Volltext Seite (XML)
252 THE PHOTOGRAPHIC NEWS. [March 27, 1891. billows,” the “ rushing mighty wind,” or the “ live thunder” from the dark cloud where “ Tempest sits enthroned.” Now, will somebody say, “ All you have told us is very good, and distinctly applicable to the arts of painting, but why fetter another form of art with all these restrictions and narrowness of scope ? For if it cannot give all the manifold charms you and Harding desire without so much pains and abnegation, yet pho tography gives the world something that the most elaborate art has never given. Does it not give detail and accuracy of drawing that was never observed before, unless it be in the microscope ? The camera may be called the microscope of the field.” Verily this is so, and in that sense I would be the very last to fetter photography ; it is an invaluable sense ; but it must be remem bered that this is a scientific sense, and not an artistic one. I am talking of pictorial composition—the science, if you will, of fine art. Harding says, “ Individuality or identical imitation is not only absolutely impossible, but is not required ; for, otherwise, to perfect the charms of sculpture or painting, we must add colour to the one, and rotundity to the other. Were identical imitation necessary, we could not stop short of any of the attributes of reality.” I have already said I have nothing new to tell you, and as I have already notified your Society that better than my own teaching would be, at this lecture, to give other people’s ideas, I shall make no excuse for quoting now from an essay on « Imitation in the Fine Arts,” by Qatremre de Quincy. He says : « Do we remark that there is matter in the masterpieces of sculpture ? Do we wish for the addition of colour ; or the step nearer to verisimilitude which it might bring ? Do we, in paintings, regret that the beautiful scenes are presented to us only on one side, or that their figures are motionless ? What, then, would we have ? Are shrieks wanting to the torments of the Laocobn, or the accents of lamentation to the anguish of Niobe ? It will hold good as a general remark that, according as the imagination is more active, we possess in a higher degree the necessary capability of supplying the kind of deficit common to every work of art, and the better, also, are we contented with the specific illusion. In fact, the pleasure of illusion arises, more than we allow for, from a sort of working of the mind, by which itself finishes the work of art. “ In imitation which is limited to the senses in the choice of its subjects and its mode of representing them, it may fairly be asked what its images can teach me, restricted as they are to the gratification of the eye ? What do they show me more than I already know ? What do they put me in a position to receive over and above their model ? What impres sions depending on art do they communicate ? What new ac quisition can such imitation promise me or give me reason to hope for ? It does not carry my imagination beyond the con fines of reality. “ I shall be told it gives me what nature—whose portrait ure it is—gives me. I answer, no I It does not give it pre cisely, because it is only a portrait, and because a portrait is only a part of the resemblance of the natural object, and pre sents only a single aspect. Wherefore should I wish for a copy ? What need have I of the appearance of things whose reality I am indifferent to ? What worth can I attach to the image when I hold its model in contempt, more especially since there is nothing beyond to compensate for the absence of all those properties which nature denies me ?” It seems almost needless for me to add that he means that which a picture often supplies, but unassisted nature rarely. We might carry this further, and, indeed, its application, I am sure, comes home to everybody in this room when they think of past suffering. What weariness has overcome them while contemplating an album—nay, how one almost shudders at the word—and what tortures have been endured in visiting the local photographer and inspecting his views, those deadliest of dead seas, and his none the less veracious valleys—valleys of the dry bones of nature without a scintilla of art in their bald presentment to redeem them ; irredeemable, indeed, and hopeless, because matter without spirit is, and must be, hopeless. What this spirit is that may redeem, irradiate, and warm the bleakest landscape, I have endeavoured to put before you this evening, not in my own feeble language, but from the text of another, who, in his turn, has learnt and compiled from the teaching of the past. I have told you nothing new ; he has told you nothing new ; art is the next oldest thing, perhaps, to the hills, and its canons are the outcome of the very nature of things, and as irrevocable. Nothing is more talked about to day, and of nothing is there less to say ; it cannot be taught, it may be learnt; it is much more likely to be felt after long, patient years of study, felt imperceptibly at first, than in a flash and in full revelation. Perhaps a picture, perhaps a dream, a sonnet, or a sympathetic voice, or a swell of mighty music—who can say ; it will depend on your idiosyncrasy when and how you are capable of analysing that which to the multi tude is beyond analysis. What have I told you ? Pictorial composition is the art of putting picturesque things in a picturesque way—that is, not putting them absolutely side by side, or immediately one on top of the other, nor at equal distances, nor four square, nor putting the least important thing in the most important place ; if you can do this, and can arrange the lighting to get contrast without patchwork or spottiness, and obtain a breadth of effect conducive to the prominence of your principal object, you will be carrying out in photography what is aimed at in painting ; and, while satisfying yourself and your beholders, you will be doing much to lessen the flood of bad photographs that are giving your ignorant brethren the basest ideas of art, and doing not a little to lift it out of the mire to its proper place again. In art, as in all things, history repeats itself. The refined stheticism of ancient Greece was debased by the Roman architects, and even Greek artists of the late imperial times were employed, and prostituted their glorious traditions by travestying them in the luxurious villas of Herculaneum and Pompeii. It required that art should die and be born again in the last throes of the empire at Byzantine, and be inspired by a new faith and a northern fervour in the Gothic periods, before it was fit to be married to the sleeping beauty of the centuries, the bride of the Renaissance, who, bringing in her train and as her dowry the new learning, the perfumed breath of the garden of the intellect, the Greek and Latin classics, to add the graces of refinement to the life of the fifteenth century. This marriage we know was fruitful in an abundant family of great names—masters in every form of art, and whose works remain to us now, for the most part unrivalled. Then, within a century or two, this mighty offspring we see dies down, and art appears again to be entering a chrysalis state, as taste declines in the times of the later Louis of France, and assumes utterly monstrous forms in the Rococco and our Georgian periods. Who, then, shall wonder that in these days art has to make enormous struggles, and, half blinded by what she has passed through, her true path is not distinctly traced before her ? Who shall wonder if sometimes she staggers with uncertain step and lifts up an uncertain voice ? Who shall wonder at her calls for ajstheticism on the one hand, or her clutches at realism on the other ? None. No ! we should rather wonder and be thankful, in a materialistic age, that she is alive at all; and let us, trusting to those clear lights that have burnt for our guidance through the ages, do what we can to assist art to take her stately way again, and keep its even tenor. To do this as it behoves us to do, unless we would be branded by posterity and puerility, and stigmatised as blind guides, if we pretend to make pictures, or play with art in any way, it should be in no careless and selfish spirit, but for the ennoble ment of the race. Pictorial composition is a great power to this end ; and if, at the risk of weariness, I am earnest in pressing upon you the importance of its study and comprehen sion, it is, gentlemen, because I feel and know its eternal truths will, as they should be, be paramount when those passing fancies whose experiments, as futile as they are frivolous, have passed away. —• Still More Like Him.—Photographer—“Your son, the student, ordered this likeness from me.” “ It is certainly very much like him. Has he paid for it?” “Not yet.” “That is still more like him,”—Fliegende Blatter.
