Part 9

Nothing is funnier than to read the explanation of the terms “Impressionists” and “Impressionism” of certain art-gossipers among the critics in Germany. These transcendental phrasegrinders, who have no notion how the word arose, believe it was invented by painters or æsthetics with the set purpose of characterising an artistic tendency, and of indicating elliptically a method of execution; and, with the rapturous, prophet-mien common among this brotherhood, they treat us to the deepest and most breath-ravishing explanations of the word. The truth is that the expression owes its origin to the jest of a comic paper that intended nothing special by it, least of all an æsthetic theory. In 1874 the painters who for ten years had been known as the “Open Air” artists or “Realists” exhibited a number of their works in the reception-room of the writer and photographer, Nadar. Claude Monet appeared, amongst others, with a sunset, which was quite in the manner of Turner’s last years, and he entitled it “Impression.” It was a remarkable and characteristic work, without form, consisting only of streaks of red and orange, in the highest degree offensive to those who will not have the contemplation of nature restricted to the observation of colours, but look also for outline and modelling. A wanton scoffer, making merry in the “Charivari” over this exhibition, seized on Monet’s “Impression” as the pattern of the new style, sneered at it in the tone of a genuine back-biter, and, with the object of belittling them, called Monet’s fellow-combatants “Impressionists,” by which he meant only that, according to his view, their pictures were daubs, just like Claude Monet’s “Impression.” That is the simple origin of the word into which the German commentators have read something exceedingly mysterious and wonderful.

Pissarro belonged to Monet’s circle of friends, and fell under the designation, which rapidly became current, of “Impressionist.” In his case, it only means that he sought and found in nature only effects of light, only the play of sunbeams on things and around things.

In the three or four centuries that landscape painting has been raised to the rank of a branch of art—I leave out of consideration, in this place, the ancient landscape, because the modern development is unconnected with it—an enquiry, which enters into the motives and aims of painters, can distinguish three different kinds of landscape, which I would term respectively the literary, the lyric, and the optical. I do not choose these new designations for old and well-known things arbitrarily, but because, in my opinion, they mark what is essential better than do the prescriptive ones.

Literary landscape, on which I have already briefly expressed my views in treating of Sisley, is that which traditionally goes under the names of historical, heroic, ideal, or artificial landscape. It is not prompted by delight in nature, but is either the offspring of imaginative power or a piece of intellectual know-all work, in both cases, the result of reading. It is, to put it briefly, a continuous illustration of the literature in vogue. Since the Renaissance, ancient heroic materials have been specially favoured in poetry. The Spanish theatre, Corneille, and Racine lived on them. Even if they placed the lofty exploits of their heroes in a less remote past and on another stage than the ancient world, still, they endowed them with hundreds of reminiscences of the Græco-Roman mythology and history. Poussin, and even Claude Lorrain, conceived their landscapes as the frames of heroic romances and dramas. They were designed as stage decoration, which the spectator might people from his memory with figures in Roman mail-armour or Gothic plate-armour, familiar to him from contemporary poetry. In order to facilitate this play of fancy, ancient temples or ruins, perhaps even men in classical garb, helpfully stimulate the association of ideas. J. J. Rousseau substituted the sentimental for the heroic fashion; but the return to nature, which he and his innumerable imitators preached, did not to landscape painters at all mean the sinking into the contemplation of God’s actual world, but only the substitution for the heroes and knights, the upright or fallen marble pillars of their predecessors, of shepherds and shepherdesses, rustic cottages and herdsmen’s fires. Thus landscape painting illustrated in turn Orlando Furioso, Jerusalem Delivered, the Æneid, the tragedies of Corneille and Racine, Rousseau, Gessner, and Ossian; then, nearer to our time, Victor Hugo and the Romantics, Zola and the Naturalists, down to the latest symbolists and mystics, whose contemplation, so far as one can speak of such a thing in their gassy heads, greets us from the pictures of Burne-Jones and his continental imitators, and also from the landscape compositions of Puvis de Chavannes and Henri Martin. It may be safely affirmed that, of the pictures of literary landscape, not a single one would have been painted unless a book or some species of literature had, to some extent, commissioned them with an exact specification of all details.

Lyrical landscape is that which is perhaps also designated landscape of mood. It is more consistent with nature than literary landscape. It owes much less to reminiscence of books or plays; its only relation to literature is that through this the painter is schooled to be more susceptible of certain features of nature. Landscape pictures of this species could be painted under some circumstances by artists who had never read a book or heard a poem, if only their own disposition were attuned to poetry. For this painting the landscape itself is a poem—ballad, romance, or idyll, in many cases, perhaps, even a melodrama. It tells some tale, or hints at one, the more delicately so much the more expressively. The wrinkles of the ground, the irregularity and abruptness of the lines of mountains, the gloom of the woods, awaken presentiments; our yearning follows the paths which are lost in the blue distance, or behind hills and bends; coolness rises from the foaming rivulet; mystery broods over the motionless fish-pond. Everything unspoken, or partly unspeakable, which a keenly perceptive man of deep contemplation imports into nature, moves and reigns in and over the lyric landscape painting. It expresses a complex, subjective mood, embracing in itself many elements of sense, feeling, and thought—the joy of spring, the melancholy of autumn, the cheerlessness of winter, the shudder at the weird, the dread of eternity. It is viewed anthropomorphically. It owes its strongest effects to traits which do not exist in nature herself, but are added to her by human imagination. Japanese art knows only lyric landscape. In Europe it was first developed by the great Dutchmen, Ruysdael and Van Ostade, to attain in Corot its zenith unsurpassed up to the present time. As it lays expression into its forms, it must figure the latter distinctly. It draws and composes, therefore, with deliberation. It proceeds from the realistically rendered topographical anecdote, even if it achieves this by the transcendental.

Optical landscape, finally, is that which seeks to reproduce only the play of convergent or divergent, of reflected or broken light in nature. It is neither book-illustration nor views of places. It does not invite to the enjoyment of nature in the sense of the Sunday excursionist from big towns, or the summer tripper. It offers no scene with suggestion that we should live out our subjective moods there. The outlines, the plastic of the bodies, are a matter of indifference to it. Everything is merely a patch of colour to it; only an arena of dancing sunbeams. It wants to reproduce, as truly and fully as possible, the change and merging of lights and shades, the reciprocal influence of neighbouring and overlapping colours, the _crescendo_ of hues in the foreground and their fading away in the perspective. It systematically rates the intellectual and moral relations as foreign to its art. It is not enthusiastic for a particular season of the year or a certain architecture of cliffs and mountains. It knows nothing of the secret magic of water, heath, forest, or snow-plain. It gives light in scales, and in harmonised and dissonant chords, and will give nothing else. This landscape painting is an art of purely sensual preception, which may call pre-existent feelings and thoughts over the threshold of consciousness, but brings about no feelings and thoughts of itself. It is to be compared with the effect of the Æolian harp, which stimulates our hearing with melodious sound, but says nothing thematically differentiated to it. Debussy, latterly, consciously strives back to these origins of acoustic pleasure. The disciples of Turner in England and on the Continent enter in landscape on the same way back to a style of painting which, neglecting form, lays stress on the harmonies of light and colour.

In practice, besides the three sharply outlined species of landscape painting, manifold transitions and mixed forms are, of course, also observable. If, perhaps, G. Poussin represents literary, Corot lyric, Turner, at the time the formation of his cataract began, optical landscape, in its theoretical purity, we see in Claude Lorrain a revelling in light and a poetic mood penetrate the mytho-heroic literary painting which he owes to his artistic training, and from which, in spite of higher flights, he could never entirely free himself; and Segantini is a good example of an originally lyrical landscape that is always more strongly inclining to the optical; for if at the beginning he loved to copy high mountains, at last he busied himself only with fixing the wonder of light in thin air on the mirroring ice and glacier snow.

Camille Pissarro was mainly, in separate periods of his artistic development exclusively, an optical landscape painter. The attunement with nature which is afforded by the meeting of mountain and wood, water and reed, by the forms of trees and cliffs, the peculiarities of plant-life, and the movements of open country, he evidently did not feel and he cannot arouse. He was nothing, and he wanted to be nothing, but a priest and poet of light. When light fell, what objects it illumined and played on was a matter of such indifference to him that this landscape painter painted city scenes just as often as those of open country. Views of the Paris Boulevards, the Avenue de l’Opéra, the Seine seen from the bridges, the streets and squares of Rouen, occupy quite as large a space in his work as studies of the valley of the Marne and the hills of Southern England. Thanks to the good school from which he came, he never, like so many of his rivals, melts away into formlessness. He could not refrain from drawing distinctly. It was the movement of his bold and skilful hand that pervaded his will; but the sole hero of his pictures, to whom he gave his love and attention, was light.

After he had outgrown the formulæ of the Corot type of landscape, he sought with persistent, hot endeavour to find a method that would qualify him to draw into his picture as much light as possible, as intense light as possible, even the whole sun. What he himself found failed to satisfy him. When Seurat, who suffered undoubtedly from eye troubles, came forward with his stippling, Pissarro at once took possession of the new manner, and became a stippler even unconsciously. Seurat, it is well known, taught that the painter, if he would give truth and force to colour, must not mix the shade on his palette and transfer it ready-made to the canvas, but must dissect it into its primary colours, which are known from the spectrum, and insert them in little dabs by one another, so as to leave it to the eye to put them together again on the retina. This optical proceeding professes to have been learnt by listening to nature, which also offers us only as single colours what we feel as a synthesis of colour. The theory is sheer nonsense. Nothing of the sort happens in nature. When we see green grass we do not see yellow and blue grass which our eye mixes into green, but we see a body proceed from the æther-vibrations of the undulations, which call forth on the retina a sensation of green; and to imitate this influence of the grass we have to employ only one colour stuff from which atmospheric vibrations of similar undulations proceed. Unscientific painters were, however, impressed by the sham-scientific jabber of Seurat, who tried, in his wonted manner, through a subsequently discovered theory, to convert a defect of sight into an advantage; and they applied themselves the more zealously to stippling as the innumerable specks really made bright a twinkling, whirling impression, which superficially reminded one of the vibration of hot air on a sunny plain at midsummer noon.

Only superficially. Pissarro soon discovered that stippling really did not bring more light into his pictures, and he gave it up. He resigned the Seurat method to rivals who rush after eccentricity because they hope to astonish by it, and to whom a style of painting was particularly suitable, which blurred the line with colour and saved them that tedious drawing that always gave them the greatest affliction. He himself, however, returned again to the honest style of wielding the brush, which he had learnt of his great masters.

The stippling episode of his life, which he got over, throws light, however, on the painful, fundamental mistake of Pissarro and his companions. They wanted to paint light, and by that wanted something impossible, for light is not to be represented by colours which do not themselves emit light, and are neither phosphorescent nor fluorescent. All that is attainable by colour is awakening the reminiscence of light, and, by means of the memory-picture illuminating the brain, to cheat our consciousness with the idea of a directly received impression. The very great masters of optical landscape painting soon acknowledge, or feel, that the brush can indeed conjure forth the illusion of illumination, but is unable to paint light, and they turn from a hopeless Sisyphus-task to create pictures of mist and dusk, from which sunlight—a thing inimitable—is absolutely banished. The most instructive example of this is James Whistler; but he who does not possess the instinctive certainty of genius will not be conscious of the limitations of human capacity, and ever rolls the round stone unweariedly up the mountain.

Pissarro would have saved himself many hours of tragic quest, struggle, and sense of powerlessness, had he known or recognised the primary fact which Friedrich Hebbel seized in his theological but lucid epigram:

“He who the sun has created will ever remain quite another Than the industrious wight who for us prospects shall paint.”

WHISTLER’S PSYCHOLOGY

“Do you think, prince, that Raphael would not have been the greatest genius among painters if he had been unlucky enough to be born without hands?” Lessing makes the painter Conti say to Prince Gonzaga. A century and a half ago that seemed paradoxical, and was, probably on that account, one of the most quoted maxims of Lessing’s. It has, meanwhile, experienced the fate of many paradoxes, viz., become a commonplace. Nowadays, every dabbler in psychology knows that not arm and hand—_i.e._, execution—make the painter, but his optical brain centres, _i.e._, his sensitiveness to impressions of sight, his specific reactions on colour and form. One is a born painter—a painter from organic necessity and natural bent preceding all education—only by special development or susceptibility of this centre.

In painting, however, there are two elements to be kept distinct—drawing and colour. Both these are traceable to the centres of sight, but they correspond to different sensibilities. Optical centres, which perceive with particular keenness and delicacy the distinctions between intensities of light, are the real, organic hypothesis of the talent for drawing; for what we perceive with the eye, without the aid of the senses of touch and muscle, as outline or form, is purely distinction of intensity in light. Optical centres, on the other hand, which are particularly sensitive to the variations of undulations of light, form the basis of the sense of colour and the talent for colouring. As a rule the talents for drawing and colouring appear coupled, even if one or the other preponderates, for highly developed or particularly sensitive optical centres are naturally receptive beyond the average of optical impression of every sort, of differences both of intensity and of undulations of light. This is, however, not always the case, and there are dry, sharp draughtsmen without sense of colour, and some who revel in colour without the ability to grasp the idea of form and render it plastically.

In a brain that is characterised by a special morphological or functional development or sensitiveness of the optical centres, this dominates all functions of the brain, especially memory and association of ideas. The entire thinking faculty has an optical or visual character; it stands in a dependent relation to sight. Memory clings almost exclusively to reminiscent pictures of the sense of sight, and association of ideas connects mainly pictures of this category. Every perception of form calls up in the consciousness representations of form. The fancy is “inwardly completely full of figures,” as Albert Dürer quaintly and with wonderful intuition expresses it in his “Diaries.” The world-picture of this brain, always disposed to intense observation, is neither loud nor excited, but bright, flashing, and radiant like a mosaic work of precious stones and enamel. All the inner connections between the different domains of the brain are sharpened towards the optic centres, and all the activities of the brain, all emotions, all processes on the threshold of consciousness also release central optical excitements.

Whistler’s life-work reveals more than that of any other artist in our times the deep, organic primitiveness of his genius as a painter. We can observe in him, as in a school text, the psychology of the born painter. His signature is at once a fine example of the association of ideas on the part of a visionary. It consists, as everybody knows who has seen Whistler’s works, of a butterfly with evenly outstretched wings. People have insisted on seeing heaven knows what symbol in this, and have consequently sought the wildest and remotest explanations of it. If any one asked the master for an explanation, he laughed, and made a mysterious gesture of refusal. It gave him vast entertainment to see his admirers tormenting themselves with profound attempts at interpreting it. They just had no eyes; they could not see. The butterfly is nothing but the first letter of Whistler’s name—a big W. A Gothic, ornamental W with the two side lines bellied out and a bar in the middle reminds one strikingly of a soaring butterfly with its cylindrical body between its outstretched wings. The definite association of ideas from similarity of form made Whistler, as he painted the W of his signature, think of a butterfly, and he henceforward formed this picture that was fuller in expression, disregarding the original letter, which seemed to him balder and more meaningless. The butterfly came to the front more and more as the W went further and further back, and it is possible that at last Whistler himself forgot the point from which he started.

Whistler was, when he liked, in the front rank as a designer of forms. From the severe, painfully upright school of Gleyre he went forth a master of drawing, as of the outline of corporeality of three dimensions seen stereoscopically. One glance at his wonderfully plastic portraits, especially of his first period, teaches this irrefutably; but, on the whole, as his individuality made itself felt, he neglected form and became more engrossed in colour. In the second half of his life the outlines of subjects hardly any longer interested him at all; he only dwelt on their appearances in colour, on the harmony or discord of their tones. That means that his optical centres were much more sensitive to the differences of undulations than to those of the intensity of light. From this there necessarily resulted a contradiction between him and the average individuals which was not to be got over, since it originated in differences in the constitution of the brain. He who has not Whistler’s special hyper-sensitiveness to colour is simply unable to see things as the latter saw them. He can just as little imagine the impressions that Whistler feels through his sense of sight as perhaps those which are supplied to a hound by his nose. When the blissfully but painfully supersensitive appreciator of colour and the dull seer of outline, _i.e._, the perceiver of light, sought to explain themselves to each other, inexplicable misunderstandings were bound to arise, which make his celebrated law-suit with Ruskin an excruciatingly comic jest. Ruskin appreciated only draughtsmanship, his mind never went beyond contour. For him a picture was a writing that should express thoughts and feelings in the most concrete form. He demanded that it should be a definite communication, reducible to plain words, as of a narrative, a record of travel, or a treatise on natural science. A picture that differed from an exact representation, just as music differs from articulate speech—a picture that attempted to convey only a general, not a concrete stimulation of the sight-centre sensitive to colour, and the pleasurable feeling accompanying and emphasising it, not only was to him necessarily incomprehensible, but, as he was a dogmatist of strong feelings, seemed to him an impertinence—nay, a profligacy and personal insult. Ruskin’s criticism of a “Nocturne in Black and Gold” was a new version of the fable of the stork and the fox who invited each other in turn to dinner, improved to the point of libel. It was childish of Whistler to bring an action against the angry-minded art-inquisitor who required, as the first duty of a painter, the accuracy of a geologist, botanist, or engineer. He should not have expected justice from judges who saw and felt, not like himself, but like Ruskin. Judge Huddleston was of good faith when, in the immortal trial—which Whistler himself has preserved for posterity in his charming book, “The Gentle Art of Making Enemies”—he exchanged with the artist remarks like these: “Which part of the picture, then, really represents the bridge? Do you mean to say that this is the proper representation of a bridge?” (The question referred to “Battersea Bridge by Moonlight.”) “I had no intention of giving an exact copy of the bridge.” “Do these daubs of colour on it represent human beings?” “They represent what you please.” “Is that thing under there a boat?” “It is a consolation to me that you recognise it. My whole object was only to produce a definite harmony of colours.” He could hear this harmony of colours: Ruskin and Judge Huddleston could not. It was utterly futile to try to make them feel it.