Robert Baldwin Ross

“ Of course, not being in Society, I am hardly in a position to judge; and the vices I know only at second-hand—from the preachers. Yet I see no outward signs of decay in Society; it dresses quite as well, in some ways better than, it did. Society eats as much, judging from the size and number of new restaurants; its patronises as usual the silliest plays in London, and buys in larger quantities than ever the idiotic novels provided for it. Have you ever been to a bazaar in aid of Our Dumb Friends’ League? Well, you see Society there, I can tell you ”

“ After you have discussed in the latest studio jargon its carpentry, valued the tones and toned the values, motive or theme must affect your appreciation of a picture, your desire, or the contrary, to possess it. That the artist is able to endow the unattractive, and woo you to surrender, I admit. Unless, however, you are a pro-Boer in art matters, and hold that Rembrandt and the Boer school (the greatest technicians who ever lived) are finer artists than Titian, you will find yourself preferring Gainsborough to Degas, and the unskilful Whistler to the more accomplished Edouard Manet. ”

“ There are problems of poverty, injustice, disease, and unhappiness, which should make the most prosperous and most selfish of us chafe; but I do urge that we should not suspect the art and literature of our time, the intellectual manifestations of our age, whether scientific or literary. I urge that we do not sit on the counter in order to cry ‘stinking fish,’ and observe that this is merely an age of commerce. An overweening modesty in us seems to persuade us that it is quite impossible we should be fortunate enough to be the contemporaries of great men. ”

“ But even Philistines have to reckon with Religion and Science, and in a lesser degree with Philosophy. That powerful trinity affects our every-day life. Philosophy is so cloistered, so difficult to understand, that we seldom hear of its decay; though we are constantly told that some branch of science is being neglected, or owing to a religious revival that its prestige is becoming undermined; its truths are becoming falsehoods. I am not a man of science, not even a student, only a desultory reader. ”

“ I am led to these reflections by the memory of Aubrey Beardsley, and the reception which his work received, not from the British public, but from the inner circle of advanced intellectuals. Too much occupied with the obstetrics of art, his superfluity of naughtiness has tarnished his niche in the temple of fame. ‘A wish to épater le bourgeois,’ says Mr. Arthur Symons, ‘is a natural one.’ I do not think so; at least, in an artist. ”

“ But why should I go over old history? Every one remembers the excitement that the discovery caused—the leaders in the Times and the Telegraph, the doubts of the sceptical, the enthusiasm of the archæologists, the jealousy of the Berlin authorities, the offers from all the libraries of Europe, the aspersions of the British Museum. ‘Why,’ asked indignant critics, ‘did Dr. Groschen offer his MS. to the authorities at Oxbridge?’ ‘Because Oxbridge had been the first to recognise his genius,’ was the crushing reply. ”

“ L. C. They are merely connoisseurs gifted with expressing their appreciation of the past in paint. They appeal to you as a literary man. You like to detect in every stroke of their brushes an echo of the past. Their pictures have been heard, not seen. All the younger artists are committing burglary on the old masters.
L. T. It is you who are a disappointed optimist.
L. C. Not about literature or the drama. I seem to hear, with Ibsen’s ‘Master Builder,’ the younger generation knocking at the door. ”

“ Dickens, I suppose, is one of the most popular writers who ever lived, and yet he is part of the structure of our literature; but as Dickens is dead, I prefer to mention the names of three living writers, who are also popular, and have become corner-stones of the same building—Mr. Thomas Hardy, Mr. Rudyard Kipling, Mr. H. G. Wells. ‘There are at all times,’ says Schopenhauer, ‘two literatures in progress running side by side, but little known to each other; the one real, the other only apparent. The former grows into permanent literature: it is pursued by those who live for science or poetry. ”

“ While the science of Egyptology and its adepts command rather awe and wonder than sympathy from the uninitiated, who keep their praises for the more attractive study of Greek art. Yet some of us still turn with relief from the serene material masterpieces of Greece, soulless in their very realism and truth of expression, to the vague and happily unexplained monsters, the rigid gods and hieratic princes, who are given new names by each succeeding generation. ”

“ Set for one moment beside some Rubens’ goddess a portrait by Mr. Sargent, and how would she be troubled by its beauty? Not in the slightest degree; because they are both similar but differing expressions of the same genius of painting. The centuries which separate them are historical conventions; and in Art, history does not count; æsthetically, time is of no consequence. But in the more objective art of caricature, history is of some import, and (as Mr. Beerbohm himself admitted about photographs) the man limned is of paramount importance. ”

“ The anonymous author of Prejudices was no other than Quentin Burrage himself. Or rather not himself, but the other self of which neither I nor Curtis knew anything. He had been living a double existence. As a writer of trashy essays and verse, an incomplete sentimentalist surrounded by an admiring band of young ladies and gentlemen, he was not recognised as the able critic and the anonymous slater of the “Acropolis.”
‘When he first received his own book for review he recalled the words of Curtis. He must be honest, impartial, and just. No one knew better the faults of Prejudices. ”

“ I was going to say Max Beerbohm. Some of his essays I put beside Lamb’s, and above Hazlitt’s. He has style; but then I am prejudiced because he is the only modern artist I really admire. He is a superb draughtsman and our only caricaturist. Then there is George Moore. I don’t care for his novels, but his essays are delightful. George Moore really counts. Few people know so little about art; yet how delightfully he writes about it. Everything comes to him as a surprise. He gives you the same sort of enjoyment as you would derive from hearing a nun preach on the sins of smart society. ”

“ Oxford may be wounded, but I have complete confidence in the issue. These Bœotian invaders must succumb, as nobler stock before them. They will form an interesting subject for some exquisite study by Mr. Henry James, who will deal with their gradual civilisation. Preserved in the amber of his art they will become immortal.
I have been able to clip only the fringe of a great theme. Athletes require an essay to themselves. In later age they seem to me more melancholy than their Cambridge peers and less successful. ”

“ How far Ruskin was out of sympathy with them, indiscreet memoirs have revealed. An artistic idea, or a group of ideas, must always be broken gently to the English people, because the acceptance of them necessitates the swallowing of words. When the golden ladders are let down from heaven by poets, artists, or critics even; or new spirits are hovering in the intellectual empyrean, the patriarch public snoring on its stone pillow wakes up ”

“ When I take to art criticism, as you kindly suggested a dishonest man might do, it will be of a livelier description than any to which you are usually accustomed. Vain dupe, you think yourself impeccable. Infallible ass, there is hardly a museum in Europe where my manuscripts are not carefully preserved for the greatest and rarest treasures by senile curators, too ignorant to know their errors or too vain to acknowledge them. ”

“ I never knew any painter worthy of the name who paid the smallest attention to what a critic says, even in conversation. He will retort; but he will not change his style or regulate his motives to suit a critic’s palate. So may I now mention their faults? What painter is without fault? Their faults are shared by nearly all of them; their virtues are their own. I see among them an absence of any desire for beauty—for physical beauty. ”

“ There are no men who guess so brilliantly as men of science, so that science, in that respect, has attained the dignity of Theology. I suppose that the startling theories propounded by Sir Oliver Lodge and others will be taken as evidence of the decay of science. But the human intellect, especially if it is scientific, cannot, I imagine, like actors, go on repeating or feigning the same emotion. ”

“ It is a common error to confuse the archæologist with the mere collector of ignoble trifles, equally pleased with an unusual postage stamp or a scarce example of an Italian primitive. Nor should the impertinent curiosity of local antiquaries, which sees in every disused chalk-pit traces of Roman civilisation, be compared with the rare predilection requisite for a nobler pursuit. The archæologist preserves for us those objects which time has forgotten and passing fashion rejected; in the museums he buries our ancient eikons, where they become impervious to neglect, praise, or criticism ”

“ And when the Pre-Raphaelites appeared, every one said the end of Art had arrived. Dickens openly attacked them; Thackeray ridiculed the new tendencies; every one, great and small, spoke of decay and decline. The French word Décadence had not crept into use. However, the weary Titan staggered on, as Matthew Arnold said, and when Mr. Whistler’s art dawned on the horizon, Ruskin was among the first to see in it signs of decay. Except the poetry of Swinburne, never has any art met with such abuse. ”

“ To the present generation his work is perhaps too ‘literary,’ and his technique is by no means faultless; but the slightest drawing is informed by an idea, nearly always a beautiful one, however exotic. The faceless head and the headless body of shivering models dear to modern art students were absent from Solomon’s designs. His pigments, both in water-colour and oils, are always harmonious, pure in tone, and rich without being garish. We need not try to frighten ourselves by searching too curiously for hidden meanings. ”

“ I should, of course, exclude from the collection living writers; only the select dead would be requisitioned. They cannot retort. And the entertaining volume would illustrate that curious artistic law—the survival of the unfittest, of which we are only dimly beginning to realise the significance. It is like the immortality of the invalid, now recognised by all men of science. You see it manifested in the plethora of memoirs. All new books not novels are about great dead men by unimportant little living ones. ”

“ Of the New Learning already become old, Professor Lachsyrma is reputed a master. Scarcely any one in England holds a like position. He is sixty, and, though his youth is said to have been eventful, he hardly looks his age. He speaks English with a delightful accent, and there always hangs about his presence a melancholy halo of mystery and Italy. His quiet unassumed familiarity with every museum and library on the Continent astonishes even the most erudite Teuton. Among archæologists he is thought a pre-eminent palæographer, among palæographers a great archæologist. ”

“ Bad artists, however, are always nice people. I do not say that the reverse is true; indeed, I know many good and even great artists who are charming; but I never met a thoroughly inferior painter (without any promise of either a future or a past) who was not irresistible socially. This accounts for some of the elections at the Royal Academy, I believe, and for the pictures on the walls of your friends whose taste you know to be impeccable. There is more hearty recognition of bad art in England than the Tate Gallery gives us any idea of. ”

“ In histories of English literature too often you find the same attitude when the writer comes to a period which he dislikes. Restoration Comedy is often said to be a period of debasement, and with Tennyson the young student is given to understand that English literature ceased altogether. But perhaps there are more modern text-books where the outlook is less gloomy. If, instead of reading the history of literature, you read the literature itself, you will find plenty of instances of writers at the most brilliant periods complaining of decay. ”

“ When the Anakim, men of old, which were men of renown—Shelley, Keats, or Tennyson—become playful, I confess to a feeling of nervousness: the unpleasant, hot sensation you experience when a distinguished man makes a fool of himself. Rossetti—I suppose from his Italian origin—was able to assume motley without loss of dignity, and that wounded Titan, the late W. E. Henley, was another exception. Both he and Rossetti had the faculty of being foolish, or obscene, without impairing the high seriousness of their superb poetic gifts. ”

“ His work has always appealed to musicians and men of letters rather than collectors—to those who ask that a drawing or a picture should suggest an idea rather than the art of the artist. Subject with him triumphs over drawing. He is sometimes hopelessly crude; but during the sixties, when, as some one said, ‘every one was a great artist,’ he showed considerable promise of draughtsmanship. His pictures are less fantastic than the drawings, and aim at probability, even when they are allegorical, or, as is too often the case, odd in sentiment. ”