ART.

THE ACADEMY.—I.

BEING REFLECTIONS ON SIMPLE TASTES.

WHY all this huge pretence of painting and pretence of a taste for painting ?

In matters the public really has a taste for, there are no mistakes of this kind. If the cricketer at a match were to defend his wicket by kicking at the ball like a goal-keeper, there would be a prompt "Leg before !" from the umpire; and if the gentlemen of the Press in attendance were to argue that the kick was an excellent kick, that the man had stopped the ball most ingeniously, and was a first-rate football- player, that football was a more manly sport than batting, that a ball kicked into the air was more elevated than a ball struck along the ground, the crowd would laugh those critics off the field. 'But,' one of them might persist, 'I am a simple, blunt person ; I can see when a ball is stopped, and that is the object of the earnest batsman ; I care nothing for the mere handling of a bat, and this talk of the limits of the game, its technique, is nothing to me ; but I know when I am pleased, and it gives me and a great many worthy people intense pleasure to see a good kick.' Such persistence in argument might lead to his personal enjoyment of that simple pleasure at the feet of rude experts, even if the Prince of Wales, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Lord Rosebery came down to maintain that football was the essential and improving element in cricket, and must, for religions and national reasons, at all costs be preserved. The crowd in this case would be "superior persons" to a man, because they all like and understand the affair.

The number of people who have a real liking for literature, for drama, for music, for painting, amounts to no crowd, as do the experts in cricket, and is indeed absurdly small. But their liking is so intense that it excites a jealousy in the minds of thousands who have unhappily no real tastes of their own, such as the taste for cricket, and even in the minds of many who have. Our Royal House, which shares with the upper classes so many ex- cellent tastes of the cricket kind, has an infallibly bad taste

in the matter of painting, and with the best intentions in the world plumps upon the most vulgar pictures that offer them- selves. No prominent Churchman or Statesman ever opens his lips on the subject without betraying the same condition

of mind. Our men of letters even, with the analogy of their own art to warn them, blunder as hopelessly, for most of them

are blind to painting as many of them are deaf to music. But these betrayals frequently come of official compulsion to speak, and should be lightly condoned. The real Philistine, who is the strength of our upper and lower classes, and an admir- able character in his way (Kipling has given us the romance of the type), makes no pretence about it. He knows what he likes, and that one of the things he has no particular liking for is art. There is nothing to complain of in that. But there are members of the upper class, and a terrible number of the middle class, in a very different case. Instead of being good Philistines, they are Cultured Persons, that is, people semi-educated into a pretence to tastes they do not possess. The Philistine before a picture is indifferent, bored. He will recognise the likeness in a portrait, the point in an illustration, and in his heart honestly think both of them a poor exchange for a photograph. The Cultured Person, being an absolute fraud, finds an excuse for pre- tending to like the picture, an anecdote about the painter, a casuistry of interpretation, and so forth. It is his favourite occupation, moreover, to spread this pretence among the dishonest-minded of the lower class, a class which, of course, like the others, sporadically produces its individuals with a real, and not a sham taste for painting.

But among these deplorable frauds, a further refinement of pretence develops, when the Cultured Person, driven from other positions, declares himself a Philistine. His dis- honesty of thought blossoms most flagrantly when he adopts the style of the Plain Man, the Person of Simple Taste, set against all that is morbid and unhealthy in art. He invites the sympathy of the real Philistine, who, modest man, is flattered, by announcing himself a patron of popular art, a devotee of all that is healthy and straightforward. I propose to examine these simple tastes.

The truth of course is (the Cultured Person's name for the truth, it is convenient to remember, is cynicism and paradox), that this so-called popular art exhibits a craving and deter- mination for all that is bastard and unnatural. Only a great artist enjoys simplicity and health in his taste.

In the course of a week I studied three illustrations of popular taste in the three arts of the theatre, music, and painting. The demand of popular taste in the theatre is that the performance shall not be dramatic, in the concert- room it rejoices in the suppression of music, in the picture gallery its simple requirement is that the things exhibited shall be anything,—except painting. The dramatist, the musician, the painter, is each satisfied within the limits of his art, the popular taste, finding nothing amusing there, clamours always for the destruction of those limits, for the suppression of this simplicity, for the excitement of unnatural combinations.

I went to the Lyceum Theatre. It is, or was, the favourite resort of the cultured people who detest the drama. I fancy that playhouses are now more popular in which there is a sham discussion of social problems. But the Lyceum is popular enough. I found a successful piece running, named King Arthur. Why was King Arthur successful ? For a series of reasons, I take it. The Arthurian story is a loosely connected narrative,—a form of art, that is to say, in which character is revealed by a stream of description and incident. Drama is a form of art in which a knot of passion is untied by means of dialogue and gesture. Public perversity, there- fore, demands first of all a narrative, and not a dramatic sub- ject. (King Arthur has just been succeeded by Dan Quixote.) Secondly, no art possesses much import that has not a morality behind it, that is, a coherent principle of conduct and feeling ; for emotion depends on such a principle, and

art is the expression of emotion. This moral reference is acute in drama, whose first necessity therefore is a morality good or bad, a coherent principle to determine emotion. Now Tennyson, in treating the Arthurian legend, destroyed the coherence of its morality of chivalry. But be embroidered it with passages of superb poetry, and with tracts of moralising, incoherent with its texture, yet congenial to modern ideas. This mixture made an extremely popular narrative. Mr. Comyns Carr saw how to render it completely popular. Its morality was already confused, he dropped out the poetry. He cobbled it into an appearance of stage form, which was needless enough, since there was little affec- tation of acting nor even expressive declamation of the verse he provided. Handsome actors and actresses, however, stood about in picturesque dresses, and in that enormous apparatus of scenery which no dramatist would tolerate for a moment. But there was no umpire to give "leg-before," the crowd was delighted to have the background in front of the foreground, to have "living pictures,"—anything except drama. That is simple taste in the theatre.

It is, however, little of a secret that the popular drama is a device for allowing the public to admire the personal advantages of its favourites in new dresses, and in solidly furnished, real rooms,—that is, off the stage. One would think that the clean, non - imitative art of music was safe from contamination. It is possible, however, to maltreat and destroy the art, to enjoy a joke at the expense of it. I went to a concert at the Crystal Palace. It opened with a symphony by Beethoven. The conductor of this was treated with an enthusiasm which he deserved, but the next performance revealed in what fashion he has to pay back the public that tolerates his Beethoven. This affair, into whose authorship I will not probe, was received with really sincere plaudits. It was a setting—if you will credit me—of Browning's "Pied Piper." What were the reasons for this success ? First, that of all forms of words, prolonged narra- tive is least adapted to musical setting. Second, there is very little verse that lends itself to musical setting, especially if it has not been written with that object; least of all Browning's verse with its intricate turns and off-hand colloquial style ; and least of Browning's verse, this piece, which is already a playful outrage on verse itself. The result, of coarse, was that music had no chance in the affair. There was not from beginning to end a phrase that could be sung ; it was a horribly ingenious gabble of sound, a half- hour's joke at the expense of music. That is how a simple popular taste employs the band and chorus of the Crystal Palace. An audience with the slightest suspicion of what music is, must have hissed the thing from the stage. But they were cultured people who had been pretending to like Beethoven, and were preparing to pretend to like Wagner, and were delighted with the relief that this trampling on the art and confusing it with jocular narrative afforded.

I might turn to literature and exhibit how in that art what the cultured enjoy is the horrible business of "word- painting," the process, that is, by which the stream of language, a sounding stream of images in a solution of thought is blocked, while the image is fished out for a futile attempt at complete presentation to the eye. But it is needless. The severity of poetry is too great for a simple taste, which cries, " Now's the time to have a little painting for a diversion."

Lastly, I enter the Academy. Before I am through the turnstile I am greeted by a transgression of the bounds of painting as violent as those others of the removed worlds of drama, music, literature. Mr. Herkomer has produced a canvas which almost persuades you that another room has been added to the Academy, and that real people are standing in it. Mr. Herkomer, a man of abounding force and ingenuity, devotes himself with the rarest assiduity to transgressing the limits of the arts, and is, of course, the darling of the public. He has painted oil-paintings that mimic bad water-colours- He has painted water-colours that have been mistaken for oils. He has made photo- gravures that he himself is reported to have mistaken for etchings. Now he paints a picture that may be mistaken for a room. His portraits have long had the strange desire to come out of their frames, to be not in their own world of painting, but in the world of reality. Next year, I suppose, he will give us stuffed figures in motion, and will thus

triumphantly join hands with the stage artists who bring on the real cab at Drury Lane, the real horse at the Lyceum, the real drawing-room at the Haymarket and St. James's. The first law, in a word, of popular painting is the abolition of the frame. The second law,—the demand for incident and narrative, I must leave over for next week,—in the examination of the "imaginative art" of Sir John Millais and Mr. Dicksee, and there will be something to say about a mysterious affair variously known as "Mere Technique," "Technique," and technique. Meantime, I repeat my question, Why these unnatural cravings ? Why demand pictures from the theatre, from poetry, from music, and in picture galleries refuse them, demanding reality, drama, narrative ? Why wish that a figure should bounce upon you out of a canvas, should stand upon your toes P The illusion would surely be unpleasant if complete, and even in the able hands of Professor Herkomer must be feeble at the best. If you reply that somepainting you must admire, because it is a polite and cultured habit to admire painting, and a virtuous act to "encourage art," I deny both assertions. It rots the character to pretend to taste; it vulgarises life ; it is only a pretence and transgres- sion you encourage. A nation whose rulers and the bulk of whose people are without this taste, will be happier and more

honest if they let painting be. D. S. M.