Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture

THE quarrel of some ten years ago between realism and idealism is by no means over: the terminology has changed, the field has widened, but the casus belli is really the same. Once it was the fight of realists against impressionists, and the field was the art of painting. Now the shibboleths vary so rapidly that we are confused, hardly learning one before another takes its place. Meanwhile the battlefield has broadened, until it embraces all manifestations of art, including therein matters that once seemed definitely placed in quite other categories.

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 picture 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, idealists,— 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, 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.

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. It 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;¹ 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 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 unbarassed 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 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 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 undivided 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, suggestions.

“ 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, 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 ; . . . there can be no absolute view of 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, 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,² 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 of objects; the other which arranges the 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.”

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 himself, and now and then we come upon a sentence that strikes a clean, clear note : "All those works of art that we dwell upon with ever renewed pleasure attract us by the delicacy, the tenderness, or the force of those emotions which the artist imaginatively felt when he was producing them ; and it is one of the most wonderful yet undeniable powers of painting, and of all the graphic arts, that the emotions of the artist are communicated to all spectators who have naturally a sensitiveness like his own.” And again : “ The progress of a landscape painter appears to be through a kind of materialism to a visionary idealism by which he attains in its full perfection the artistic estimate of things. Materialism appears to be necessary as a stage, but only as a stage.”

A vigorous statement like this does much to make one forget the unfortunate methods so evident in the bulk of the volume, and what is left of unpleasant impressions almost disappears for the moment, as we close the book on this last sentence, which has in it a truth that applies to more varieties of art than Mr. Hamerton allows: “ "There may be a color-music without meaning, invented by the imagination, exactly as there is a sound-music without meaning, or, at least, of which the meaning could not possibly be expressed in any other language than its own. Therefore, when we come to this kind of imagination, in which substance is either banished altogether or reduced to a minimum, whilst the delicacies of color are retained, the only intelligent way of considering it is to think of it as an art existing on its own basis, which is almost, though not quite, independent of nature.”

It is always agreeable to pass from the Study of the theory of art to its practice at the hands of a great master, and the season brings us a distinct contribution to this literature.³ Correggio has had many biographers and more interpreters, but among them all, from Tiraboschi to Morelli, there is not one whose services to English readers have been what those of Dr. Ricci promise to be in his new book on the painter. He starts with the assumption that has governed all his predecessors, that Correggio belongs among the major artistic figures of his time ; and this takes for granted much the same attitude of enthusiasm which has been demanded with strenuous persistence by the greater number of critics rhapsodizing over the epicurean qualities in the master’s art. But Dr. Ricci protests in his preface that he has “ endeavored to avoid the pitfalls of fetichism,” and he adds that “ if the more fanatical worshipers of Correggio find us lacking in enthusiasm, and his detractors blame us for our leniency, we must content ourselves with the knowledge of having sought the golden mean.” With some trifling reservations, we may say that Dr. Ricci has found it. And the matter is one of no small significance when the character of Correggio is considered. More than most artists of the Renaissance he needs to be weighed with severe impartiality. He belongs to the line of lyric painters which began with Botticelli in the pure dawn of Italian art ; gave Antonio Allegri to the town of Correggio and the school of Ferrara some years later, through a seemingly unrelated phase of development; and then, providing Venice with a representative in Giorgione, took a great leap across the decadence of the peninsula to reappear in the persons of Watteau and Lancret in France. Every one of the men we have named has suffered at the hands of his friends, because the lyrical inspiration in his work has wakened poetic thoughts in their minds and incited them to rhetorical deliverances. Correggio offers an engaging theme for panegyric and fantastic surmise, since he cultivated an art all daintiness and fragile charm in the midst of a movement which was hastening on to the brilliant but specious triumphs of materialistic feeling. Dr. Ricci makes a dispassionate biographer, and gives us the material for a clear and consistent appraisal of his master.

The sub-title to this volume indicates the good judgment and sympathy with which our author has extended his scope. He aims to reconstruct the environment of Correggio, and thus to show more eloquently the sources and development of the latter’s art. If he fails to accomplish his purpose altogether, it is because he lacks imagination. The picture he draws of the Emilian society in which the painter was brought up is more erudite than flexible and dramatic. To identify Correggio with a living epoch, to show his close connection with the fastidious civilization in which the lords of Correggio, the princes of Mantua and Parma, stand conspicuous and potent, it is necessary to handle the history of those men and cities with warmth of feeling and animation of style. Yet Dr. Ricci might justly claim that his scholarship has done all that may be expected of scholarship ; and if we regret his paucity of imagination, we may also remember with comfort that the quality has run away with most of his forerunners. None of those forerunners has thrown so much light as Dr. Ricci throws, for all his dryness, on the surroundings of Correggio. He destroys the old conception of the painter, as a man detached by circumstance and taste from the social expansion of his time, and restores him to the circle of wealthy and cultured contemporaries with whose encouragement alone could the refinement of his nature and the distinction of his art have been nurtured and made strong. This volume presents a man of reserved and quiet temperament, whose placidity has often been mistaken for the resignation of an obscure and even neglected worker, but of whom his fellow-townsmen had a genuine appreciation, and in whom the rich nobles of the day found one of their most precious aids. Let the reader who remembers Correggio as something of a rustic, or a straggler, or a disappointment to himself and his friends, read in Dr. Ricci’s book of the way in which Veronica Gambara wrote of him when corresponding with Isabella d’Este at Mantua. “ Our Antonio,” she calls him, and Dr. Ricci has no difficulty in showing that the affectionate phrase sprang from Correggio’s intimate acquaintance with the little court of his city, and with many of its patrician ramifications beyond the walls. When he went to Mantua, early in his career, it was under the protection of the princes of Correggio ; and later on, his labors for the Abbess Giovanna Piacenza in the convent of San Paolo at Parma, and for the authorities of the Duomo and of the church of San Giovanni Evangelista in the same city, were all undertaken with the encouragement of Cavaliere Scipione, Donna Giovanna’s high-born kinsman.

We should be glad if it were possible to transfer to these pages some of Dr. Ricci’s interesting details, assembled in his endeavor to revive the atmosphere of his painter as a participant in Renaissance life. But we must pass from the indication of what this biographer has done to clarify understanding of Correggio the man to what he has to offer in elucidation of Correggio the artist. Here he is in the main moderate and sagacious. There is only one point in his analysis which provokes emphatic dissent. He gives a discreet account of the two great domes in Parma, preserving his critical equilibrium in the presence of their sublimity and their impassioned brilliancy of design. His closing estimate of the stupendous fresco in the cathedral at Parma is a perfect illustration of the manner in which Correggio should be considered. It reveals understanding and sobriety, sympathy and justice, enthusiasm and good sound sense. Dr. Ricci recognizes that, extraordinary as the cathedral dome may be, the work exceeds the boundaries of mural decoration, and becomes defective in its organic relations. He is a felicitous critic, too, of the beautiful ceiling in the convent of San Paolo. But something he says with reference to this work brings up a familiar and troublesome quantity in the literature of Correggio. He repeats with approval Meyer’s observation that “ the winged genii who hold up the inscription in the Camera degli Sposi ” (Mantegna’s famous room in Mantua) “ are the true precursors of Correggio’s putti ; ” that is, the putti of the Camera di San Paolo. Dr. Ricci reminds us in a footnote that Eastlake, Burton, Paul Mantz, and others have made the same point in discussing the Mantuan and Parmesan decorations. This does not in the least fortify the hypothesis of a Mantegnesque influence which Dr. Ricci insists upon, presenting various kinds of evidence to prove his argument.

No critic who has written upon Correggio fails to have something to say about the hitter’s indebtedness to Mantegna, and Dr. Ricci follows the rest. He wants to extend the sphere of Mantegna’s influence upon Correggio; and though he wisely rejects the old notion that the two were ever in the relation of master and pupil, he tries to make out a case for his painter’s having come in contact with works by the earlier master, and for his having been seriously affected through the experience. Some slight influence we may grant. In his earlier works Correggio occasionally repeated some of the motives of Mantegna. But the elements on which Dr. Ricci would prolong this situation into Correggio’s maturer years, referring the garlanded decoration of the Camera di San Paolo to an acquaintance with the Camera degli Sposi and the well-known Madonna della Vittoria in the Louvre, seem to us to be of superficial character, and to have been held in common by the masters of the Renaissance. They have little weight, they are of no permanent significance, when placed in the balance with the essentials of Correggio’s art, — his lyrical strain, his imaginative vivacity, his elegance, his suavity of style, his nobility, his passion for a tender, vaporous, and above all things poetic scheme of form and color. He is in every one of these qualities — qualities which determine the final value of his genius—a positive antithesis to the intellectual and somewhat northern and astringent Mantegna, a man of peculiar rigidity in the most distinctive phases of his art. Give due force to the individuality of Correggio, and the whole hypothesis of a Mantegnesque influence fades away from the bold assertions of his critics into a brief and unimportant passage in the interpretation of his art. Dr. Ricci keeps it in the foreground. It has been there too long, and we regret that the present volume is likely to perpetuate a false impression. In all other details Dr. Ricci commands the respect, the admiration, and the gratitude of students. He gives them, on the whole, the most tangible and reasonable image of Correggio that exists among books on Italian art. Thanks to the generosity of the publishers, who have gathered together in excellent plates a veritable museum of the master’s paintings and studies, it will be possible for the reader to base upon this work a just and serviceable conception of the painter.

In the long history of art criticism there is perhaps no name which arouses a more genuine or more loving admiration than that of Mrs. Anna Jameson. Her work has that peculiar sympathetic quality which appeals at once to the popular imagination. However learned she may be, she is never dry ; however poetic, she is never beyond the average comprehension ; and withal she knows so well just what to say and how to say it that she has won a lasting place in the hearts of the people.

The scope of her work in its original plan was of great magnitude and importance. Her purpose was to furnish an interpretative guide to the entire field of religious art (painting and sculpture), not only covering the several centuries of the “old masters,” but coming down to her own times, and ranging over the art of Italy, Germany, France, Belgium, and Spain. The subjects treated were to include the complete cycle of Scripture themes, both Old and New Testaments, and also those legends which grew into greatest prominence in the mediæval Church, and which constituted so large an element in ecclesiastical and monastic art. This magnificent scheme the writer did not live to carry to full execution, but the portion which she completed is a splendid monument to her industry and enthusiasm. This consists of two volumes on the saints and martyrs, known under the general title of Sacred and Legendary Art, one on the Legends of the Monastic Orders, and one on the Legends of the Madonna. Taken with her previous work on the Early Italian Painters, there are in all five volumes as the result of her art studies.⁴

Mrs. Jameson’s own estimate of her ability was a very just one, and the great task to which she set herself was one for which she was admirably adapted. She was unusually gifted with powers of description ; she could tell a story delightfully, had a keen sense of beauty and a great reverence for sacred things. As a critic, her point of view is purely literary; her chief aim is to explain the incident which forms the art subject. To her the first, question to ask in the presence of a masterpiece was, What is it all about ? A picture, like a book, has a story to tell, and the story itself was, in her opinion, a more important matter than the authorship or the technical skill employed in its narration. For discussions of technique, indeed, she had but little taste. At the time of her writing, though no strictly scientific work had been done in this field, there was a growing interest in such su bjects which prepared the way for later writers. The new movement, far from enlisting her sympathy, only made her more zealous in her chosen task, determined that an intelligent understanding of the significance of the great masterpieces should keep pace with the increasing knowledge of their artistic qualities. Perhaps — who can tell ? — she looked forward to the day of a still more profound mode of criticism, to which her own should lead up, — a criticism of the philosophic principles which are the fundamental motif of art. Be that as it may, her work lies just between the purely scientific method on the one side and the purely philosophical on the other, and forms a connecting link between the two. So far as her resources permitted she availed herself of the results of her contemporary technical critics, and, on the other hand, so far as in her lay she revealed occasional glimpses of the higher criticism towards which her own tended. But in the main she held consistently to the middle course, and in this department her work is such as we can never afford to dispense with. We must keep our Crowe and Cavalcaselle and our Morelli as books to be used for occasional reference ; Symonds and Pater take a higher place of honor as treasures for rare hours of quiet reflection ; Mrs. Jameson must stand between them, always at hand, the writer dearer than all others for constant and familiar companionship.

The new edition before us merits attention for the exceeding care which the editor plainly has taken in bringing Mrs. Jameson’s work to the test of the special criticism expended since her time on the origin of the several pictures discussed by her, and of the latest authorities respecting their present position. Mrs. Jameson was not careless, but the critical apparatus in her day was meagre compared with what is now at our service, and no one would have thanked Miss Hurll more warmly for the laborious task she has performed with such scrupulous fidelity than Mrs. Jameson herself. The scheme of illustration is fresh and sensible.

From biography and critical study we pass to the interesting reproductions of great art which we have learned to look for at the hand of Mr. Cole. Criticism of his new book ⁵ hesitates between spending itself upon the charm of the Dutch and Flemish masters and following the more technical considerations provoked by the engraver’s art. Many students of the volume will thank him for just the glow and friendly human feeling of Dutch painting. These things exist in Mr. Cole’s blocks with astonishing vitality. Confined to an apparently inflexible chord of black and gray tones, he yet achieves the golden beauty of his originals. With this alone we might be content. But the believer in American wood-engraving must recognize in this volume, first of all, a remarkable illustration of the range and power of his favorite form of reproductive art. Analysis of the illustrations pauses delighted over the revelation they provide of what a spacious field one American graver, at least, can cover. Mr. Cole turns from the subtlety of the Italian masters to the direct, substantial conventions of the Low Countries. His hand accommodates itself to the change without yielding up a fibre of its skill, and, after having more than pleased his public with exquisitely intuitive interpretations of the most spiritualized paintings in the world, he runs, with equal authority, equal persuasiveness, up and down the whole gamut of Dutch and Flemish art, — an art humanized beyond the measure of any other in the very strictest sense of the term. Dutch painting is painting permeated by what might be called the finer instincts of the flesh. Flemish art is in the same case. The pathos of Rembrandt, the polish of Van Dyck, does not lift either master into the region of purely imaginative and idealistic things. Both men stand upon the solid earth, and both express themselves through quite ponderable elements of art. The technique of an Italian, like the elder Lippi, for example, like Fra Angelico, or like Benozzo Gozzoli, is intertwined, despite its often naïve precision and transparency, with refinements of feeling, of mind and spirit, which make it tremulous with beauty. The Dutch or Flemish technique is traceable through no such labyrinthine conditions. It is direct, vigorous, simple, and for the engraver even more than for the dilettante of artistic emotions its secrets lie upon the surface.

Mr. Cole is familiar with both kinds of technique, and reproduces both with a hand so searching and so sure that his equivalent on so small a scale has a force immeasurably wider than the limits of his block. Texture, relief, movement, the three great results which were secured over and above the sensuous charm of color by the impetuous and authoritative brushes of the great Dutch and Flemish masters, Mr. Cole transfers to his pages through the manipulation of his instrument. Something of the solidity and elasticity of creative art is carried into his engravings. In the open brush-work of The Jolly Man, by Frans Hals, as Mr. Cole gives it after the original at Amsterdam, there is the variety of color, there is the mobility of surface, which may be found in the actual painting. The printed block catches the light with a measure of that crispness and even plastic reality which will be recalled by those who have studied the canvas in the Rijks Museum. It is high praise to give to a small reproduction in black and white. We do not forget how Mr. Cole has been charged (especially by English critics) with an absence of linear character, with a failure to realize the true mission of engraving. We maintain, nevertheless, the truth of our main contention : that, however his work may differ from the work of the great masters of the past, Mr. Cole is incontestably a master of the present, — an engraver who has developed the capabilities of the American school to their furthest limit, and proved that, whether linear or not, the school is unassailable in its reproductive branch.

It may be admitted that an engraving made for its own sake might be based on a simpler scheme than appears in Mr. Cole’s block after Ruysdael’s Thicket, in the Louvre, or in his translation of the fine Hobbema in the National Gallery ; but once the engraver has set out to render the style and loveliness of either of these two works, it is plain that Mr. Cole’s painter-like system meets the logic of the situation. To point out a painter’s merits in an engraver’s work may seem an ambiguous compliment, but it is really a high tribute when the work happens to be reproductive. Thus Mr. Cole may seem far away from the tradition of Albrecht Dürer, yet he loses nothing in projecting himself, his very technical habit, into the painter whom he is engraving. He really inspires the profoundest admiration for his sensitiveness and skill. He has attacked a number of the most difficult originals: Rembrandt’s Philosopher in Meditation ; the central figure from the great Supper at Emmaus, in the Louvre ; Potter’s extraordinary Bull, at the Hague ; and the enchanting Portrait of a Lady by Ver Meer, in the National Gallery, which stands among the few rare paintings commemorative of a thoroughly purified strain in the art of Holland. In all this work Mr. Cole has preserved the calm receptivity of temper which makes him a mirror for his painter’s conception, and the protean mastery which assures in each one of his blocks an exact correspondence between its details of execution and those of the canvas reproduced. Wood-engraving remains a distinctly noble art as he employs it.

The volume to which we refer is one of pure reproduction, but its pages have the value of an original performance. The text, historical, descriptive, and critical, is well written and interesting. Mr. Cole and Mr. Van Dyke are in harmony over their theme, and what they have to say, each in his attractive style, will make the book more useful to the student. The main purpose of the publication. however, is to give circulation to Mr. Cole’s engravings, and it is the aim of our review to point out in those productions. more particularly, the promise of a wide and enduring fame.

Furtwängler’s Masterpieces of Greek Sculpture ⁶ may be described as a book which is epoch - breaking rather than epoch-making, inasmuch as a considerable amount of the author’s energy is devoted to rudely shattering and scattering to the winds theories which have become so generally accepted that we have grown to look upon them as among the established facts of archæology. To a certain extent it is well that, this should be done, for our knowledge of the history and development of Greek art, and especially of the works which are to be ascribed to certain masters, is still largely empirical ; and it is unquestionably for the benefit of the study that those in authority should be emphatically reminded of this fact once in a while, that they may not continue building too far upon foundations which are flimsy.

Indeed, it would be a great boon to the student of archæology if a competent critic were to take up some recognized history of Greek art — this one of Furtwängler’s would be an excellent subject for the task — and sift out theory from fact, telling us exactly what is positively known regarding each topic discussed, and drawing the line sharply between that and conjecture, leaving the matter there. Such a book would not only be a valuable compendium, but it would serve as an excellent starting-point for further investigations, fact and theory being so confused at present that the student has to gain a considerable advance in his study before he knows one from the other; that is, before he has learned to distinguish the established facts from assumptions which have become rooted for want of contradiction. But Furtwängler does not leave the matter there. If he pulls down old theories, it is only to set up substitutes of his own in their places ; and his arguments are constructed with such vigorous and confident assertion that the inexpert might well be unsuspicious of the fallacies among them. For this reason. and because of the character of the material of which it is composed, the book is not adapted to the "general reader,” or to the beginner in the study of Greek art. In this respect it is radically different from either Mrs. Mitchell’s History of Ancient Sculpture or Collignon’s more recent Histoire, the second half of which we are awaiting with interest. On the contrary, it is an expansion of the typical German monograph into a quarto volume of 471 pages, all occupied with the development of one argument, which begins in the first lines, and is continued without a momentary relaxation to the end. For the intelligent appreciation or criticism of this argument one must have fresh in memory practically all that has been written about Greek art for an entire generation, and the reasoning is so close that in more than one portion of the book the present writer has found it impossible to follow more than seven or eight pages at a time. No holiday book of “ appreciations ” this !

We do not propose to discuss the book or its argument in detail, our purpose being only to show that it is not, as its title might lead one to suppose, a description of the move important works of Greek sculpture which the layman could profit by or enjoy. However, if we stopped here, we should be doing scant justice to the combined brilliancy and erudition of the author. Whether we accept all his conclusions or not, Furtwängler is unquestionably one of the most brilliant archæologists of this century. His learning and his industry are alike phenomenal. In the encyclopædic character of his knowledge of everything pertaining in the remotest degree to Greek sculpture he has no peer. To these qualities he adds imagination, which, when properly restrained, is, next to knowledge, the scholar’s happiest gift, but it is also the most dangerous. His power of argument is such that if we admit the premises, the rest must follow as a matter of course ; and if the rest did always follow, the science of classical archæology would have to return to the beginning and start life again upon a new basis. This we imagine its high priests are not at present prepared to do. Still, if they are grateful to him for nothing else, they should be for the opportunity he has given them to show the strength of their pet theories, almost every one of them having been put upon the defensive at one point or another. And however they may differ from him as to the theories which he has attacked or defended, they cannot ignore him. His case has been stated with such marked ability that no one can hereafter express an opinion on any of the topics he discusses without first giving heed to what Furtwängler has said about it; and the Masterpieces will form a necessary part of every archæologist’s equipment. For this reason it is comforting to know that the English edition is superior to the German, Miss Sellers’s able translation having been revised by the author since the original was published, and having thus had the benefit of such corrections and additions as he would have made in a new edition of his own. The illustrations, also, are not only more numerous, but much better in quality, especially the full-page plates, which are remarkably good.

In one of his lectures Mr. La Farge says, in speaking of the emotional power of color and its absence from artists nowadays : “ But why is it so extremely rare among architects, or among the artists of decoration, to whom especially these principles, even if only felt in the blindest way, have given, at certain times, a power of affecting the mind, which, with the scale of their means, is tremendous when compared with the smaller effects that the weaker and smaller though more intellectual methods of painting and sculpture can merely hit at ? In the past the architect has given a golden glow to the interior, to lift you up into New Jerusalem ; has made his walls sombre with black marble; has grayed them with stone that was neutral; has made his building clear-minded, if one may so say. And what shall we say of the whiter thing, which is intellectual when it emphasizes fine thought, commonplace and courteous when it is used for average expression ? Now why do we use all these things haphazard to-day ? One man likes this, another that, as if he were some little lady anxious about being in the fashion, and willing to go even against her complexion, provided she do nothing that others do not do. And at length architecture, the means of largest importance that we can use, takes on a dress of triviality ; like the Madonnas of southern countries, dressed in paper and satin, with real, costly diamonds, perhaps. But that is relatively excusable.”

The question suggested leads not unnaturally to consideration of another book recently issued, A Cyclopædia of Works of Architecture in Italy, Greece, and the Levant.⁷ As a cyclopædia, it has, of course, no bearing on the theory of architecture, nor does it deal with architectural criticism. It is a book of reference for students, and viewed in this light it is open to no criticism. The cities and towns of Italy, Greece, and the Levant are arranged alphabetically, and under every heading is a short historical and descriptive account of the important buildings in each locality. For the student the book is invaluable, for it brings together in concise form facts that hitherto could be found only by reference to hundreds of sources. In the fact that the work includes all the small and unknown towns, — in case they possess buildings of architectural interest, — as well as Venice, Rome, and Athens, lies much of its value, for it has always been very difficult to discover data relating to such localities without immense trouble. The book at once takes its place as a standard.

Its publication at this time is significant. Ever since the movement towards the restoration of art began, half a century ago, interest has grown rapidly in its most monumental and enduring form, architecture. The practical result is not conspicuous, for it can hardly be said that, taken as a whole, the development of architecture in America, or Germany, or France shows an appreciable advance; possibly, rather a retrogression. But the interest exists, and, with the growth of something approaching favorable conditions, must surely result in vital amendment.

In one way, however, this new interest has had a good effect, namely, in the recognition of the fact that architecture is a pretty accurate exponent of the real life and times that gave it birth, — more accurate sometimes than written history. So, in looking over this Cyclopædia, one is filled with an ever-increasing wonder at the mavelous periods of civilization that have left these monuments of their own greatness. Asia Minor ceases to be only the desolated field of murder and outrage and barbarism, and becomes the theatre of a marvelous civilization that stretched from Assos to Jerusalem, from Trebizond to Rhodes ; European Turkey, with all its anomalous barbarism, fades before the memory of the golden empire of Byzantium ; and even Italy ceases to be the pitiful heir to an unbearable and crushing weight of wonder and glory.

All this is of course in the past. Italy, Greece, the Levant, offer nothing built during the last three centuries worthy to stand for a moment beside the humblest classical or mediæval or early renaissance structure illustrated in this book. And the same is true of Germany, France, England, America. For three hundred years we have striven to make immortal history, but if we have succeeded we have left no architectural evidence thereof.

Now and then work is done which is hailed as fine and enduring. Why ? Simply because it is a more than usually delicate and accurate copy of ancient work, not because it is vital with life and feeling, —the life and feeling of the people who built it, who watched it grow. A church is called good now when it is so well copied that it might deceive even a scholarly critic into thinking it the work of the fourteenth or fifteenth century ; a library or other public building, when it might have been almost removed bodily from Rome. In other words, we are content to copy, recognizing our inability to express original contemporary ideas, emotions ; doubtful sometimes if there are any such that demand expression.

Fortunately, nine tenths of the work is perishable ; but were it to last, were some future generation to study its nature, to find therein the secret of the life and times that saw its creation, what would be the verdict? Not one that we could regard with pride or pleasant anticipation.

It is when confronting such a memorial of past glory as this Cyclopædia that one feels most keenly the hopeless inadequacy of contemporary work. Something lay behind this manifestation of power that is our admiration and shame to-day,—something that we no longer possess. Is it not the very thing the loss of which has made possible modern “ realism ” in art, as well as kindred heresies in society and religion and civil affairs? There is cause to think so, certainly ; and if this is true, if we are ever to see the time when the nature of art is undoubted, and when a sane, vital, beautiful system of life makes inevitable an art that expresses all these things, not as the possession of a few “artists,” but as the heritage of every man, we must gain the sense of proportion lost long ago ; cease worshiping unessential, scoffing at essentials ; realize that the spiritual life is as real as the physical, and that its channels of reception and expression — the emotions — are every whit as honorable as those of physical life.