and imitative elements which dominate, while the
imaginative and emotional, which, above all, dis-
tinguish the great art of all time, are curiously
deficient. Of a sincerely devout though question-
ing mind, his religion led him to art by one tie,
while the difficulty of then attaining to social
position without high birth and family influence
made art almost the only avenue to eminence for
men of great intellectual activity, disposed neither
to the church nor to the army. And as it was,
we see that his art enlisted but a small part of
his study, while his note-books in all their pre-
cepts point rather to the naturalistic than the
artistic side of painting, though not by modern
methods.
Therefore it is that when we demand general
critical powers, and such analysis of art as is
necessary to evolve the laws by which its study
must be directed, it is quite useless to look to
the artists to serve us. It has, indeed, passed
into a common saying that an artist is never
a competent critic; but this, like most other
popular proverbs, only expresses the vulgar and
superficial side of the truth it relates to, the
truth being that, while artists are generally il-
logical and one-sided in their appreciation of any
M
178 THE DECAY OF ART
special form of art, there is no possibility of
being a competent critic of art without some-
thing of that technical training which, when
successful in a high degree, makes the artist of
distinction. If we could but collect and reduce
to system the occasional criticisms and dicta of
men like Watts, J. F. Millet, Rossetti, Dela-
croix, Burne-Jones, Th. Rousseau, etc., we should
have a body of precepts and criticisms such as
no writer on art has ever given or can ever
give us; but the peculiar form of intellectual
activity which is needed to put this corpus in-
scriptionum into a logical and consequent form,
as a code of art, is not compatible with the
artistic intellect. Da Vinci began such a book,
but it still remains in the form of notes. No
man not practically versed in art to such an
extent that he can at least measure the diffi-
culties to be met, and appreciate the skill that
has overcome them ; whose eye is not trained by
practice in drawing so that he may judge dis-
criminatingly of the forms before him; and who
has not, moreover, made himself thoroughly ac-
quainted with the body of evidence to be collected
from the great work of the old schools ; who
does not know, in fact, both nature and art by
intimate and special study can have any valid
authority in criticism of art in any form. We
have a much completer scientific basis for criticism
of music than of painting, but no one proposes
to write musical criticisms without mastering
counterpoint and acquiring some practical and
THE DECAY OF ART 179
executive knowledge of the elements of music.
In art criticism such effrontery is of everyday
occurrence.
It is one thing to enumerate abstract principles
of criticism, which may be evolved by analogy
from well-ascertained parallels in other intellec-
tual studies, and another to apply them in such
a way as to give sound, concrete judgments on
particular forms of art. Of the former kind of
generalisation about art, we have many excellent
examples in the writing of men whose opinions
on individual works of art are absurdly whim-
sical and inconsequent. The name of Professor
Ruskin will at once be put forward as that of
the critic who has best fulfilled all the conditions
imposed on the ideal critic, and he would be a
rash man who contested his claim to the first
place, or his splendid services to modern thought.
But, in point of fact, and so far as the claims of
the highest art are concerned, he has simply
retarded their recognition by basing all his teach-
ing on direct study of nature, and insisting on a
realistic basis for art. So far as I know, the best
result of practical knowledge of art, applied to
the elucidation of the principles of criticisms, is
in the works of Mr Hamerton. Sir Joshua
Reynolds has left us a series of lectures and
some fragmentary notes which are of great value
in the technical education of the artist, but
which in nowise attempt any explanation of the
principles of art from the logical side, or trench
on its philosophy.
180 THE DECAY OF ART
The German philosophers have, on the other
hand, contributed much valuable material to the
study of that philosophy, and we owe to them
such basis for its development as we possess;
though, in every attempt to apply their funda-
mental principles to education or concrete criti-
cism, they fail through want of catholicity of
appreciation. We owe to them the clear state-
ment of the fundamental distinction between the
elements which constitute the dualism of art, the
objective and subjective, as well as the formulation
of the science of the aesthetic. Baumgarten, to
whom the honour of having projected this
science belongs, defines it as "the theory of the
liberal arts, inferior to gnoseology, the art of
beautiful thought, . . . the science of sense cogni-
tion." But the value of this very valid advance
in art philosophy was not realised by Baum-
garten, because the nomenclature of art was, as
it still is, in no state to supply the terms of the
logical discussion. There was no definition of an
art which constituted a definite distinction from
a science. What was an art at one time became
a science later, and the confusion common to his
day betrayed him into an inconsistency which
now makes his essay more or less absurd. But
his definition of aesthetics as the science of the
beautiful remains to us. We are still too much
encumbered by the nomenclature which betrayed
him, and under which any definite assertion may
be met by another which pre-supposes an entirely
different conception of art. We have the fine
THE DECAY OF ART 181
arts, the polite arts, the useful arts; the art
which is simply skill in doing anything, equiva-
lent to the Greek r^vi\ the secret of doing
anything, the rule for which becomes matter of
science when established. It may be a trick or
it may be a Greek sculpture that engages us,
and we may have, to discuss it, masters of arts
who know no art. An artist may be a Titian,
a Beethoven, an actor, a dancer, a singer, a
juggler, a pickpocket; the tailor, the milliner,
any workman, may be "quite an artist in his
way." How can we define art or the artist?
We must avail ourselves of that natural process
of differentiation in terminology which is con-
tinually going on, and according to which the
leading claimants to the general rank of artist
are distinguished by their peculiar appellations.
A composer is taken to mean the writer of music,
a poet the writer of verse, a musician the per-
former of music, and the performer of plays an
actor; even the sculptor has a range of work so
definite and distinct that, though no one ques-
tions the quality of his art, he is generally
known as a sculptor rather than by the wider
term, and so a prevailing (which might well be
made authoritative) acceptation of the words art
and artist, when in nowise qualified, implies the
arts of design and those who follow them. Even
in the arts of design a common and, perhaps,
unconscious distinction is put forward of greater
or less, one painter being known as a true artist,
and another only as an unintelligent imitator or
182 THE DECAY OF ART
copyist. This custom does not consider photo-
graphy an art or a photographer an artist, and
as the work of a painter approaches the quality
of photography we recognise that it recedes from
art.
I believe this development of a more definite
terminology to be in accordance with the true
philosophy of art, and that it points to the severe
definition of the Artist as the Creator.
" The artist saw his statue of the soul
Was perfect ; so with one regretful stroke
The earthen model into fragments broke,
And without her the impoverished seasons roll."
The supreme artist is the idealist, and the imi-
tator of nature is the artist only in a lower and
secondary sense, and this distinction has become a
differentiated conclusion in general English speech
and thought. Baumgarten's aesthetics, the science
of the beautiful, is, therefore, the science of art in
its restricted sense of design ; and design, in its
severe and only logical sense, is the creation (from
the material stored in the imagination) of a visible
ideal. We can in nowise admit to a parity with
the idealist any realist, no matter how trium-
phant. The question is not one of comparison, but
of contrast; the distinction is radical; it is that
between poetry and science, the imagination and
simple vision. Extreme illustrations will be found
in J. F. Millet and Meissonier, each magnificent
examples of the two classes of minds, each success-
ful in its aim, and each, alas ! a type as well of the
estimation in which modern society hold them :
THE DECAY OF ART 183
Millet, the most subtle and masterly example of
the pure Greek method of approaching art, dying in
comparative poverty and neglect; and Meissonier,
the extreme manifestation of the purely modern
spirit, realism reduced to its last expression,
wealthy and idolised, the object of the shallow
enthusiasms of a society that hardly cares to study
what it admires. It is impossible, on any sound
theory of art, to put together work so radically,
as well as superficially, distinct no rules of criti-
cism or precept of schools will embrace both.
To contribute ever so little to the clear setting
forth of those cardinal distinctions, which must
underlie all productive criticism and so aid in
forming a sound theory of art education, it is
necessary to go back to the radical distinctions
between these two kinds of art, and to make it
impossible to confound the paths of approach. It
may be possible to walk alternately in both if it
were desirable, but it ought not to be possible to
confound them or mistake one for the other.
Professor Ruskin, with all his power and
subtlety of thought (and I regard the second
volume of "Modern Painters" the most pregnant
contribution of our generation to a sound aes-
thetic literature), has, me judice, missed the re-
forms he had at heart by his rejection in theory
and practice of the fundamental distinction of
objective and subjective, and by his insistence
on rigid realisation of nature as a method of art
education. That element in art which makes it
such is not its fidelity to nature but its personality ;
184 THE DECAY OF ART
the way in which the artist arranges, subordinates,
harmonises the material which he borrows or in-
vents; in the majesty or sweetness of his com-
position, the harmony and pathos or splendour of
his colour; all those things which in poetry, in
music, give rank as poet or musician. The law is
the same in all the arts ; it is always the subjective
element which determines the place of the artist.
In music and in poetry there is no room for
confusion on this subject; and, to one who will
reflect, it is no less clear that the whole power
of painting over the emotions is due to qualities
which are entirely independent of any question of
representation of natural objects. Even is it true
that the glow of sunset and the gloom of twilight
owe their fascination and the power they have over
the artist mainly to the liberty they give to escape
from the facts of nature, from the domination of
an inflexible materialism. If painting owed its
power to the representation of nature, the noon-
day should have more value to the painter than the
evening, which everybody knows is not the fact, and
as twilight, as phenomenon, has no more value or
rarity than daylight, it appears that the value it
has is in a certain correspondence with moods of
the mind more grateful and potent than the
perception of facts. This points to a metaphysical
investigation, in which I do not enter farther than
to state my conclusion that twilight and others
of the greater phases of nature, which have a
special artistic appeal, owe it, not to the fact that
they are forms of phenomena, but to the relation
THE DECAY OF ART 185
between them and certain moods inherent in the
human mind i.e., to their subjectivity, just as,
in a larger way, physical beauty owes its fascina-
tion, not to its being a fact, but to its accord with
certain unexplained chords of human emotion.
Art is simply the harmonic expression of human
emotion. Where there is no emotion there is no
art, except in that secondary sense which has
been pointed out, and which relates to the primary
as the letter to the spirit. Nature furnishes
symbols but no language. The arts which are
the legitimate daughters of the muse are, dancing,
music, poetry, sculpture and painting so in the
order of their birth; if organic nature has been
called in to nurse the latter more openly than the
former, the parentage is nowise changed. The
entire quality of all art is misrepresented and mis-
understood by any other hypothesis. The law
which controls the poem or symphony is the same
which guides the pencil or chisel of the true artist.
That all great art be it of school or individual
obeys this law, is capable of proof. It is only,
moreover, as part of human life and motive that
it has any claim to the consideration we give it.
If, as I believe to be beyond doubt, the art impulse
is the first of the humanities in the race as in
the child, then, in the highest conception of life,
is it equally true that art is, for the happiness of
the race, a necessity, and its wise fostering a part
of true political economy, of which human happi-
ness is the legitimate end. Every human being,
in proportion as the child-like nature survives in
186 THE DECAY OF ART
him, is dependent on art for his happiness, and
the happiest are those to whom art has longest-
kept its realities.
This, in most men's experience of their kind,
is a commonplace, interpret it as we may ; but in
modern culture it is ignored in a twofold and
singular manner. Art is commonly held a too
trivial branch of study for adult intellects; or,
where provision is made for its culture, we ignore
the facts that its roots are entirely in the
emotional i.e., subjective or poetic i.e., creative
(irow'w, I make) faculties, and not at all in the
objective or scientific, which latter when cultivated
per se are not only antipathetic but destructive
to art. The scientist is the natural enemy of art
in every form, as the scientific tendency is to the
emotional, which is the indispensable aliment of art.
All the great schools of painting and sculpture
have been purely subjective in their origin and
development, and all have been in the former
purely decorative; abstract or subjective forms of
decoration in all cases preceding imitative or natu-
ralistic an unmistakable indication that the earli-
est pictorial impulse was creative and not imitative.
The schools grew by the sapient accumulation of
sound tradition and the development of the ideal
of beauty, always regarded originally as super-
human. All grew up as schools of music still
grow, and to all these came a time when they
began to lean on nature-study and so on realism
and scientific methods of looking at nature, in
which were the causes of decay. No great school
THE DECAY OF ART 187
ever was founded on the direct or objective study
of nature, nor, at its prime, was any school ever
guilty of it ; but the moment the subjective method
which was its life gave way to the objective or
scientific method, the art began to go down. The
moment of completest triumph, in which art
seemed to have added to its proper charm that
of the realistic fidelity which wins the universal
applause, was that in which decline began. This
was the epoch of Praxiteles and Scopas, of Titian
and Raphael; and when, finally, at Bologna, the
academy model took the place of the ideal, there
was no longer any hope of any school of art.
The reason for this is not difficult to state.
The genuine creative art or ideal art is only
possible where there is full liberty to embody
distinct and homogeneous conceptions which, so
far as the word can be properly applied to human
work, are creations; and here the mental concep-
tion must be so clear in the mind of the artist
that it serves the mental vision as the type of
which the work of art is the visible embodiment.
In all great design this vital quality is most
clearly evident ; but when constant and concurrent
reference to the model is kept up this is not pos-
sible, and the slightest indication of the model
shown in design is immediately destructive of
this supreme quality of art. The great artists
of past ages have left us no specific declaration
in words of their recognition of this law, but
the internal evidence in their works is abun-
dant. There can be no doubt that the Greek
188 THE DECAY OF ART
sculptors never worked directly from nature,
but from an intimate knowledge, in which the
perfectly-trained eye co-operated with the habit
of working from an ideal developed through
a subtle sense of the beautiful in form, whereof
the complete realisation was no more to be found
in any visible natural type then than now. We
know the same to be true of Michael Angelo ;
and in all the work of the great painters of the
Italian schools, we find constant and unmistakable
indications that they did not work before nature.
Of the greatest of living idealists, and, in the
noble sense of art, the highest modern example
of the combination of its greatest qualities, G. F.
Watts, we have the distinct and invariable rule
never to work from the model in any ideal (i.e.,
other than portrait) work.
Not only is this the immutable law of all great
art, but I maintain that the scientific study of
nature, whether as anatomy, geology, or botany,
is obnoxious in a high degree to the development
of the great qualities of design. Beauty, which
is the loftiest of all the attributes of art, is
purely a visible and therefore superficial quality.
To know the structure of the human body, to be
able to create the bones and their articulations,
the muscles and their insertions, is to confuse the
ideal perception with things which are not of
vision but of another kind of knowledge. We
know that the Greeks had no knowledge of
anatomy or of the use of the muscular system;
that they regarded the strength of the body as
THE DECAY OF ART 189
in the bones to which the muscles were merely
protecting cushions. We can see in Michael Angelo
the ostentation of the anatomist showing through
the perception of the ideal, and marring it in spite
of his immense and unapproached imaginative
power, and in the lesser men of the school of
Raphael can follow the decadence that came from
this pride of knowledge. But, even then, the
habit of direct study of the subject from nature,
or the attempt to so represent the scene that it
should appear an actuality an historical tran-
script of the scene was unknown.
The Dutch painters, though they sought the
most trivial details in nature, never became
entirely objective in their work, and only approxi-
mately in still life. In their landscape and sea
pieces the colouring and rendering of detail are
purely conventional, and aim, not at reproducing
the colour of nature, but at giving harmonies in
various keys of grey colour, and at expressing the
quality of natural objects by peculiarities of exe-
cution which are not at all inspired directly by,
or true to, the detail of nature.
Down to the last of the great schools, that of
Rembrandt, Teniers and Rubens, the deference to
nature, except in portraiture, never went further
than to make sketches from nature, in which the
essential qualities were recorded in such a way as
to leave the artist at full liberty to modify in
his painting either tone or form to suit his indi-
vidual feeling. Hobbema and Ruysdael, who, of
all the Dutch painters, came nearest to the minor
190 THE DECAY OF ART
facts of nature, clearly never painted from her
directly or used her otherwise than as a vehicle
for their ideals of composition and colour.
That true and delightful school of English land-
scapists which began with Girtin, was completely
subjective in its methods and in its appeals, and
is the only collective movement in English art
which deserves the name of a distinctive school.
So far as it had any artistic progenitors, it was
due to the influence of Claude, Poussin, and the
Dutch landscapists, but with a robust individu-
ality and fresh poetic feeling which no other
landscape had ever shown, a near and intimate
inspiration from the larger qualities of unsophisti-
cated nature, which made it more poetic than any
prior school of landscape had been. Turner, who
was its greatest master, and who attained the
highest expression of subjective art of his time
possibly of all time was in no period of his career
a student of nature in the modern acceptation
of that term. No painter ever so nonchalantly
defied all the actualities, or took such startling
liberties with the broader verities of landscape
as he. It was not merely topography that he
upset and the mountains that he marshalled
about, but he outdid Joshua in the liberties he
took with the sun and moon. If he ever realised
a tint of actual nature, it was simply because in
his chromatic scale it happened to hit the note
he wanted. An audacious defiance of facts was
not enough ; he set at nought the larger laws, and
his colour from the beginning to the end of his
THE DECAY OF ART 191
career was a constantly widening and complicating
scheme of chromatic harmonies as perfectly sub-
jective as a symphony. Light, space, colour ; that
subtle synthesis of lines and forms which his most
influential master Claude taught him and which
we call composition ; modulation of tint which
never left a vacant space in any portion of his
work; orchestration as complex, as masterly, as
ever musician mastered these were what he
sought ; and if the forms of nature and her com-
binations furnished him with the elements of his
work, he accepted them certainly, but with the
liberty which belongs to one to whom nature is
a useful servant, not an imperious mistress.
When the full force of the poetic tendency
which produced this school of English landscape-
painters was broken by the rise and fascination
of nature-painting, I do not know. The work was
done ere Turner died; and with him, Linnell, S.
Palmer, and some minor men of the same general
tendency, the school disappeared. It died out as
the Greek and the Italian schools had died, from
a method of study initiated by portraiture and
the sudden recognition of an interest in nature
never felt before by the general mind. The Dutch
painters had long held a controlling influence
over the dilettanti of England, as painters whose
work could be partially understood by men who
had no knowledge of art a copper kettle of
Ostade or Teniers gave more real pleasure to the
average buyer of pictures than a Madonna of
Raphael or Botticelli, though the Dutchman only
192 THE DECAY OF ART
did such things as tours de force, and to show his
skill. His system of study was still more subjec-
tive than objective; but when the modern land-
scape and genre painter brought into painting a
clear unconventional way of seeing nature, and
uncompromising fidelity in rendering facts re-
quiring neither knowledge of, nor feeling for, art
in its public, or poetic insight in its painter, it
developed intellectual indolence in the latter and
flattered the ignorance and conceit of the former,
and brought into existence what is commonly
supposed to be a rational art, but which is, in
reality, the negation of art.
There is one interesting phenomenon that is
connected with this arrival of a school of art at
its climax and its subsequent rapid decay, which
deserves explanation. In the subjective method,
or working " out of one's head," as the common
expression goes, the mind forms certain conven-
tional modes of expression, and follows these with
an increasing approach to fidelity until the art
reaches that point which we take for the acme,
so near to perfection is it when seen from our
lower plane. Then, whether by law or by a re-
curring chance, the artist finds his way to reali-
sation, the more or less literal reproduction of
what nature puts before him generally, I believe,
through intellectual indolence; perhaps more or
less through methods induced by portraiture, and
persisted in on account of the charm which all
men have felt who ever made a faithful study