But we believe that the Gioconda will endure, and Albrecht Dúrer will never be forgotten, and that the reign of Blake is yet to begin.
I have said nothing of Art in England. We have never had a tradition, Gainsborough in a small charming way, Blake in his magnificent great way, Alfred Stevens in his noble reminiscent way, and Rossetti in a romantic way, with Turner and Constable, are perhaps all the English artists who count at all, and of all these, only Blake can be ranked amongst the highest order. But lately Art has sprung into flower. In Augustus John, we have a power; the first English artist with a genuine conception of Art.
About 30 years ago the Slade school was started. Before the Slade, with the exception of Alfred Stevens and Legros, both of whom learnt abroad, and were unrecognised here, no drawings worthy of the name had been done by an English artist. Blake was not a good draughtsman, but he had a noble idea of form. It was a great pity he had Flaxman for a teacher instead of Dúrer. I here mean drawing as we understand it in the classic sense. Blake knew the end but grasped at it too quickly; he recognised a result and conceived too simple a cause. What else could he do? The unbroken tradition that runs right from Egypt through Da Vinci, Dúrer to John, passed by him; there were none to hand it on to him. Drawing is a science, the final result of a slow growth, and continual criticism of ages, and no man however divine can be expected to invent it. I hold Blake to be the highest artist England has ever had, as high above the next highest as this to the lowest. No other artist that ever lived possessed in so high a degree, that inspired quality; that unimpaired divinity that shines from all things mortal when looked at through the eye of imagination. Each touch is interpenetrated with sense, with life that breathes from the reachless and obscure heights and depths, deep, profound, and all embracing. And this in spite of a bad and mannered way of drawing, which sometimes obtrudes and obscures our pure appreciation. I will not enter into the claims of Leighton, Watts, Millais as draughtsmen. In England they have been forgotten long ago and nobody dreams of disturbing their memories. Whiles these men were still alive and England mute and wondering at their powers, real drawings were being done by students at the Slade. John burst upon London with amazing drawings, some that could be hung side by side with da Vinci without suffering. At last we were able to boast of a draughtsman, such as Italy once had, and France now possessed. A man who could apprehend a fact, its significance, and translate into terms of expressive line the visual substance of things. You look at a drawing. Can I read it? Is it clear, concise, definite? It cannot be too harsh for me. The lines must cut into my consciousness; the waves of life must be disturbed, sharp, and unhesitating. It is nature’s consent, her agreement that what we can wrest from her we keep. Truth, structural veracity, clearness of thought and utterance, the intelligent understanding of what is essential. I should like to make the distinction between the picturesque and the profound, the swagger and the stately. Rubens, Vandyke, Watteau are considered good but not serious enough. They are the ‘knuts’ of the Renaissance. These glib and aristocratic hunger marchers, who were too clever to sweat, are as shallow as they are fertile. Compare an etching of Rembrandt with Vandyke, a drawing by Ingres or Degas with Rubens or Watteau. It is the difference of the Temple to the Playhouse, of the Prophet to the ballad monger. It is the difference between the accessory and the essential, the accidental and the inevitable. The difference between the pretty plausible and the fierce straightforward.
The French Impressionists were the reaction from the traditional and lifeless. Art somehow had lost touch with nature and lay simpering, cosy and snug, propped up by sweet anecdote and delicious armchair sentiment. It was the day of Dickens’ slime and slush. Then Baudelaire published ‘The Flowers of Evil’, Swinburne his ballads, and Meredith ‘Modern Love’, while at the same time Degas, Manet, Pissarro, Puvis de Chavannes tried to get at the core of nature with paint. In their anxiety to get at truth, the Impressionists, unlike Puvis and Degas, overlooked one great point, which was, the form by which truth is to be conveyed must be concise and arbitrary, to isolate and impress its significance. Post Impressionism is that criticism of Impressionism. Vitality is expressed by patterns of clear form.
In England Impressionism manifested itself in Wilson Steer, Professor Brown, Sargent, Walter Sickert, Henry Tonks. To my mind the personality of Sickert is the most interesting of this school. It is very forbidding and sombre and stands alone in its ruthless philosophy. Steer is more lyrical and gay, and has recaptured the golden splendour of Turner. Clausen serves as a good populariser of other men while Sargent pains one by his smartness. Then we have a group of artists whose ideal is mixed up with Dutch Art, with Vermeer and Van Hooch, William Rothenstein, Orpen and Walter Russell. Rothenstein’s picture of ‘The Doll’s House’ is very beautiful and haunting.
But the young men have been taught by John that a sharp contour means more than the blending of tone into tone. Nature can be a lure and a snare and be used as an end and not as a means to an end. The concise pregnant quality of poetry rather than prose.
Henry Lamb is shy, a tremulous and ever-shaken life in shadow. Compared to Lamb, John is the broad ocean with the sun on it, and Lamb the sea with the moon. Innes paints landscapes very much like the Chinese and Mantegna. They have the vague beauty of perfumes and luxuriant reverie. Mark Gertler has a deep understanding of nature and sometimes achieves to that intensity we call imagination. John Currie has painted lovely things without being very convincing as a draughtsman. David Bomberg has crude power of a too calculated violence — and is mechanical, but undoubtedly interesting. Roberts, who is yet a boy, is a remarkable draughtsman in a stodgy academic way, clear, logical, and fervent. But the finest of all is Stanley Spencer. He is too independent for contemporary influence and goes back to Giotto and Blake as his masters. He strikes even a deeper note than John, and his pictures have that sense of everlastingness, of no beginning and no end, that we get in all masterpieces.
UNCLE’S IMPRESSIONS IN THE WOODS AT NIGHT
The moon shed its clear effulgent beam upon a scene of sylvan beauty wrapped in its garments of night.
I smiled with glee as a gentle breeze came softly whirring round me, fanning me with its light and delicate touch, and dispelling the heat of a summer’s night. The trees, my companions for years, invested with new life this beautiful still night, intermingled a soothing, incessant rustling of their leaves with the slight noises which arose now and then from an awakened insect.
The trees around me stood in ghostly array, huge blotches of shadow in the night shades, but here and there inexpressibly lovely and fairylike, when a beam outlined and touched with a silvery light, a leaf, a twig, or a notch of the gnarled bark.
No daylight could make these trees look lovelier, thought I.
The golden light of the sun with its bold, artistic touch, transforming dull greens into golden magnificence, flooding with its arrogant beneficence a peaceful vale, could not compete, thought I, with the gentler splendour of his sister Moon.
The Lady of the Moon showed me a study of silver and black. Thus the night as the daytime has a peculiar atmosphere of its own. Here, everything was still: a prolonged silence, an unearthly stillness, stole over the woods. The silence was broken by an impudent insect, the watchman of the night, who curious to know why all was so still called to its sleeping companions. A little babel arose, yet sweet and appropriate to the woods. It pleased me to think that I was not alone in noting the wonders of Nature by night. Again silence fell, to be interrupted as before by the insect life which dwelt at my feet. They were innumerable, but having respect for my age, they did not often drop in upon my meditation. I like the little things though, and when they ask me to tell them events I have seen in bygone ages, they listen entranced till I cease.
Thus my thoughts ran on in the same groove as they had run on years before, and still, I looked at the Lady touching up a little pool with her wand. The inky blackness of the pool would have disguised its presence but those l
ight touches accentuated the undulations of each ripple, revealing its presence as She revealed each tree. Thus my friends were not merged into the shadows, but with becoming dignity stood out individually and displayed their noble proportions. I ceased thinking and with the rest of the world around me slept.
WE HAVE HINTS, SUGGESTIONS
We have hints, suggestions — as if we have just woken up in time to note the passing; there are moments in thought where thought almost knows — words are not delicate or intimate enough; that instant we have died — our souls truly etherialised — that instant we have truly lived.
We all build the tower of Babel to reach to God and he has stricken us with confusion of speech who understand each other.
Is not each soul solitary, condemned in its separate prison? Yet when all the prisoners assemble in the courtyard we suspect each other and talk guardedly and opposite, fearing to be betrayed.
If I could die and leave no trace, ah, that thought of mine must live, incomplete and imperfect, maimed. Could I destroy all I have ever thought and done...
You the world, will sneer: ‘Young fool — mad...’ But my quiet undisturbed serenity rebukes your despairs and vexations and the joys that pass. I go to meet Moses who assuredly was a suicide, and the young Christ who invited death, I who have striven to preach the gospel of beauty
How small a thing is art. A little pain; disappointment, and any man feels a depth — a boundlessness of emotion, inarticulate thoughts no poet has ever succeeded in imaging.
Death does not conquer me, I conquer death, I am the master.
THE PRE-RAPHAELITES AND IMAGINATION IN PAINT
We are apt to confuse imagination with literature, with the psychological interest of a picture, as a quality apart from its technical qualities. Literature, I think, is permissible if it enhances the interest of a picture, but it only increases the difficulties of imagination. A picture must be a perfect consistency of thought and execution, of colour and design and conception; the more dramatic or psychological a picture is the more intense must be the imagination of colour and design to harmonise with the idea. The psychology is helpless without the other elements; the psychology itself is only part of the imagination and perhaps the smallest. Whatever the subject, nature is always our resort, a basis for creation. To feel and interpret nature, to project ourself beyond nature through nature, and yet convince of the veracity of the sensation, is imagination.
The ultimate end of all the arts should be beauty. Poetry and music achieve that end through the intellect and the ear; painting and sculpture through the eye. The former possess advantages which the latter do not; and the latter, vice versa. Painting is stationary while poetry is motion. Through the intellect the emotion is enchained; feeling made articulate transmits its exact state to the reader. Each word adapts itself to the phase of emotion, (I include sensation of the soul) and carries one along from degree to degree. Painting can only give the moment, the visual aspect, and only suggest the spiritual consciousness; not even a mood, but the phase of a mood. By imagination in paint we do not encroach on the domain of the writer; we give what the writer cannot give, with all his advantages, the visible aspect of things, which the writer can only suggest, and give that aspect a poetic interest; and by that a more intensely human interest: for here the body and the soul are one, and beauty the crown thereof.
ON MODERN ART
We are not affected by Art in the same way as life. The spiritual consciousness is stirred to aesthetic emotion. Colour being more imitative is responded to by the senses. Form has a greater interest for the mind. Here nature becomes an abstraction, an essence. Mere representation is unreal, is fragmentary. The bone taken from Adam remains a bone.
To create is to apply pulsating rhythmical principles to the part, a unity, another nature is created.
The renaissance was the revival of learning. Civilization has been tamed by the commercial spirit, a logic without imagination, mechanical, scientific, practical. Impetuous ideals, Art has become too self-conscious.
The sky stagnates, life becomes inert, arid, a perishing tomb for itself. Dust are the stars, dust the sun, the whole world dust. Obscured and effaced, the life force fails and like a pricked balloon subsides. Out of this nothingness, out of this dust, art is born and philosophies.
Life stales and dulls, the mind demands noble excitement, half apprehended surprises, the eternal desire, the beautiful. It is a vain belief that Art and life go hand in hand. Art is as it were another planet, which does indeed reflect the rays of life, but is nevertheless a distinct and separate planet.
Passivity and detachment is a need, even as a mirror to reflect truly must be calm and undimmed. The vivifying organism that is the pulse of a work of art does not come from the ardour of the limbs, or the impulse to mix with men, and do what men do (an external life) but from the imaginative understanding, a necessary consequence of having something genuine to express. We all experience all emotions possible to be experienced. Similar sentiments may dwell in dissimilar conditions, and qualities that appear to be unapprehensible, because their activities are possible only in certain conditions, have their corresponding elements in apparently ?dissimilar situations, though the connection would be difficult to trace.
THE SLADE AND ITS RELATIONS TO THE UNIVERSE
‘The Slade, what is the Slade?’, nine-tenths of our readers will cry. Is it a building or a threshing machine? It is merely an art school. In Gower Street, concealed in a corner of that noble edifice the University, the Slade reposes in promiscuous obscurity. You pass through the gate and take the small path to the left. You pass a building which you take no notice of, and then pause before a stately imposing one, and on proceeding to enter you are intercepted by a buttoned authority and you find you have mistaken the porter’s lodge for the Slade. You retrace your footsteps and hesitate before the insignificant building we passed before. Then you catch glimpses of girls in painting overalls through the glass doors, and are oppressed by an uncomfortable feeling of being watched by numberless eyes from rows and rows of windows. You pluck up courage and look, and you know then that it is the Slade. What is the Slade? You don’t know yet. Well, I can’t find it in my heart to blame you. I know what the Slade is. I have been a student there, and so I ought to know. The first day I came I thought I had wandered into a Seminary, and I spent the whole day in trying to find my way out without being seen, but I only succeeded in getting myself grabbed by a student — a male luckily — the first I had seen, who told me the model was taken ill and they generally had new students to take their place. Afterward I ran across some stray waifs of youthful males descending to the lower regions where the atmosphere distinctly became more masculine.
THE SLADE AND MODERN CULTURE
If we consider the Slade as it stands related to modern culture we will find one fundamental principle exemplified — one guiding law, one fact that is of paramount interest in our endeavour. We find that the law of change only proves the futility of change, that it is a circle revolving round the rock of fixity.
* * *
The Slade marks an era in the history of Art. Constable, the French Impressionists, had given flashes to the world of an attempt to wrest her secret from her; of the endeavour to show to the world the beauty that lies around us if our souls will only see; with more or less adequate power and concentration of vision. Whistler, exquisite, dainty and superficial, dandied through the slushy sentimentalism that had saturated English art, and taught Art not to despise the moods of nature; that a pigsty in twilight was a poem, and even a church could be hallowed — by a fog.
But these, though they were forces, were not as one might say an organized force, they were flashes; the final culmination, the concentration of the blaze is the Slade.
* * *
This is the paradox of the Slade: to be ourselves we must not forget others — but forget ourselves. We must not look at nature with the self-conscious, mannered eye of a stylist, whose vision is limited by h
is own personal outlook, but assimilate the multifarious and widened vision of masters to widen our outlook to the natural, to attain to a completeness of vision which simply means a total sinking of all conscious personality, a complete absorption and forgetfulness in nature, to bring out one’s personality.
AN AGE THAT BELIEVES IN BLAKE AND TOLERATES TENNYSON
An age that believes in Blake and tolerates Tennyson, that has forgotten Pope and worships Shelley, to whom Keats is simply sensuous and Shakespeare not subtle or intense enough — this is our age of poetry. Rossetti I think is the keynote of the demand, and in the ‘Monochord’ and ‘The Song of the Bower’ — in the first all poignancy — a richness and variety, a purity of imagination — a truth, far beyond wit, or thought. There are poets who delight in the morbid, for whom life always is arrayed in crepe; whose very vigour and energy find its outlet in a perverse and insistent plucking at the wings of death. The poet is so not because he is weak but because he is perverse. His life is a paradox — he does not live, if what other men do is life. This poet will make a song out of sorrow and find in a tear a jewel of perpetual delight. Love is his theme, life is the background, and the beauty of woman stands to him as the manifestation of the beauty of spiritual nature and all outer aspects of the workings of nature.
HIDDEN IN AIR, IN NATURE, ARE UNEXPLORED POWERS
Hidden in air, in nature, are unexplored powers which the earlier masters had no hint of. We are immeasurably in advance of them in range and scope of subject. The spirit of inquiry wrestled with superstition; Luther brought to bear upon the moral world what Darwin has upon the physical world. Marlowe foreshadows Nietzsche. Tamburlaine, the towering colossus, symbolises the subjection of matter to will — the huge blind forces of nature shrink terrorised before this indomitable energy of purpose, clay for some colossal plastic shaping.
Complete Works of Isaac Rosenberg Page 31