Little by little, we have come to realize that the word "art" means something more than painting and sculpture; that the phrases "art and architecture," "art and letters," "art and the drama,” are inaccurate; and that a noble building, a great work of fiction, a fine piece of dramatic action, is just as truly art as a pic ture or a statue. Therefore the altercation over the essence of art and its proper manifestation has come to comprehend all these things, and many others as well. Indeed, not a great while ago, the quarrel between symbolists, impressionists, ideal ists, or whatever name may for the moment have been in favor, and realists, always unchangeable in nature and name, was quite overshadowed by the fierceness of the conflict that raged between precisely the same principles in the art of fiction. One result of this widening of the field of action has been a distinct clearing of the air, and a consequent realization of the fact that, in the end, the apparently inextinguishable conflict is based, not on some little principle that touches painting alone, or fiction, or even all art, but on the very spirit of the century. It is simply the question as to whether the impulse that is making this an age of triumphant facts, of scientific achievement, of industrial development, of rationalism and infidelity and materialism, shall overthrow in its turn the accepted foundations of art, or whether these same foundations shall stand, in that they are based on spiritual laws that rest calm and unchangeable, beyond the touch of contemporary happenings. Not many years ago, it almost seemed that this ancient law of art was to be degraded and cast aside, but of late one has often been led to wonder if the tide has not reached its flood. The time is not long past when the man would have been laughed at who ventured to predict that in a few years the scientific spirit, 1 Considerations on Painting. Lectures given in 1893 at the Metropolitan Museum of New which had driven idealism to its last trenches, would have suffered an almost complete reverse, and been forced to witness an accession of power to its oncebeaten enemy, apparently unlimited in its scope and acceptance. Yet this has happened, and for the moment realistic fiction is a discredited issue. Something of the same reaction is taking place even now in the art of painting, and the greatest pictures of the year in America are expressions of religion and fable, wrought out by methods which have in them nothing of the cherished principles of realism. It Of course the revulsion is violent and extreme in many cases, and the most conspicuous school of contemporary art, using the word in its new and comprehensive sense, is characterized by a degree of exaggeration quite as excessive and importunate as that which marked the reign of the dynasty of realism. is the old story of the pendulum, and just now it has swung far towards the pole of ultra-idealism. The result is often so bizarre and fantastic that one is tempted to justify Mr. Nordau in his assault on its absurd vagaries, even though his indiscriminating onslaught seems the last vindictive blow of a lost cause. But the pendulum of theory, oscillating from pole to pole across the intervening space where lies all the land of artistic possibility, must now and then pass the point of equilibrium, and it sometimes happens that a picture, or a book, or some other manifestation of the art idea comes into existence at this desired moment, and under the sign of the via media. Such a work is John La Farge's Considerations on Painting; for in it the author avoids the dangerous poles of exaggeration, and, while showing clearly the necessity of both elements of realism and impressionism in painting, indicates with unerring judgment the eternal laws of art, vindicating their claim to stability York. By JOHN LA FARGE. New York, Macmillan & Co., and London. 1895. 1 and eternity. In one of the lectures Mr. La Farge says: "And in no division of the arts of sight has there been more misapplied ingenuity of teaching, more narrowness of reasoning, more individual assertion, more professional incapacity, than in the law-making which has been done in our century for the reasonable production of the work of art that we call decoration." The restriction as to the particular division of the arts seems hardly necessary, for few would deny that this accurate judgment applies to the literature of painting quite as closely as to that of decoration. Indeed, there is no branch of art that has been free from the meddling of incompetent theorists and demagogues, and as a result we have not only failed to acquire any real vital art, but we have achieved instead a false and evil art that is self-conscious, conceited, aggressive, the very contrary of the old art we still pretend to respect. For the dogmas that have been defended with such exactness have been formulated almost entirely from the standpoints of the advocates of extremes. The quarrel over the theory of art has been on the respective values of the poles of æsthetic possibility, while the middle ground has been left unharassed by theorists; and only now and then, when perhaps it flashed suddenly on some zealous fighter that neither pole had dominion over the great world of art won for us in past centuries, did the thought occur to any one that, after all, the treasured extremes lay dangerously near the infrared and ultra-violet rays of the spectrum, while between lay the whole field of real art, discovered long ago, and still quite adequate for all human effort. In the end, is there very much of realism or impressionism, as they are now understood, in the old art that we know to be so good? Therein there is something that appeals to the essential and universal quality in man as little that has since come into existence succeeds in doing, something that needs neither the hysteria of ultimate impressionism nor the brutality of perfect realism to aid its influence. We may try our best; we still fail to grasp this secret of success, for it lies in neither pole, but in the forgotten middle ground. "Art begins where language ceases." In these five words Mr. La Farge has indicated as closely as conciseness will permit the lost secret of universal and lasting art, the trail of the middle way, overlooked in our passion for ultimate extremes. "Art begins where language ceases." In other words, art is the symbolical expression of otherwise inexpressible ideas. For in verbal language we can embody in a form mentally acceptable the ideas which take cognizable shape from bodily experience; but in this way we cannot express, in a manner either mentally or spiritually acceptable, the ideas which transcend experience, but which are no less real, no less honorable, than they. To give these ideas a form which may appeal to the arbiter of their existence, we must seek the other language, which appeals, not through the senses, but through the emotions, the language of symbolism. And by symbolism we mean all the wonderful and mysterious powers of color and form and light and shade, tone and rhythm and harmony, the forms and methods of verse, the qualities of architectural composition and design. We can neither justify nor explain the influence of these things by any mental process, though unfortunate efforts have been made; but to the faculty in man to which alone they have a right to speak such justification is unnecessary. "Who shall fathom the mystery of the impressions made by art!-impressions which become confused when one tries to declare them and describe them, strong and clear if we feel them again, even by the recall of memory; so that by his placing of words in an artificial frame, the poet suggests, not the actual thing itself that he says, but what our memories will make of it, as soon as he has thrown us out of the hearing of the language of every day." Nor can he lay stress too often on the necessity of individuality in the work of the painter: "The man is the question; we realize how much of ourselves constituted the feelings that seemed to come out of the things that struck us. In our art these impressions are tangible, if I may say so. We enjoy what we think is the representation of the certain things at the same time that some sense of what they mean for our mind affects and moves us. These figures, these objects, which seem to be the thing itself. . . there can be no absolute view of to a certain part of our intelligence, make a sort of bridge over which we pass to reach that mysterious impression which is represented by form as a sort of hieroglyph, a speaking, living hieroglyph, not such a one as is replaced by a few characters of writing; in our art and in that sense a sublime means and creation of man, if we compare it to that in which thought can reach us only through conventional arrangements of the signs we call letters. An art more complicated, certainly, than literature, but infinitely more expressive, since, independently of the idea, its sign, its living hieroglyph, fills the soul of the painter with the splendor that things give; their beauty, their contrast, their harmony, their colors, all the undi vided order of the external universe." In a similar way, throughout these lectures, Mr. La Farge holds up the highest ideal of art to those who listen; warning them against heresies and false gods; unveiling a little of the radiance of the true deity, not by the declaration of rigid dogmas, but by hints, sugges tions. "In these realities with which we are concerned realism is a very evasive distinction; . . . there is for you practically no such thing as realism." Speaking of methods, he says: "The variety of dreamland into which we enter depends on [the painter's] manner of opening the gate;" and again, touching the very matter mentioned before, the difference of æsthetic expression from that employed by the mind: "By his cadences, by the stress laid upon certain words, nature." "If you ever know how to paint somewhat well, and pass beyond the position of the student who has not yet learned to use his hands as an expression of the memories of his brain, you will always give to nature, that is to say, what is outside of you, the character of the lens through which you see it which is yourself." "In our art of painting, above all others, that desire of the beautiful is expressed and appeased by representation of what is exterior, what is perceived by the sense of sight. Through these representations, more or less complete, more or less the result of acquired ideas, or, on the other hand, of personal impressions, the artist has expressed what is in reality himself. If we were gifted with the imaginary perception that we attribute to supernatural beings, we could see written out at length, in these works of art, not only the character of their authors, but their momentary feelings, often contradictory to the apparent intention; and even their physical failings, the make and habit of their bodies." Is not this, then, almost a solution of the whole question? "The artist has expressed what is in reality himself; " not the mere phenomena of a nature at the best imperfect, not the objective world, "the subject, as it is called in catalogues of pictures, is merely the place where we express ourselves," — not even the impressions which these phenomena make on the painter, but the emotions they excite, the dreams out of the greater, more wonderful world of man's spiritual life, brought into existence by the impulse of natural facts and phenomena, of objects; the other which arranges the vitalized by the strange and unknowable thing we call the soul, made visible by the suggestive images of the nature that called them into being, appealing to the spiritual faculty through the senses, by means of those agents of the emotions, symbolism, color, harmony, and their allies. If we can look on the art of painting in this way, the fight between realism and impressionism will seem very trivial indeed, and we shall find that through all the forms of art runs a thread that holds them together, so that Wagner and Rossetti, Burne-Jones and George Meredith, yes, and Mr. St. Gaudens, Mr. John Sargent, and Mr. La Farge himself, are all workers in one direction, towards the restoration of the underlying laws and the forgotten secret of art. It is on turning from this book of Mr. La Farge's to another,' which, from its title, gives promise of kinship, that we find how easy it is to approach this subject from a standpoint, to say the least, inadequate. In Considerations on Painting, the author seems to see and admit the impossibility of laying down in dogmatic verbal form laws touching the spiritual or emotional side of art. He suggests, he does not assert; for a spiritual truth cannot be accurately defined in words which require no comment, exposition, or explanation, be it a truth of religion or a truth of art. The language of art is very different from the language of nature, as Mr. La Farge shows; but Mr. Hamerton starts with the assumption that words may be used to express everything. "What is imagination?" he asks; and for answer he goes to the Philosophical Dictionary, Littré, and Webster's Unabridged. The answer is definite and concise: "There are two kinds of imagination: one of which consists in retaining a simple impression 1 Imagination in Landscape Painting. By PHILIP GILBERT HAMERTON. With many il lustrations. Boston: Roberts Brothers. 1895. images so received, and combines them in a thousand ways." "Nature and his own labors together have armed [the artist] with these three talents: First, the power of recalling images of absent things. Second, the power of representing these images in painting. Third, the power of fusing images into pictorial wholes. I should say that an artist so gifted would have every chance of being recognized as an imaginative artist.” This is all, and on this foundation Mr. Hamerton raises a superstructure which is in effect but an amplification of his dictionary definition. To be a painter, one must be able to "visualize;" that is, see objectively the subjective memories of things once observed. To be a great painter, one must be able to combine these "visualized " memories in a visible form which will be pleasing to the eye. It would seem from this that the author confuses the domains of the spiritual and the physical, sees nothing in the faculty of imagination but organized memory; leaving out of the consideration entirely the great world of real imagination, which is far distant from physical memory, and is a world in itself, with its own laws, its own phenomena, its own language. To this view of the situation, and to the treatment that must follow from acceptance of the definitions of Littré and Webster, Mr. Hamerton's didactic — shall we say pedantic?-method of exposition is peculiarly adapted. After reading the passage quoted above, one comes with a certain satisfaction upon, “With regard to the action of the memory in dealing with memoranda, the following piece of actual experience may be worth recording. A distinguished painter, now a Royal Academician, told me that he had never found it possible to paint things well from hasty memoranda unless he had carefully painted objects of the same kind, at one time or other, from nature, but that he could always paint with his full power from slight memoranda when this condition had previously been fulfilled. This was said with reference to landscape subjects." One is not surprised, after this, to find the following analysis of a picture in the Salon of 1886 (not 1885, as Mr. Hamerton says). After describing the awful solemnity of the vast wall of rock cleft by the sword slash of a Norwegian fjord, the author says: "And yet, in this picture, just opposite to this scene of terrible desolation, there are three or four poor little wooden buildings to show that man lives even there, and the pathetic interest of the work lies in the sympathy that we immediately feel for the inhabitants. 'What!' we say to ourselves, 'do human beings live in such a solitude?' The artist tells us, in his way, that this little colony is not deprived of communication with the outer world, for he shows us a steamer under the precipice, steadily making its way on the calm, deep water, with a line of foam at its bows. Small and insignificant as it appears under the giant mountain, and rare as may be its visits, the mere possibility of them is a link with distant humanity. The success of the picture was due, no doubt, in great part, to this artifice, by which the sympathetic imagination is first disquieted, and afterwards gently reassured." This is "the very ecstasy of madness," or rather of hopeless sanity. The art of Tintoretto, Velasquez, Turner, does not deal with trivialities of this kind; its mission is not to be the agent "by which the sympathetic imagination is first disquieted, and afterwards gently reassured." This is the function of the artifice that expresses itself in the Sunday-school literature so popular with a certain class of people. The mysterious world of the spiritual life is full of vast phenomena, strange passions, awful desires, illimitable aspirations. Since human life began, man has tried to express these things to men, that he might dispel the loneliness that broods over these trackless lands. Through the symbolical language of art he has succeeded, and to any one who has gained the power to use that agency to such ends Mr. Hamerton's idea of employing it to disquiet the sympathetic imagination, and afterwards gently reassure it, by such childish details as a coasting steamboat and fishermen's huts, will seem blasphemous and sacrilegious in the extreme. From this treatment of art necessarily follows the conviction that Mr. Hamerton avows toward the end of the volume: "Now, if we accept my theory that invention is imagination that can be made to work, it must follow that the real inventors will work at invention just as they would at anything else, and that those who wait for inspiration' are just the people to whom inspiration is least likely to be given." 6 Most certainly this conviction must follow from acceptance of the given theory, but does not this fact militate against the truth of such a law? The painter who, if "suddenly asked, What is the greatest need of the Imagination?' would probably answer either, Abundance of materials,' or else, Liberty," should undoubtedly work this organized memory as he would any other physical faculty, but he would be bound within an iron line, the rigid ring that circumscribes his own physical experience. For him would be forbidden forever the wonderland of dreams and reveries, of strange visions and mystic symbolism: his would be an art of statistics, not of ideals. To this extent Mr. Hamerton's "imaginative painter" would be in touch with that contemporary art which Mr. La Farge describes as characterized by "deplored, undoubted incapacity," not with that of Leonardo and Rembrandt and Burne-Jones. But in spite of his encyclopædic assumptions, his pedantic methods, his material dogmatism, Mr. Hamerton rises above the limitations he imposes upon |