Complete Works of George Moore, page 791
THE WHISTLER ALBUM.
THE PHOTOGRAPH OF the portrait of Miss Alexander is as suggestive of the colour as a pianoforte arrangement of Tristan is of the orchestration. The sounds of the different instruments come through the thin tinkle of the piano just as the colour of the blond hair, the delicate passages of green-grey and green, come through the black and white of the photograph. Truly a beautiful thing! But “Before the Mirror” reflects perhaps a deeper beauty. The influence of that strange man, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, is sufficiently plain in this picture. He who could execute hardly at all in paint, and whose verse is Italian, though the author wrote and spoke no language but English, foisted the character of his genius upon all the poetry and painting of his generation. It is as present in this picture as it is in Swinburne’s first volume of Poems and Ballads. Mr. Whistler took the type of woman and the sentiment of the picture from Rossetti; he saw that even in painting Rossetti had something to say, and, lest an artistic thought should be lost to the world through inadequate expression, he painted this picture. He did not go on painting pictures in the Rossetti sentiment, because he thought he had exhausted Rossetti in one picture. In this he was possibly mistaken, but the large, white, indolent shoulders, misshapen, almost grotesque in original Rossettis, are here in beautiful prime and plenitude; the line of the head and neck, the hair falling over the stooped shoulder — a sensuous dream it is; all her body’s beauty, to borrow a phrase from Rossetti, is in that white dress; and the beauty of the arm in its full white sleeve lies along the white chimney-piece, the fingers languidly open: two fallen over the edge, two touching the blue vase. Note how beautiful is the placing of this figure in the picture; how the golden head shines, high up in the right-hand corner, and the white dress and white-sleeved arms fill the picture with an exquisite music of proportion. The dress cuts against the black grate, and the angle of black is the very happiest; it is brightened with pink sprays of azaleas, and they seem to whisper the very enchanted bloom of their life into the picture. Never did Dutch or Japanese artist paint flowers like these. And the fluent music of the painting seems only to enforce the languor and reverie which this canvas exhales: the languor of white dress and gold hair; languor and golden reverie float in the mirror like a sunset in placid waters. The profile in full light is thrilled with grief of present hours; the full face half lost in shadow, far away — a ghost of a dead self — is dreaming with half-closed eyes, unmindful of what may be. By her mirror, gowned in white as if for dreams, she watches life flowing past her, and she knows of no use to make of it.
INGRES.
RAPHAEL WAS A great designer, but there are a purity and a passion in Ingres’ line for the like of which we have to go back to the Greeks. Apelles could not have realised more exquisite simplifications, could not have dreamed into any of his lost works a purer soul of beauty than Ingres did into the head, arms, and torso of “La Source”. The line that floats about the muscles of an arm is illusive, evanescent, as an evening-tinted sky; and none except the Greeks and Ingres have attained such mystery of line: not Raphael, not even Michael Angelo in the romantic anatomies of his stupendous creations. Ingres was a Frenchman animated by the soul of an ancient Greek, an ancient Greek who lost himself in Japan. There is as much mystery in Ingres’ line as in Rembrandt’s light and shade. The arms and wrists and hands of the lady seated among the blue cushions in the Louvre are as illusive as any one of Mr. Whistler’s “Nocturnes”. The beautiful “Andromeda”, head and throat leaned back almost out of nature, wild eyes and mass of heavy hair, long white arms uplifted, chained to the basalt, — how rare the simplifications, those arms, that body, the straight flanks and slender leg advancing, — are made of lines simple and beautiful as those which in the Venus of Milo realise the architectural beauty of woman. We shrink from such comparison, for perforce we see that the grandeur of the Venus is not in the Andromeda: but in both is the same quality of beauty. In the drawing for the odalisque, in her long back, wonderful as a stem of woodbine, there is the very same love of form which a Greek expressed with the benign ease of a god speaking his creation through the harmonious universe.
But the pure, unconscious love of form, inherited from the Greeks, sometimes turned to passion in Ingres: not in “La Source”, she is wholly Greek; but in the beautiful sinuous back of the odalisque we perceive some of the exasperation of nerves which betrays our century. If Phidias’ sketches had come down to us, the margin filled with his hesitations, we should know more of his intimate personality. You notice, my dear reader, how intolerant I am of criticism of my idol, how I repudiate any slight suggestion of imperfection, how I turn upon myself and defend my god. Before going to bed, I often stand, candle in hand, before the Roman lady and enumerate the adorable perfections of the drawing. I am aware of my weakness, I have pleaded guilty to an idolatrous worship, but, if I have expressed myself as I intended, my great love will seem neither vain nor unreasonable. For surely for quality of beautiful line this man stands nearer to the Greeks than any other.
SOME JAPANESE PRINTS.
“LADIES UNDER TREES”. Not Japanese ladies walking under Japanese trees — that is to say, trees peculiar to Japan, planted and fashioned according to the mode of Japan — but merely ladies walking under trees. True that the costumes are Japanese, the writing on the wall is in Japanese characters, the umbrellas and the idol on the tray are Japanese; universality is not attained by the simple device of dressing the model in a sheet and eliminating all accessories that might betray time and country; the great artist accepts the costume of his time and all the special signs of his time, and merely by the lovely exercise of genius the mere accidents of a generation become the symbolic expression of universal sensation and lasting truths. Do not ask me how this transformation is effected; it is the secret of every great artist, a secret which he exercises unconsciously, and which no critic has explained.
Looking at this yard of coloured print, I ask myself how it is that ever since art began no such admirable result has been obtained with means so slight. A few outlines drawn with pen and ink or pencil, and the interspaces filled in with two flat tints-a dark green, and a grey verging on mauve.
The drawing of the figures is marvellously beautiful. But why is it beautiful? Is it because of the individual character represented in the faces? The faces are expressed by means of a formula, and are as like one another as a row of eggs. Are the proportions of the figure correctly measured, and are the anatomies well understood? The figures are in the usual proportions so far as the number of heads is concerned: they are all from six and a half to seven heads high; but no motion of limbs happens under the draperies, and the hands and feet, like the faces, are expressed by a set of arbitrary conventions. It is not even easy to determine whether the posture of the woman on the right is intended for sitting or kneeling. She holds a tray, on which is an idol, and to provide sufficient balance for the composition the artist has placed a yellow umbrella in the idol’s hand. Examine this design from end to end, and nowhere will you find any desire to imitate nature. With a line Utamaro expresses all that he deems it necessary to express of a face’s contour. Three or four conventional markings stand for eyes, mouth, and ears; no desire to convey the illusion of a rounded surface disturbed his mind for a moment; the intention of the Japanese artists was merely to decorate a surface with line and colour. It was no part of their scheme to compete with nature, so it could not occur to them to cover one side of a face with shadow. The Japanese artists never thought to deceive; the art of deception they left to their conjurers. The Japanese artist thought of harmony, not of accuracy of line, and of harmony, not of truth of colour; it was therefore impossible for him to entertain the idea of shading his drawings, and had some one whispered the idea to him he would have answered: “The frame will always tell people that they are not looking at nature. You would have it all heavy and black, but I want something light, and bright, and full of beauty. See these lines, are they not in themselves beautiful? are they not sharp, clear, and flowing, according to the necessity of the composition? Are not the grey and the dark green sufficiently contrasted? do they not bring to your eyes a sense of repose and unity? Look at the embroideries on the dresses, are they not delicate? do not the star-flowers come in the right place? is not the yellow in harmony with the grey and the green? And the blossoms on the trees, are they not touched in with the lightness of hand and delicacy of tone that you desire? Step back and see if the spots of colour and the effects of line become confused, or if they still hold their places from a distance as well as close….”
Ladies under trees, by Utamaro! That grey-green design alternated with pale yellow corresponds more nearly to a sonata by Mozart than to anything else; both are fine decorations, musical and pictorial decorations, expressing nothing more definite than that sense of beauty which haunts the world. The fields give flowers, and the hands of man works of art.
Then this art is wholly irresponsible — it grows, obeying no rules, even as the flowers?
In obedience to the laws of some irregular metre so delicate and subtle that its structure escapes our analysis, the flowers bloom in faultless, flawless, and ever-varying variety. We can only say these are beautiful because they are beautiful….
That is begging the question.
He who attempts to go to the root of things always finds himself begging the question in the end….
But you have to admit that a drawing that does not correspond to the object which the artist has set himself to copy cannot be well drawn.
That idea is the blight that has fallen on European art. The goodness or the badness of a drawing exists independently of the thing copied. We say — speaking of a branch, of a cloud, of a rock, of a flower, of a leaf — how beautifully drawn! Some clouds and some leaves are better drawn than others, not on account of complexity or simplicity of form, but because they interpret an innate sense of harmony inherent in us. And this natural drawing, which exists sometimes irrespective of anatomies and proportions, is always Utamaro’s.
I do not know how long I stood examining this beautiful drawing, studying the grey and the green tint, admiring the yellow flowers on the dresses, wondering at the genius that placed the yellow umbrella in the idol’s hand, the black masses of hair above the faces, so charmingly decorated with great yellow hair-pins. I watched the beauty of the trees, and was moved by the placing of the trees in the composition, and I delighted in the delicate blossoms. I was enchanted by all this bright and gracious paganism which Western civilisation has already defaced, and in a few years will have wholly destroyed.
I might describe more prints, and the pleasure they have given me; I might pile epithet upon epithet; I might say that the colour was as deep and as delicate as flower-bloom, and every outline spontaneous, and exquisite to the point of reminding me of the hopbine and ferns. It would be well to say these things; the praise would be appropriate to the occasion; but rather am I minded to call the reader’s attention to what seems to me to be an essential difference between the East and the West.
Michael Angelo and Velasquez, however huge their strength in portraiture and decoration, however sublime Veronese and Tintoretto in magnificent display of colour, we must perforce admit to Oriental art a refinement of thought and a delicacy of handicraft — the outcome of the original thought — which never was attained by Italy, and which so transcends our grosser sense that it must for ever remain only half perceived and understood by us.
THE NEW ART CRITICISM.
BEFORE COMMENTING ON the very thoughtless utterances of two distinguished men, I think I must — even at the risk of appearing to attach over-much importance to my criticisms — reprint what I said about L’Absinthe; for in truth it was I who first meddled with the moral tap, and am responsible for the overflow: —
“Look at the head of the old Bohemian — the engraver Deboutin — a man whom I have known all my life, and yet he never really existed for me until I saw this picture. There is the hat I have always known, on the back of his head as I have always seen it, and the wooden pipe is held tight in his teeth as I have always seen him hold it. How large, how profound, how simple the drawing! How easily and how naturally he lives in the pose, the body bent forward, the elbows on the table! Fine as the Orchardson undoubtedly is, it seems fatigued and explanatory by the side of this wonderful rendering of life; thin and restless — like Dumas fils’ dialogue when we compare it with Ibsen’s. The woman that sits beside the artist was at the Elysée Montmartre until two in the morning, then she went to the ratmort and had a soupe aux choux; she lives in the Rue Fontaine, or perhaps the Rue Breda; she did not get up till half-past eleven; then she tied a few soiled petticoats round her, slipped on that peignoir, thrust her feet into those loose morning shoes, and came down to the café to have an absinthe before breakfast. Heavens! what a slut! A life of idleness and low vice is upon her face; we read there her whole life. The tale is not a pleasant one, but it is a lesson. Hogarth’s view was larger, wider, but not so incisive, so deep, or so intense. Then how loose and general Hogarth’s composition would seem compared to this marvellous epitome, this essence of things! That open space in front of the table, into which the skirt and the lean legs of the man come so well — how well the point of view was selected! The beautiful, dissonant rhythm of that composition is like a page of Wagner — the figures crushed into the right of the canvas, the left filled up with a fragment of marble table running in sharp perspective into the foreground. The newspaper lies as it would lie across the space between the tables. The colour, almost a monochrome, is very beautiful, a deep, rich harmony. More marvellous work the world never saw, and will never see again: a maze of assimilated influences, strangely assimilated, and eluding definition — remembrances of Watteau and the Dutch painters, a good deal of Ingres’ spirit, and, in the vigour of the arabesque, we may perhaps trace the influence of Poussin. But these influences float evanescent on the canvas, and the reading is difficult and contradictory.”
I have written many a negligent phrase, many a stupid phrase, but the italicised phrase is the first hypocritical phrase I ever wrote. I plead guilty to the grave offence of having suggested that a work of art is more than a work of art. The picture is only a work of art, and therefore void of all ethical signification. In writing the abominable phrase “but it is a lesson” I admitted as a truth the ridiculous contention that a work of art may influence a man’s moral conduct; I admitted as a truth the grotesque contention that to read Mdlle. de Maupin may cause a man to desert his wife, whereas to read Paradise Lost may induce him to return to her. In the abominable phrase which I plead guilty to having written, I admitted the monstrous contention that our virtues and our vices originate not in our inherited natures, but are found in the books we read and the pictures we look upon. That art should be pure is quite another matter, and the necessity of purity in art can be maintained for other than ethical reasons. Art — I am speaking now of literature — owes a great deal to ethics, but ethics owes nothing to art. Without morality the art of the novelist and the dramatist would cease. So we are more deeply interested in the preservation of public morality than any other class — the clergy, of course, excepted. To accuse us of indifference in this matter is absurd. We must do our best to keep up a high standard of public morality; our living depends upon it — and it would be difficult to suggest a more powerful reason for our advocacy. Nevertheless, by a curious irony of fate we must preserve — at least, in our books — a distinctly impartial attitude on the very subject which most nearly concerns our pockets.
