novels than ours! However truly the purely artist
ic qualities may touch us — great art is universal — we miss our native land and our race in Tourguenieff. We find both in Dickens, in Thackeray. Miss Austen and Fielding have little else; and vague though Fielding may be in form, still his pages are England, and they whisper the life we inherited from long ago. The superb Rembrandt in the next room, the Gentleman with a Hawk, lent by the Duke of Westminster, is a human revelation. We only perceive in it the charm, the adorableness, the eternal adventure of youth; nationality disappears in the universal. This beautiful portrait was painted in 1643, a year after the “Night-watch”. The date of the portrait of the Lady with the Fan is not given. They differ widely in style; the portrait of the man is ten years in advance of the portrait of the woman; it seems to approach very closely, to touch on, the great style which he attained in 1664, the year when he painted the Syndics. Of his early style, thin, crabbed, and yellow, there is hardly a trace in the portrait of the Man with the Hawk; it is almost a complete emancipation, yet it would be rash to say that the Lady with the Fan is an early work, painted in the days of the Lesson in Anatomy. In Rembrandt’s work we find sudden advancements towards the grand final style, and these are immediately followed by hasty returnings to the hard, dry, and essentially unromantic manner of 1634. The portrait of the Young Man with the Hawk was painted in middle life. But if it contains something more than the suggestion of the qualities which twenty years later he developed and perfected for the admiration of all time, if the immortal flower of Rembrandt’s genius was still unblown, this is blossom prematurely breaking. The young man is shown upon darkness like a vision: the face is illuminated mysteriously, the brush-work is large and firm, the paint is substantial without being heavy, the canvas is smoky, an unnatural and yet a real atmosphere surrounds the head. The black velvet cap strikes in sharp relief against the background, which lightens to a grey-green about the head. The modelling of the face is extraordinarily large and simple, and yet without omissions; we have in this portrait a perfect example of the art of being precise without being small. The young man is a young nobleman. He stands before us looking at us, and yet his eyes are not fixed; his moustache is golden and frizzled; his cheeks are coloured slightly; but the picture is practically made of a few greys and greens, and white, slightly tinted with bitumen; yet we do not feel, or feel very little, any lack of colouring matter. Rembrandt realised in the romantic young man his ideal of young masculine beauty. Truly a beautiful work, neither the boyhood nor the manhood, but the adolescence of Rembrandt’s genius.
Between the portrait of the Lady with a Fan and Sir Joshua’s portrait of Miss Frances Crewe it would be permissible to hesitate; but to hesitate even for one instant between Miss Crewe and the Young Man with the Hawk would be unpardonable. Sir Joshua painted as he thought; he had an instinctive sense of decoration and a deep and tender feeling for beauty; he was especially sensible to the agreeable and gay aspect of things; his eyes at once seize the pleasing and picturesque contour, and his mind divined a charming and effective scheme of colour. He saw character too; all the surface characteristics of his model were plain to him, and when he was so minded he painted with rare intelligence and insight. He did not see deeply, but he saw clearly. Gainsborough did not see so clearly, nor was his hand as prompt to express his vision as Sir Joshua’s; but Gainsborough saw further, for he felt more keenly and more profoundly. But light indeed were their minds compared with Rembrandt’s. Rembrandt was a great visionary; to him the outsides of things were symbols of elemental truths, which he expressed in a form mighty as the truths themselves. There is no question of comparison between him on one hand and Reynolds and Gainsborough on the other. Yet we should hesitate to destroy our Reynolds and Gainsboroughs, to preserve any works of art, however beautiful. Were we to keep what our reason told us was the greatest, we should feel as one who surrendered England to save the rest of the world, or as a parent who sacrificed his children to save a million men from the scaffold.
SEX IN ART.
WOMAN’S NATURE IS more facile and fluent than man’s. Women do things more easily than men, but they do not penetrate below the surface, and if they attempt to do so the attempt is but a clumsy masquerade in unbecoming costume. In their own costume they have succeeded as queens, courtesans, and actresses, but in the higher arts, in painting, in music, and literature, their achievements are slight indeed — best when confined to the arrangements of themes invented by men — amiable transpositions suitable to boudoirs and fans.
I have heard that some women hold that the mission of their sex extends beyond the boudoir and the nursery. It is certainly not within my province to discuss so important a question, but I think it is clear that all that is best in woman’s art is done within the limits I have mentioned. This conclusion is well-nigh forced upon us when we consider what would mean the withdrawal of all that women have done in art. The world would certainly be the poorer by some half-dozen charming novels, by a few charming poems and sketches in oil and water-colour; but it cannot be maintained, at least not seriously, that if these charming triflings were withdrawn there would remain any gap in the world’s art to be filled up. Women have created nothing, they have carried the art of men across their fans charmingly, with exquisite taste, delicacy, and subtlety of feeling, and they have hideously and most mournfully parodied the art of men. George Eliot is one in whom sex seems to have hesitated, and this unfortunate hesitation was afterwards intensified by unhappy circumstances. She was one of those women who so entirely mistook her vocation as to attempt to think, and really if she had assumed the dress and the duties of a policeman, her failure could hardly have been more complete. Jane Austen, on the contrary, adventured in no such dismal masquerade; she was a nice maiden lady, gifted with a bright clear intelligence, diversified with the charms of light wit and fancy, and as she was content to be in art what she was in nature, her books live, while those of her ponderous rival are being very rapidly forgotten. “Romola” and “Daniel Deronda” are dead beyond hope of resurrection; “The Mill on the Floss”, being more feminine, still lives, even though its destiny is to be forgotten when “Pride and Prejudice” is remembered.
Sex is as important an element in a work of art as it is in life; all art that lives is full of sex. There is sex in “Pride and Prejudice”; “Jane Eyre” and “Aurora Leigh” are full of sex; “Romola”, “Daniel Deronda”, and “Adam Bede” are sexless, and therefore lifeless. There is very little sex in George Sand’s works, and they, too, have gone the way of sexless things. When I say that all art that lives is full of sex, I do not mean that the artist must have led a profligate life; I mean, indeed, the very opposite. George Sand’s life was notoriously profligate, and her books tell the tale. I mean by sex that concentrated essence of life which the great artist jealously reserves for his art, and through which it pulsates. Shelley deserted his wife, but his thoughts never wandered far from Mary. Dante, according to recent discoveries, led a profligate life, while adoring Beatrice through interminable cantos. So profligacy is clearly not the word I want. I think that gallantry expresses my meaning better.
The great artist and Don Juan are irreparably antagonistic; one cannot contain the other. Notwithstanding all the novels that have been written to prove the contrary, it is certain that woman occupies but a small place in the life of an artist. She is never more than a charm, a relaxation, in his life; and even when he strains her to his bosom, oceans are between them. Profligate, I am afraid, history proves the artist sometimes to have been, but his profligacy is only ephemeral and circumstantial; what is abiding in him is chastity of mind, though not always of body; his whole mind is given to his art, and all vague philanderings and sentimental musings are unknown to him; the women he knows and perceives are only food for it, and have no share in his mental life. And it is just because man can raise himself above the sentimental cravings of natural affection that his art is so infinitely higher than woman’s art. “Man’s love is from man’s life a thing apart” — you know the quotation fr
om Byron, “Tis woman’s whole existence.” The natural affections fill a woman’s whole life, and her art is only so much sighing and gossiping about them. Very delightful and charming gossiping it often is — full of a sweetness and tenderness which we could not well spare, but always without force or dignity.
