MODERN PAINTING.* -" THE Editor of the Speaker allowed me
to publish from time kto time chapters of a book on art. These chapters have been .gathered from the mass of art journalism which had grown about them, and I reprint them in the sequence originally intended." The construction of Mr. Moore's book is a good • deal looser than these words would lead one to expect. It ,begins, indeed, with a group of articles dealing with recent painters—Whistler, Puvis de Chavannes, Millet and Manet, 'Ingres and Corot, Monet Sisley and Pissaro—with a fairly strict -sequence of treatment and ideas. There was room for a good book here, even if the time has not come for a final one, and 'Mr. Moore, both by his success in distinguishing the dominant ,figures and treating them with a sense of relative importance, and also by the advantage of personal intercourse with Manet and others, had unusual qualifications for writing the book. He has, perhaps, been a little too hasty to carry out com- pletely the scheme that would seem to have been in his mind; the occasional and journalistic element is too strong, and this element, present at the outset, declares itself still more frankly in the more loosely connected essays that fill the -remainder of the volume. References to current exhibitions and to passing controversies stamp a good many of the pages with a temporary interest ; and the whole would have gained by pruning and revision.
But if Modern Painting is not a book as distinguished from . a collection of articles on art, taken in its actual shape, it is • extremely successful. It is throughout most readable and amusing ; and regarded as blows in a critical campaign for • good painting as against bad, the articles are well directed and effective. It is not violence of praise or attack that tells most in the long-run of such warfare, but justice ; to be right in the main, gives a force to the individual blow that its separate --effectiveness would not give ; and to have grasped the relative importance of the real masters to the mass of ephemeral pro- duction, is to be armed with the first and essential endowment of a critic. Without that there can be nothing but the timidity and worthless compliance of the man who does not know anything, and therefore praises everything ; whose gratuitous advertisements of the dealers' shows fill the papers, as Mr. Moore points out in the chapter called " Picture- Dealers; " and who mixes, in a lukewarm appreciation, the masters of painting with the names that are popular for the .moment in commerce. It may be objected to Mr. Moore that there are slips of taste in what he writes ; he certainly is not always on the safe side of the debateable line where public criticism should stop, and he allows the personality of himself or others to figure more than is convenient ; but this should not obscure the fact that his contention is for the most part • on the side of knowledge, and has the courage and the warmth of conviction.
This being allowed, we may admire further the brilliant 'writer's qualities with which Mr. Moore's views are expressed. One has been just noted, and is perhaps the most striking, the contagious warmth, namely, that grows upon him as he -deals with a work that he really admires. Such an admiration he expresses in fluent description or felicitous phrases that have little the effect of premeditation, but seem to spring from and mould themselves on the immediate impression that the picture makes. The other side and defect of this im- promptu manner of writing is a looseness and carelessness of diction; but Mr. Moore's language has the merit of being very unaffected, and it has a flexible and easy character that suits itself to the matter in hand, instead of being kept aloof by a whim of style. He is most happy in persuasive de- scriptive passages which must always be, as Mr. Ruskin long ago proved, the most effective engine of the critic for bearing- in upon the reader's mind not only some idea of the look of a picture, but a presumption in favour of its beauty, by a pleasant effect upon the literary sense. If the presumption is merited, this persuasive method is doubtless the judicious way to address a public more awake to literary than to pictorial beauty. Here is one sample of Mr. Moore's descrip- tive power. He is speaking of the early work of Pinar() :— "his earliest pictures were all composed in pensive greys and "Xodiro Painting. By George Moore. Loudon. Walter Scott. 1 3.
violets, and exhaled the weary sadness of tilth and grange and scant orchard trees. The pale road winds throuvh meagre uplands, and through the blown and gnarled and shiftless fruit-trees the saddening silhouette of the town drifts across the land. The violet spaces between the houses are the very saddest, and the spare furrows are patiently drawn, and so the execution is in harmony with and accentuates the unutterable monotony of the peasant's lot. The sky, too, is vague and empty, and out of its deathlike, creamy hollow the first shadows are blown into the pallid face of a void evening."
Holes might be picked in this ; but in the main matters of movement and colour and evocation, it attains the end it aims at by suggesting and recommending to the imagination a fairly well defined picture. Another instance of excellent description is that of Manet in the act of painting.
When we pass from Mr. Moore's appreciations to the logic on which he bases them, we are on more doubtful ground, for it is not always certain that the reasons he finds to back his admirations are as incontestible as the desert of the object admired. Thus, in the very forefront, comes the question what we are to understand by nationality in art. "Art," Mr. Moore says, "is nationhood ; " by which statement he appears to mean that vigorous painting has been produced at times when a nation has been vigorous,—vigorous in other ways as well as painting. That may be true enough, but it is a jump from this to condemn " cosmopolitanism " in the sense of learning from foreign nations. It is fatal, Mr. Moore holds, to travel, to leave one's parish ; with Mr. Ruskin he thinks the great artist must be racy of his village, of his rock, or heath. AU the substance in this contention surely is, that a painter usually paints that hest with which he is most familiar, and that he is likely to be most familiar and most sympathetic with his own country and its types. But to go further and to shut off the painter from the methods of seeing and rendering developed in other places, is absurd ; for those methods have, so far as they are good, a universal validity, their connection with the plac.c where they are first developed is accidental, and they cm ire'l applied with advan- tage to the familiar subject. Where should we English have learned painting at all, if not from a-broad P Nor have we appreciably bettered the instruction. No Englishmen ever drew English faces to beat Holbein. Vandyck assuredly entered into English character, and when Englishmen arose to take up the art, Reynolds, English in the sense of feeling English type and character, was the greatest of eclectics in the universal matters of drawing, colouring, light and shade, and all the conventions of picture-making. So with our land- scape painters, who learned from Holland, as Mr. Moore is constrained to admit.
Mr. Moore's intention, however, in this matter is evidently to protest against English students of painting going abroad to learn cheap methods. He could hardly quarrel with an Englishman who studied his art under the influence of Ingres or Manet, but he does, with a good deal of reason, lament the troops of students who pick up a manner at the ateliers of Julian. That manner, however, is in no good sense French rather than English. It is simply vulgar. The defects of that manner of drawing and painting Mr. Moore analyses with some success, but perhaps it is not probing to the bottom to hold up the principle of "drawing by the character," as against "drawing by the masses." As cant phrases these may hit-off a recognisable difference, but mass is, of course, a prime element in drawing, however much in a particular school it may be caricatured by a mechanical substitute for the subtleties of attachment and inflection by which mass modulates into character.
Another of Mr. Moore's favourite distinctions, on which a word may be said, is that between "painting with the values" and painting without them. What he seems to understand by values "is painting on a monochrome basis with a tinting of local colour, and he associates such painting with the pleasure of chiaroscuro, and opposes it to ia peintwre claire. it is an intelligible position that it is impossible to get accurate values in painting throughout the scale, and that therefore it is necessary to fall back on relative values by a process of transposition. But it is rather misleading to use the word " value " in the sense of "transposed value," since it is by usage applied also to the matching exactly the colour and tone of something in nature with a touch of paint. As to the merit of the two procedures, it may be plausibly argued that the " mosaic " method of the enjoyment of colour is permissible as well as that pleasure in painting that rests more on light and shadow. The art of the Japanese is a strong argument. Mr. Moore's general bias in this matter leads him to be less than just to Monet, but he does good service in his exposition of the recent manias and cranks in French painting. He has done no better service, perhaps, than by introducing, as we believe he had the credit of doing in a former work, a great modern painter, Degas, to the notice of the English public. In the present volume, he has more to say on the excellence of that master's drawing. We con- gratulate him on a book which, in spite of minor contra- dictions and perversities, will make for the general enlighten- ment.
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