vases. But Burne Jones and Alma-Tadema— I think of it as one of the loveliest things I ever surely their pictures are worth study. recollect to have looked at. Ralph Burgoyne. I looked at all their pictures-remember, please, I only speak as an outsider and as specimens of painting they were, I have no doubt, wonderful. I saw marble that looked like marble; mosaic pavements that looked like mosaic pavements; flowers that looked like flowers; dresses that looked like dresses; and a quantity of bare skin that looked like skin. I was conscious also of many medleys of color that gave my eyes a languid sense of pleasure. But really this was all. The pictures said nothing to me; they neither amused, soothed, instructed, nor suggested a single thought to me. Gage Stanley. I, on the contrary, think that they are all full of instruction. Add Tissot to Burne Jones and Alma-Tadema, and I think that the works of these three artists are the most significant sights in London. Ralph Burgoyne. Perhaps you have powers of vision that are denied to me. But, as far as I can tell, it meant actually nothing. If we really thought that God in six days had produced this fair order of things out of chaos, the matter would be very different-so too, probably, would have been the artist's way of treating it. I thought old Lady Ealing's painted face, whom I saw last year looking at the picture, a far more suggestive study than the picture was itself. Violet Staunton. Well, there at any rate you have a modern miracle if you don't believe in the ancient one; for she, any day and in only six hours, creates a far fairer order out of a far more formless chaos. Ralph Burgoyne. Very well, then; if that is so, let us paint the modern miracle. Let us have something out of the life around us. Violet Staunton. All the great Italian painters painted scenes remote from their own present. They took their subjects from the past of the Gospel history. Ralph Burgoyne. They took their subjects from the Gospel history, it is true; but the Gospel history was not a past to them. It was an eternal present. A painter may nominally paint past events, if he pleases; but a great painter will only do so nominally. He will not do so in the spirit of an antiquary, but of a contemporary and a familiar; and this, not because his present is withdrawn into the past, but because the past is conjured up and made to breathe in the present. Thus no great scriptural or historical picture was ever painted that was not full of anachronisms. The absence of anachronisms always means the absence of genius. In Burne Jones and Alma-Tadema I dare say there are no anachronisms. I have no doubt the baths, the pavements, the chairs, and the musical instruments are historically entirely accurate. Ralph Burgoyne. It may be my dullness and denseness, but I don't see how they can be. As I say, as tours de force with a brush and a paint-pot, they may be as wonderful as you please. But I confess I am no judge of such technical merits. A gin-palace may be a specimen of perfect bricklaying, but none the more do I care to look at it. Painting is a sort of language. To talk this language gracefully may be a charming accomplishment; but still if the talker says nothing, I shall soon get tired of hearing him. And to me these modern painters are nothing but accomplished babblers. It is true they seem to be saying something, but for the life of me I cannot tell what it is, and they themselves seem quite indifferent. Their meaning is but a lay figure on which to hang the clothes of their language. All that I can tell of the meaning is that it has nothing to do with me or with mine, or with them, or with any living thing. They seem as frightened of realities as common people are frightened of ghosts. I am perfectly out of patience with them. For God's sake, I feel inclined to say to them, do try to paint something that will concern the only life that is of any concern to us-the life of the present day. We are surrounded with hopes, pains, passions, and perplexities, all tinged with the special color our own age gives them. Try to catch this color. It is the only color you will ever really know. But no-it is of no avail. With my mind's ear I hear them start back sighing; and they call me fool and Philistine in Pompeian Latin or in mediæval French; or else they misquote a text at me from a Bible they have ceased to believe in. Think for a moment of Burne Jones's "Six Days of Creation." Violet Staunton. I often do think of it; and who has been caught cheating at cards, and who Violet Staunton. To me there is something quite delightful in this accuracy. You feel that the painter actually lived in the past, and that he takes us with him. Ralph Burgoyne. Yes, that is just my accusation against them. If a man deserts his own generation, his own generation will take no heed of him. He is a useless idler. If he allures others to desert their own generation likewise, he is a mischievous idler. Violet Staunton (softly). I suppose it is not everybody who knows what a relief it is, sometimes, to escape from the present. Some of these pictures are to me like a wet towel round one's head when it is aching. They do take one very far away. Myself, I like that. I feel like a man has at last got safely out of his own country. So this very unreality you complain of for me has something real in it. Some of the pictures that I believe it is the right thing to admire, I won't say a word for. You can't think them more unreal than I do. They are like nothing in the heaven above or in the earth beneath. Artists, people say, are proverbially immoral. I don't know anything about Mr. Whistler personally; but, if he had broken every other commandment, I'm sure he has faithfully kept the second. Gage Stanley. You know Ruskin, on the contrary, says that all great artists must be moral. Violet Staunton. I know he says that; but I'm afraid their biographies would hardly bear him out. Lady Lilith Wardour. According to my theory, every one is moral who does his own special work in the best way possible. Gage Stanley. I think you may give a painter's morals a wider field than that, and yet find Ruskin right. I entirely agree with him; but then I think that is because I understand him, and I think other people don't. When we talk of moral goodness we may mean two thingscorporate goodness and individual goodness, one of which we have because we belong to ourselves, the other of which we have because we belong to our epoch. I can explain this to Miss Staunton out of her own experience. You were surprised, as you said just now, at the gallery applauding Isabella. The men who made all that clapping were, no doubt, as you charitably suppose, Lucios in their own conduct; but they were Lucios not because they had no higher self, but because the higher self had been gagged and tied down by the lower. But at moments like these the better self gets free. No temptation is there to fetter it. Looking at the stage, they are placed, as it were, above the world, and they can judge of vice and virtue unwarped by any personal feeling. Another cause also helps to bring the better self uppermost. The moral judgment we are speaking of is given in public; and even should each have some secret wish in his heart to applaud vice, shame chokes the wish, and he does not dare to do so. Each man is not only passing judgment himself, but his sentence is being judged by others. Well, here you have a body of rough, dissolute individuals, any one of which one might be afraid of meeting alone, who yet show themselves possessed, under certain circumstances, of a spirit of virtue and of chivalry-possessed of what I call a corporate moral goodness. Now, this is the sort of goodness that is necessary for a great painter to have part in. Though his own life may be selfish, he must reverence self-sacrifice; though his own life be impure, he must reverence purity. And if, during the age he lives in, purity and self-sacrifice are held surely and generally to be holy and adorable things, he may give them a willing and public tribute on his canvas, though he may unwillingly deny them in his secret life. But he can do this only when his age is of such a character. Thus, in a great age, a dissolute painter may paint pure and noble pictures; and in a degraded age a most respectable painter may paint degrading and degraded pictures. And now perhaps you will see what I meant when I said just now that I thought some of these pictures we have been talking of were the most significant sights in London. The painters who painted them may, no doubt, personally be most excellent people, but their pictures, so far as their meaning goes, are utterly condemnable and debased. A bad painter, in a great age, is like the Dead Sea, which, though it hides Gomorrah in its heart, yet reflects the heaven on its surface. A good painter, in a bad age, is sure to reflect Gomorrah, though his heart, in its own depths, may be as pure as Jordan. Ralph Burgoyne. I, my dear Gage, should be thankful if our modern art had even an immoral meaning. To me it seems positively to have none. Gage Stanley. And so it has none in one sense. It is true there is this want in it-and that is what you are struck by-there is no discrimination in it between good and evil. I quite agree with you, that if it were immoral, there would be much to be thankful for. This would show that our artists knew the good even if they did not choose it. But to me it seems that they do not so much as know it. That idea of the good, which, in Plato's exquisite metaphor, is the moral sun of the world, which has been the fountain of the spiritual coloring in every great painter from Giotto to Hogarth, is for men like Burne Jones dark And silent as the moon, Hid in her vacant interlunar cave." Lady Lilith Wardour. Mr. Stanley, I don't quite understand your meaning. Surely by this time it has become a commonplace that great art is above morality, and that it never ought to be didactic. Gage Stanley. That great art preaches no particular moral—that very likely is true enough. But that does not prove that it is not full of morality. On the contrary, good and evil are the two great colors that it paints with; and when one says it is not didactic one means only that it shows these colors so clearly to us that there` no need to label them. But our modern painte to me seem spiritually color-blind. They pant evil with no consciousness of sin, and good with love that could not be wronged, for nothing could no admiration for virtue. Lady Lilith Wardour. I think what you notice in these pictures is not the absence of any moral standard, but the substitution of a true for a superstitious one. Happiness-a happiness for all of us, and a happiness that we can realize here this is the only rational standard. I see, Mr. Stanley, you can't make up your mind to agree with me. But to me the whole thing seems so profoundly simple; and I can't understand how any one who has read Mill can be in a moment's doubt about it. Gage Stanley. I think the present generation is very quickly ceasing to doubt. It is beginning to live by Mill's standard; and we see in these pictures the result of the action. Art in this way is an excellent comment on philosophy. Philosophers may persuade men that certain facts are true or untrue; but of what use men at large will make of this knowledge, philosophers are profoundly ignorant. No child in its cradle, no girl of ten in her schoolroom, knows less of the world in general than Mill did, or could tell less how his theories, if accepted, would affect it. Burne Jones's pictures tell us far better. When I think of Mill, self-contained, passionless, unimaginative, despising society and all the world's frivolities, it makes me smile to think of him with his logic turning the handle, and grinding out the "Laus Veneris" and the "Chant d'Amour." Violet Staunton. I don't quite see what you mean. Gage Stanley. What I mean is this: The world has been taught that its one standard of action, its one thing to live for, is happiness in this life. This teaching is gradually changing the world. The change at first is hard to perceive; but none has so delicate, though it may be so unconscious, a sense of it, as a gifted artist; and we may trace the change most clearly in such an artist's pictures. Well, go to Burne Jones, and he will show you the direction where men, of themselves, are sure to look for happi ness. The men and women he paints are not the unfortunate and the poor-not people strugging with physical evils. They are evidently people in command of all life's resources, and they are choosing, presumably, what they think the best of them. What they choose is love. That is their life's crown. As far as meaning goes, Burne Jones's two great pictures are a study of love. Lady Lilith Wardour. And is not love, properly, the crown of life? I think if we only realized that, we should be far more careful not to offend against it than we are now. Gage Stanley. Yes, love; but what sort of love? The love depicted in these pictures is a make it worse than it is. If love is to be really the crown of life, it must be a crown of thorns as well as a crown of roses. It should nerve us for bearing sorrow; it should make us pure by pain and by forgetting of self. But look at Burne Jones's women. Would they suffer for any one's sake if they could help it? The only sorrow they know is the languor of exhausted animalism. Lady Lilith Wardonr. Yes, sorrow. Do you know he seems to me to paint sorrow so much more than happiness? Gage Stanley. The sorrow he paints is the shadow of happiness, and shows us the shape of the thing as well as the thing would itself. The happiness his people follow is a happiness not fit to be painted. It can only be shown to us in the wake it leaves behind it, and in the lips and eyes of those that sing and dream of it. Lady Lilith, you are always very hard on the common fashionable conversation of our day—you say it is frivolous, ill-natured, and all that. Well, for my part I would sooner listen to the most frivolous, the most lying, the most ill-natured gossip of Mayfair or Belgravia, than I would to the "Chant d'Amour" the singer in the picture is supposed to be singing. The gossip has at any rate some life about it; its ill-nature is often bright and humorous, and falls on the just and the unjust alike. It typifies even at its worst a purer and a healthier life than the faces of these epicene dreamers. Lady Lilith Wardour. I think, Mr. Stanley, that a good deal of this is your fancy. Gage Stanley. I thought so myself till I looked at the artist's other pictures, " Day and Night" and the "Four Seasons." There is the whole history of the same diseased desires; and the motto for the whole series might be taken from a certain sonnet of Shakespeare's: "Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream." 1 Lady Lilith Wardour. No. What I mean is this: I think you try to read a meaning into the pictures that is not there. "Is there any moral shut Within the bosom of the rose ?" These pictures are meant themselves to be factors in life's enjoyment, not to teach us lessons about it. They are specimens of art for art's sake. Look at the exquisite coloring, the exquisite workmanship. Look, for instance, at the painting of the tapestry in the "Laus Veneris." Gage Stanley. In certain qualities I think Burne Jones far beyond all modern painters; but 1 Shakespeare, "Sonnets," cxxix. Mrs. Roland. My dear Gage, don't you think you are laying too much stress on this good Mr. Burne Jones? I think all this sort of thing is confined very much to a clique. Gage Stanley. There is a certain sort of artslang, and a certain kind of artistic dressing, that is, of course, confined to a clique, and Heaven be praised for it! But the spirit that Burne Jones has caught, or that has caught him, is a spirit that is spread more widely. In his exquisite sense of color, and in his exquisite workmanship, he represents very fitly the sort of refinement that is coming over our civilization; but civilization is only the setting of the jewel of life; and if the jewel is valueless, we only see this the quicker if the setting is invaluable. Violet Staunton. I quite agree with you about Burne Jones. But he is only one painter, and you shouldn't judge all by one. Look now at Alma-Tadema-you don't think his pictures sickly, do you? Ralph Burgoyne. If Alma-Tadema was illustrating a dictionary of Roman antiquities, his pictures would be all very well. But to me, as pictures, they mean absolutely nothing. Gage Stanley. To me, on the contrary, they mean a very great deal. I discern in them the same quest after happiness—a happiness that shall be self-sufficing, and shall vindicate a sufficient value for life. And they show me that in actual life the artist fails to find this. He despairs of reality; he betakes himself to a dream of the past. This too is true of Burne Jones. He for his outer surroundings has to go to the Middle Ages. Ralph Burgoyne. That is just what I say. The art is all unreal; and being unreal it can teach us nothing. And what are the highest things of which M. Tissot's art is contemplative? A girl's ankles, the high heels of her shoes, the frills of a fashionable petticoat, and the amount of back she can show through muslin between her stays and her necklace. Gage Stanley. Well, Tissot is simply Burne Jones modernized. He says in the careless slang of the day what the other says with his fastidious archaisms. Look at the sort of woman that is represented in the “ Evening" and the “July” of Tissot. She is evidently meant for a grande dame of some kind. One used to think that a grande dame had duties. But this woman— what duties has she? Her wealth is simply used to minister to a voluptuous languor. Look in her eyes—can you find a thought in them of anything beyond her own pleasure, or perhaps a fretfulness that at this moment she is too weary to be pleased? Lady Lilith Wardour. I see, Mr. Stanley, your mind is still running on what you said just now about faith, and your religious standard of good and evil. You think these people don't look as if they said prayers or thanked a God for their happiness, and therefore you are determined to think they can never be rightly happy. It is very possible that when we first consciously begin to make our own happiness our object, we shall make a few mistakes about it at first; but we all know so well, if we will only think about it, what the best happiness consists in, that our standard will be a far surer one than the unauthenticated formula of a superstition. Take the happiness of a husband and wife when they really love one another. Every one admits that this is the best happiness life can give. Is not that a sufficient standard by which to condemn inconstancy, and a sufficient inducement to prevent people from being inconstant ? From "A Familiar Colloquy," by W. H. MALLOCK, in the Nineteenth Century. III. Gage Stanley. No, for you forget this: that this unreality is itself real. It is a fact. You may see it in the life around us. Don't Lady Lilith's Hampstead friends spend their life, which is cast in this century, in playing at living in the last? And to a certain extent we are all doing the same thing. These very forks we are eating with are Queen Anne forks, and I've no doubt my cousin paid any amount of money for them. THE LIMITS OF MODERN ART-CRITICISM. Yes, this is what it is: we have lost our faith, and this is how we try to make up for it. Our architecture and all our surroundings tell the same tale. Once what they did was to remind us that we shall be living a million years hence; now they try to make us think that we are living a hundred years ago. Perhaps, Ralph, you like such art as Tissot's better. There is very little about that that is not of the nineteenth century. Ralph Burgoyne. I think Tissot the worst and the most meaningless of all. I suppose his is what Ruskin would call contemplative art. (Reply to the preceding.) I AM led by an article-a very brilliant oneentitled "A Familiar Colloquy on Recent Art,” to appeal briefly and rather humbly to its author, and other men of the same high standard of capacity, about amenities and reticences which it seems to me they are called on to respect—revive -or perhaps to initiate. The article in question has not the weight of its author's more careful work, though it is quite worthy of him as a model causerie. Still I think it reckless, crude, and ill considered, in its adverse criticisms. It does not seem as if the author had overridden any genuine scruples, which would be altogether wrong; but as if he had written just as he spoke, or heard others speak, in a drawing-room or a smokingroom. According to his rather unfavorable view of society, people seem to say much the same things in either place now. What is to be said here will not have the piquancy of conversation, and I shall avoid the mention of names as far as possible, speaking as a friend of Mr. Burne Jones, and an admirer of his censor. And this is written partly at the instance of another person for whom that painter, his critic, and his critic's critic, entertain the same strong respect and regard. So that these observations are made ex animo; and, though one critique has given rise to them, they may apply to a great many others. First, I rather object to the colloquial form of writing, where severe adverse criticism has to be done. The writer dodges behind his characters. It is not right to print sharp moral animadversion in the mouths of dummies, however prettily you may dress them up: and they enable you to use a style of touch-and-go insinuation which cannot be replied to. In personal discussion there is no harm in saying, "People say this or that about you, and I want to know about it, believing them "--because the other man can speak for himself. A license is allowed when men face each other, which should not be taken in a conversation all on one side. Again, litera scripta manet. The sharpest things may often be said, when they ought not to be printed. The whole question of scandal, and scandalous newspaper writing, turns on printing intimate conversations for all the world to read, and proclaiming that which was said in the ear on the house-tops. It is an indiscretion; and it will certainly interfere, and gravely, with all freshness and confidence in society. It turns epigram into libel, and fun into malice. In short, criticisms may be flashed out, laughed at, and even remembered in the talk of a familiar clique, if they get no further than talk: they should be served up with their natural evanescent flavor, and not printer's-deviled. This applies more particularly to very clever men who live in ladies' society: they ought not to print things as said before modest women which they would not really say before them, unless indeed they have an underlying conviction that no women are modest, and that is matter of the very gravest statement, and not stuff to flavor a review. Besides, there is such a thing as self-control; and a gentleman of England should be able to restrain even his humor. pictures. I am inclined to protest against the right claimed in this and other criticisms, of ignoring the artist's technical skill, and criticising his work as if that did not exist. On the subject of painting, and now on that alone, ignorance claims authority of its own, and scholars who don't know their lesson stand on the form to speak ex cathedra. I know that many wellread art-critics maintain that their mystery, like that of fencing in "Peter Simple," consists in knowing nothing about it; but having made both books and pictures in my time, I must assert that pictures are not books, and should be treated in a different way. The fact is, that the bullying power of a critic who avows his own ignorance, and appeals as an honest man to everybody else's, is so great as to be overpowering. A painter cannot by his art answer criticism which ignores his art: and the wordman is tempted to considerable outrecuidance toward the workman, as in this critique. Mr. Ralph Burgoyne, the rough intellectual dummy, first contemptuously withholds contemptible opinion as to beauty and pictorial merit, and then he and the other man advance grave censure as to intellectual and moral result. He says that the only resource of the afflicted painter is to call his assailant fool or Philistine in Pompeian Greek or medieval Latin. I seldom use either word in any language: but I have a decided opinion as to the use of the term gentleman, and its cognate adjectives, and it seems to me that those who claim that name should, in these dangerous days, walk warily in print. The intellectual rough of the colloquy begins by saying that he is not interested in technical excellence as such, and goes on to compare it to good bricklaying, as, for example, that of a ginshop. This is rather insolent, and in fact just the right way to shut up an anathematized artist. But it involves the assertion that painting has no more intellect or morals in it than bricklaying, and if that be the case, the painter ought not to be attacked about intellect and morals, as he is in the next page. But the truth is, as all artstudents know, that their skill and moral health or rightness are very closely related. To look on human, i. e. female, beauty with the view of representing it is not like looking on it from any other motive, innocent or guilty. The art of painting affects the moral character of the painter, and the picture. No one ought to be or is allowed to study in a life school till he has learned the human form, i. e., its ideal anatomy, curves, chiaroscuro, and color in the cast school. He has to bring a good deal of acquired knowledge, ocular, mental, and manual, to bear on his model when he first sees her: and the difficult and deThen as to painting, and Mr. Burne Jones's lightful manipulations, on which his success de VOL. VI.-4 |