The Note-Books of Samuel Butler Part 25

Certainly as regards colour, I never remember to have seen a piece of one colour without finding a bit of a very similar colour not far off, but having no connection with it. This holds good in such an extraordinary way that if it happens to fail the matter should be pa.s.sed over in silence.

Colour

The expression "seeing colour" used to puzzle me. I was aware that some painters made their pictures more pleasing in colour than others and more like the colour of the actual thing as a whole, still there were any number of bits of brilliant colour in their work which for the life of me I could not see in nature. I used to hear people say of a man who got pleasing and natural colour, "Does he not see colour well?" and I used to say he did, but, as far as I was concerned, it would have been more true to say that he put down colour which he did not see well, or at any rate that he put down colour which I could not see myself.

In course of time I got to understand that seeing colour does not mean inventing colour, or exaggerating it, but being on the look out for it, thus seeing it where another will not see it, and giving it the preference as among things to be preserved and rendered amid the wholesale slaughter of innocents which is inevitable in any painting.

Painting is only possible as a quasi-hieroglyphic epitomising of nature; this means that the half goes for the whole, whereon the question arises which half is to be taken and which made to go? The colourist will insist by preference on the coloured half, the man who has no liking for colour, however much else he may sacrifice, will not be careful to preserve this and, as a natural consequence, he will not preserve it.

Good, that is to say, pleasing, beautiful, or even pretty colour cannot be got by putting patches of pleasing, beautiful or pretty colour upon one's canvas and, which is a harder matter, leaving them when they have been put. It is said of money that it is more easily made than kept and this is true of many things, such as friends.h.i.+p; and even life itself is more easily got than kept. The same holds good of colour. It is also true that, as with money, more is made by saving than in any other way, and the surest way to lose colour is to play with it inconsiderately, not knowing how to leave well alone. A touch of pleasing colour should on no account be stirred without consideration.

That we can see in a natural object more colour than strikes us at a glance, if we look for it attentively, will not be denied by any who have tried to look for it. Thus, take a dull, dead, level, grimy old London wall: at a first glance we can see no colour in it, nothing but a more or less purplish ma.s.s, got, perhaps as nearly as in any other way, by a tint mixed with black, Indian red and white. If, however, we look for colour in this, we shall find here and there a broken brick with a small surface of brilliant crimson, hard by there will be another with a warm orange hue perceivable through the grime by one who is on the look out for it, but by no one else. Then there may be bits of old advertis.e.m.e.nt of which here and there a gaily coloured fragment may remain, or a rusty iron hook or a bit of bright green moss; few indeed are the old walls, even in the grimiest parts of London, on which no redeeming bits of colour can be found by those who are practised in looking for them. To like colour, to wish to find it, and thus to have got naturally into a habit of looking for it, this alone will enable a man to see colour and to make a note of it when he has seen it, and this alone will lead him towards a pleasing and natural scheme of colour in his work.

Good colour can never be got by putting down colour which is not seen; at any rate only a master who has long served accuracy can venture on occasional inaccuracy--telling a lie, knowing it to be a lie, and as, se non vera, ben trovata. The grown man in his art may do this, and indeed is not a man at all unless he knows how to do it daily and hourly without departure from the truth even in his boldest lie; but the child in art must stick to what he sees. If he looks harder he will see more, and may put more, but till he sees it without being in any doubt about it, he must not put it. There is no such sure way of corrupting one's colour sense as the habitual practice of putting down colour which one does not see; this and the neglecting to look for it are equal faults. The first error leads to melodramatic vulgarity, the other to torpid dullness, and it is hard to say which is worse.

It may be said that the preservation of all the little episodes of colour which can be discovered in an object whose general effect is dingy and the suppression of nothing but the uninteresting colourless details amount to what is really a forcing and exaggeration of nature, differing but little from downright fraud, so far as its effect goes, since it gives an undue preference to the colour side of the matter. In equity, if the exigencies of the convention under which we are working require a sacrifice of a hundred details, the majority of which are uncoloured, while in the minority colour can be found if looked for, the sacrifice should be made pro rata from coloured and uncoloured alike. If the facts of nature are a hundred, of which ninety are dull in colour and ten interesting, and the painter can only give ten, he must not give the ten interesting bits of colour and neglect the ninety soberly coloured details. Strictly, he should sacrifice eighty-one sober details and nine coloured ones; he will thus at any rate preserve the balance and relation which obtain in nature between coloured and uncoloured.

This, no doubt, is what he ought to do if he leaves the creative, poetic and more properly artistic aspect of his own function out of the question; if he is making himself a mere transcriber, holding the mirror up to nature with such entire forgetfulness of self as to be rather looking-gla.s.s than man, this is what he must do. But the moment he approaches nature in this spirit he ceases to be an artist, and the better he succeeds as painter of something that might pa.s.s for a coloured photograph, the more inevitably must he fail to satisfy, or indeed to appeal to us at all as poet--as one whose sympathies with nature extend beyond her superficial aspect, or as one who is so much at home with her as to be able readily to dissociate the permanent and essential from the accidental which may be here to-day and gone to-morrow. If he is to come before us as an artist, he must do so as a poet or creator of that which is not, as well as a mirror of that which is. True, experience in all kinds of poetical work shows that the less a man creates the better, that the more, in fact, he makes, the less is he of a maker; but experience also shows that the course of true nature, like that of true love, never does run smooth, and that occasional, judicious, slight departures from the actual facts, by one who knows the value of a lie too well to waste it, bring nature more vividly and admirably before us than any amount of adherence to the letter of strict accuracy. It is the old story, the letter killeth but the spirit giveth life.

With colour, then, he who does not look for it will begin by not seeing it unless it is so obtrusive that there is no escaping it; he will therefore, in his rendering of the hundred facts of nature above referred to, not see the ten coloured bits at all, supposing them to be, even at their brightest, somewhat sober, and his work will be colourless or disagreeable in colour. The faithful copyist, who is still a mere copyist, will give nine details of dull uninteresting colour and one of interesting. The artist or poet will find some reason for slightly emphasising the coloured details and will scatter here and there a few slight, hardly perceptible, allusions to more coloured details than come within the letter of his bond, but will be careful not to overdo it. The vulgar sensational painter will force in his colour everywhere, and of all colourists he must be p.r.o.nounced the worst.

Briefly then, to see colour is simply to have got into a habit of not overlooking the patches of colour which are seldom far to seek or hard to see by those who look for them. It is not the making one's self believe that one sees all manner of colours which are not there, it is only the getting oneself into a mental habit of looking out for episodes of colour, and of giving them a somewhat undue preference in the struggle for rendering, wherever anything like a reasonable pretext can be found for doing so. For if a picture is to be pleasing in colour, pleasing colours must be put upon the canvas, and reasons have got to be found for putting them there. [1886.]

P.S.--The foregoing note wants a great deal of reconsideration for which I cannot find time just now. Jan. 31, 1898.

Words and Colour

A man cannot be a great colourist unless he is a great deal more. A great colourist is no better than a great wordist unless the colour is well applied to a subject which at any rate is not repellent.

Amateurs and Professionals

There is no excuse for amateur work being bad. Amateurs often excuse their shortcomings on the ground that they are not professionals, the professional could plead with greater justice that he is not an amateur. The professional has not, he might well say, the leisure and freedom from money anxieties which will let him devote himself to his art in singleness of heart, telling of things as he sees them without fear of what man shall say unto him; he must think not of what appears to him right and loveable but of what his patrons will think and of what the critics will tell his patrons to say they think; he has got to square everyone all round and will a.s.suredly fail to make his way unless he does this; if, then, he betrays his trust he does so under temptation. Whereas the amateur who works with no higher aim than that of immediate recognition betrays it from the vanity and wantonness of his spirit. The one is naughty because he is needy, the other from natural depravity. Besides, the amateur can keep his work to himself, whereas the professional man must exhibit or starve.

The question is what is the amateur an amateur of? What is he really in love with? Is he in love with other people, thinking he sees something which he would like to show them, which he feels sure they would enjoy if they could only see it as he does, which he is therefore trying as best he can to put before the few nice people whom he knows? If this is his position he can do no wrong, the spirit in which he works will ensure that his defects will be only as bad spelling or bad grammar in some pretty saying of a child. If, on the other hand, he is playing for social success and to get a reputation for being clever, then no matter how dexterous his work may be, it is but another mode of the speaking with the tongues of men and angels without charity; it is as sounding bra.s.s or a tinkling cymbal, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.

The Ansidei Raffaelle

This picture is inspired by no deeper feeling than a determination to adhere to the conventions of the time. These conventions ensure an effect of more or less devotional character, and this, coupled with our reverence for the name of Raffaelle, the sentiments arising from antiquity and foreignness, and the inability of most people to judge of the work on technical grounds, because they can neither paint nor draw, prevents us from seeing what a mere business picture it is and how poor the painting is throughout. A master in any art should be first man, then poet, then craftsman; this picture must have been painted by one who was first worldling, then religious-property- manufacturer, then painter with brains not more than average and no heart.

The Madonna's head has indeed a certain prettiness of a not very uncommon kind; the paint has been sweetened with a soft brush and licked smooth till all texture as of flesh is gone and the head is wooden and tight; I can see no expression in it; the hand upon the open book is as badly drawn as the hand of S. Catharine (also by Raffaelle) in our gallery, or even worse; so is the part of the other hand which can be seen; they are better drawn than the hands in the Ecce h.o.m.o of Correggio in our gallery, for the fingers appear to have the right number of joints, which none of those in the Correggio have, but this is as much as can be said.

The dress is poorly painted, the gold thread work being of the cheapest, commonest kind, both as regards pattern and the quant.i.ty allowed; especially note the meagre allowance and poor pattern of the embroidery on the virgin's bosom; it is done as by one who knew she ought to have, and must have, a little gold work, but was determined she should have no more than he could help. This is so wherever there is gold thread work in the picture. It is so on S. Nicholas's cloak where a larger s.p.a.ce is covered, but the pattern is dull and the smallest quant.i.ty of gold is made to go the longest way. The gold cording which binds this is more particularly badly done.

Compare the embroidery and gold thread work in "The Virgin adoring the Infant Christ," ascribed to Andrea Verrocchio, No. 296, Room V; "The Annunciation" by Carlo Crivelli, No. 739, Room VIII; in "The Angel Raphael accompanies Tobias on his Journey into Media"

attributed to Botticini, No. 781, Room V; in "Portrait of a Lady,"

school of Pollaiuolo, No. 585, Room V; in "A Canon of the Church with his Patron Saints" by Gheeraert David, No. 1045, Room XI; or indeed the general run of the gold embroidery of the period as shown in our gallery. {147}

So with the jewels; there are examples of jewels in most of the pictures named above, none of them, perhaps, very first-rate, but all of them painted with more care and serious aim than the eighteen- penny trinket which serves S. Nicholas for a brooch. The jewels in the mitre are rather better than this, but much depends upon the kind of day on which the picture is seen; on a clear bright day they, and indeed every part of the picture, look much worse than on a dull one because the badness can be more clearly seen. As for the mitre itself, it is made of the same hard unyielding material as the portico behind the saint, whatever this may be, presumably wood.

Observe also the crozier which S. Nicholas is holding; observe the cheap streak of high light exactly the same thickness all the way and only broken in one place; so with the folds in the draperies; all is monotonous, un.o.bservant, unimaginative--the work of a feeble man whose pains will never extend much beyond those necessary to make him pa.s.s as stronger than he is; especially the folds in the white linen over S. Nicholas's throat, and about his girdle--weaker drapery can hardly be than this, unless, perhaps, that from under which S.

Nicholas's hands come. There is not only no art here to conceal, but there is not even pains to conceal the want of art. As for the hands themselves, and indeed all the hands and feet throughout the picture, there is not one which is even tolerably drawn if judged by the standard which Royal Academicians apply to Royal Academy students now.

Granted that this is an early work, nevertheless I submit that the drawing here is not that of one who is going to do better by and by, it is that of one who is essentially insincere and who will never aim higher than immediate success. Those who grow to the best work almost always begin by laying great stress on details which are all they as yet have strength for; they cannot do much, but the little they can do they do and never tire of doing; they grow by getting juster notions of proportion and subordination of parts to the whole rather than by any greater amount of care and patience bestowed upon details. Here there are no bits of detail worked out as by one who was interested in them and enjoyed them. Wherever a thing can be scamped it is scamped. As the whole is, so are the details, and as the details are, so is the whole; all is tainted with eye-service and with a vulgarity not the less profound for being veiled by a due observance of conventionality.

I shall be told that Raffaelle did come to draw and paint much better than he has done here. I demur to this. He did a little better; he just took so much pains as to prevent him from going down-hill headlong, and, with practice, he gained facility, but he was never very good, either as a draughtsman or as a painter. His reputation, indeed, rests mainly on his supposed exquisitely pure and tender feeling. His colour is admittedly inferior, his handling is not highly praised by any one, his drawing has been much praised, but it is of a penmans.h.i.+p freehand kind which is particularly apt to take people in. Of course he could draw in some ways, no one giving all his time to art and living in Raffaelle's surroundings could, with even ordinary pains, help becoming a facile draughtsman, but it is the expression and sentiment of his pictures which are supposed to be so ineffable and to make him the prince of painters.

I do not think this reputation will be maintained much longer. I can see no ineffable expression in the Ansidei Madonna's head, nor yet in that of the Garvagh Madonna in our gallery, nor in the S. Catharine.

He has the saint-touch, as some painters have the tree-touch and others the water-touch. I remember the time when I used to think I saw religious feeling in these last two pictures, but each time I see them I wonder more and more how I can have been taken in by them. I hear people admire the head of S. Nicholas in the Ansidei picture. I can see nothing in it beyond the power of a very ordinary painter, and nothing that a painter of more than very ordinary power would be satisfied with. When I look at the head of Bellini's Doge, Loredano Loredani, I can see defects, as every one can see defects in every picture, but the more I see it the more I marvel at it, and the more profoundly I respect the painter. With Raffaelle I find exactly the reverse; I am carried away at first, as I was when a young man by Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words, only to be very angry with myself presently on finding that I could have believed even for a short time in something that has no real hold upon me. I know the S. Catharine in our gallery has been said by some not to be by Raffaelle. No one will doubt its genuineness who compares the drawing, painting and feeling of S. Catharine's eyes and nose with those of the S. John in the Ansidei picture. The doubts have only been raised owing to the fact that the picture, being hung on a level with the eye, is so easily seen to be bad that people think Raffaelle cannot have painted it.

Returning to the S. Nicholas; apart from the expression, or as it seems to me want of expression, the modelling of the head is not only poor but very poor. The forehead is formless and boneless, the nose is entirely wanting in that play of line and surface which an old man's nose affords; no one ever yet drew or painted a nose absolutely as nature has made it, but he who compares carefully drawn noses, as that in Rembrandt's younger portrait of himself, in his old woman, in the three Van Eycks, in the Andrea Solario, in the Loredano Loredani by Bellini, all in our gallery, with the nose of Raffaelle's S.

Nicholas will not be long in finding out how slovenly Raffaelle's treatment in reality is. Eyes, eyebrows, mouth, cheeks and chin are treated with the same weakness, and this not the weakness of a child who is taking much pains to do something beyond his strength, and whose intention can be felt through and above the imperfections of his performance (as in the case of the two Apostles' heads by Giotto in our gallery), but of one who is not even conscious of weakness save by way of impatience that his work should cost him time and trouble at all, and who is satisfied if he can turn it out well enough to take in patrons who have themselves never either drawn or painted.

Finally, let the spectator turn to the sky and landscape. It is the cheapest kind of sky with no clouds and going down as low as possible, so as to save doing more country details than could be helped. As for the little landscape there is, let the reader compare it with any of the examples by Bellini, Basaiti, or even Cima da Conegliano, which may be found in the same or the adjoining rooms.

How, then, did Raffaelle get his reputation? It may be answered, How did Virgil get his? or Dante? or Bacon? or Plato? or Mendelssohn? or a score of others who not only get the public ear but keep it sometimes for centuries? How did Guido, Guercino and Domenichino get their reputations? A hundred years ago these men were held as hardly inferior to Raffaelle himself. They had a couple of hundred years or so of triumph--why so much? And if so much, why not more? If we begin asking questions, we may ask why anything at all? Populus vult decipi is the only answer, and nine men out of ten will follow on with et decipiatur. The immediate question, however, is not how Raffaelle came by his reputation but whether, having got it, he will continue to hold it now that we have a fair amount of his work at the National Gallery.

I grant that the general effect of the picture if looked at as a mere piece of decoration is agreeable, but I have seen many a picture which though not bearing consideration as a serious work yet looked well from a purely decorative standpoint. I believe, however, that at least half of those who sit gazing before this Ansidei Raffaelle by the half-hour at a time do so rather that they may be seen than see; half, again, of the remaining half come because they are made to do so, the rest see rather what they bring with them and put into the picture than what the picture puts into them.

And then there is the charm of mere age. Any Italian picture of the early part of the sixteenth century, even though by a worse painter than Raffaelle, can hardly fail to call up in us a solemn, old-world feeling, as though we had stumbled unexpectedly on some holy, peaceful survivors of an age long gone by, when the struggle was not so fierce and the world was a sweeter, happier place than we now find it, when men and women were comelier, and we should like to have lived among them, to have been golden-hued as they, to have done as they did; we dream of what might have been if our lines had been cast in more pleasant places--and so on, all of it rubbish, but still not wholly unpleasant rubbish so long as it is not dwelt upon.

Bearing in mind the natural tendency to accept anything which gives us a peep as it were into a golden age, real or imaginary, bearing in mind also the way in which this particular picture has been written up by critics, and the prestige of Raffaelle's name, the wonder is not that so many let themselves be taken in and carried away with it but that there should not be a greater gathering before it than there generally is.

Buying a Rembrandt

As an example of the evenness of the balance of advantages between the principles of staying still and taking what comes, and going about to look for things, {151} I might mention my small Rembrandt, "The Robing of Joseph before Pharaoh." I have wanted a Rembrandt all my life, and I have wanted not to give more than a few s.h.i.+llings for it. I might have travelled all Europe over for no one can say how many years, looking for a good, well-preserved, forty-s.h.i.+lling Rembrandt (and this was what I wanted), but on two occasions of my life cheap Rembrandts have run right up against me. The first was a head cut out of a ruined picture that had only in part escaped destruction when Belvoir Castle was burned down at the beginning of this century. I did not see the head but have little doubt it was genuine. It was offered me for a pound; I was not equal to the occasion and did not at once go to see it as I ought, and when I attended to it some months later the thing had gone. My only excuse must be that I was very young.

I never got another chance till a few weeks ago when I saw what I took, and take, to be an early, but very interesting, work by Rembrandt in the window of a p.a.w.nbroker opposite St. Clement Danes Church in the Strand. I very nearly let this slip too. I saw it and was very much struck with it, but, knowing that I am a little apt to be too sanguine, distrusted my judgment; in the evening I mentioned the picture to Gogin who went and looked at it; finding him not less impressed than I had been with the idea that the work was an early one by Rembrandt, I bought it, and the more I look at it the more satisfied I am that we are right.

People talk as though the making the best of what comes was such an easy matter, whereas nothing in reality requires more experience and good sense. It is only those who know how not to let the luck that runs against them slip, who will be able to find things, no matter how long and how far they go in search of them. [1887.]

Trying to Buy a Bellini

Flushed with triumph in the matter of Rembrandt, a fortnight or so afterwards I was at Christie's and saw two pictures that fired me.

One was a Madonna and Child by Giovanni Bellini, I do not doubt genuine, not in a very good state, but still not repainted. The Madonna was lovely, the Child very good, the landscape sweet and Belliniesque. I was much smitten and determined to bid up to a hundred pounds; I knew this would be dirt cheap and was not going to buy at all unless I could get good value. I bid up to a hundred guineas, but there was someone else bent on having it and when he bid 105 guineas I let him have it, not without regret. I saw in the Times that the purchaser's name was Lesser.

The other picture I tried to get at the same sale (this day week); it was a small sketch numbered 72 (I think) and purporting to be by Giorgione but, I fully believe, by t.i.tian. I bid up to 10 pounds and then let it go. It went for 28 pounds, and I should say would have been well bought at 40 pounds. [1887.]