_An Apostasy_

[Sidenote: Mr. Whistler's Lecture on Art, by Algernon Charles Swinburne.

_Fortnightly Review_, June 1888.]

To speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth may justly be required of the average witness; it cannot be expected, it should not be exacted, of any critical writer or lecturer on any form of art....

... And it appears to one at least of those unfortunate "outsiders"

for whose judgment or whose "meddling" Mr. Whistler has so imperial and Olympian a contempt....

[Sidenote: _REFLECTION:_

"If" indeed!

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[Sidenote: _REFLECTION:_

"Cups and fans and screens," and Hamilton vases, and figurines of Tanagra, and other "waterflies."

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Let us begin at the end, as all reasonable people always do: we shall find that Mr. Whistler concedes to Greek art a place beside j.a.panese.

Now this, on his own showing, will never do; it crosses, it contravenes, it nullifies, it pulverizes his theory or his principle of artistic limitation. If j.a.panese art is right in confining itself to what can be "broidered upon the fan"--and the gist of the whole argument is in favour of this a.s.sumption--then the sculpture which appeals, indeed, first of all to our perception of beauty, to the delight of the eye, to the wonder and the worship of the instinct or the sense, but which in every possible instance appeals also to far other intuitions and far other sympathies than these, is as absolutely wrong, as demonstrably inferior, as any picture or as any carving which may be so degenerate and so debased as to concern itself with a story or a subject. a.s.suredly Phidias thought of other things than "arrangements"[34] in marble--as certainly as aeschylus thought of other things than "arrangements" in metre. Nor, I am sorely afraid, can the adored Velasquez be promoted to a seat "at the foot of Fusi-yama." j.a.panese art is not merely the incomparable achievement of certain harmonies in colour; _it is the negation, the immolation, the annihilation of everything else_. By the code which accepts as the highest of models and of masterpieces the cups and fans and screens with which "the poor world" has been as grievously "pestered" of late years as ever it was in Shakespeare's time "with such waterflies"--"diminutives of nature"--as excited the scorn of his moralizing cynic, Velasquez is as unquestionably condemned as is Raphael or t.i.tian. It is true that this miraculous power of hand (?)[35] makes beautiful for us the deformity of dwarfs, and dignifies the degradation of princes; but that is not the question. It is true, again, that Mr. Whistler's own merest "arrangements" in colour are lovely and effective;[36] but his portraits, to speak of these alone, are liable to the d.a.m.ning and intolerable imputation of possessing not merely other qualities than these, but qualities which actually appeal--I blush to remember and I shudder to record it--which actually appeal to the intelligence[37]

and the emotions, to the mind and heart of the spectator. It would be quite useless for Mr. Whistler to protest--if haply he should be so disposed--that he never meant to put study of character and revelation of intellect into his portrait of Mr. Carlyle, or intense pathos of significance and tender depth of expression into the portrait of his own venerable mother. The scandalous fact remains, that he has done so; and in so doing has explicitly violated and implicitly abjured the creed and the canons, the counsels and the catechism of j.a.pan....

[Note 34: _REFLECTION:_

Because the Bard is blind, shall the Painter cease to see?

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[Note 35: _REFLECTION:_

Quite hopeless!

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[Note 36: _REFLECTION:_

Whereby it would seem that, for the Bard, the lovely is not necessarily "effective."

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[Note 37: _REFLECTION:_

The "lovely," therefore, confessedly does not appeal to the intelligence, emotions, mind, and heart of the Bard even when aided by the "effective."

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[Sidenote: _REFLECTION:_

Of course I do mean this thing--though most imprudent was the saying of it!--for this Art truth the Poet resents with the people.--June 1888.

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And when Mr. Whistler informs us that "there never was an artistic period," we must reply that the statement, so far as it is true, is the flattest of all possible truisms; for no mortal ever maintained that there ever was a period in which all men were either good artists or good judges of art. But when we pa.s.s from the positive to the comparative degree of historic or retrospective criticism, we must ask whether the lecturer means to say that there have not been times when the general standard of taste and judgment, reason and perception, was so much higher than at other times and such periods may justly and accurately be defined as artistic. If he does mean to say this, he is beyond answer and beneath confutation; in other words, he is where an artist of Mr. Whistler's genius and a writer of Mr.

Whistler's talents can by no possibility find himself. If he does not mean to say this, what he means to say is exactly as well worth saying, as valuable and as important a piece of information, as the news that Queen Anne is no more, or that two and two are not generally supposed to make five.

[Sidenote: _REFLECTION:_

Je reviens donc de Pontoise!

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But if the light and glittering bark of this brilliant amateur in the art of letters is not invariably steered with equal dexterity of hand between the Scylla and Charybdis of paradox and plat.i.tude, it is impossible that in its course it should not once and again touch upon some point worth notice, if not exploration. Even that miserable animal the "unattached writer" may gratefully and respectfully recognize his accurate apprehension and his felicitous application of well-nigh the most hackneyed verse in all the range of Shakespeare's--which yet is almost invariably misconstrued and misapplied--"One touch of nature makes the whole world kin;" and this, as the poet goes on to explain, is that all, with one consent, prefer worthless but showy novelties to precious but familiar possessions.

"This one chord that vibrates with all," says Mr. Whistler, who proceeds to cite artistic examples of the lamentable fact, "this one unspoken sympathy that pervades humanity, is--Vulgarity." But the consequence which he proceeds to indicate and to deplore is calculated to strike his readers with a sense of mild if hilarious astonishment.

It is that men of sound judgment and pure taste, quick feelings and clear perceptions, most unfortunately and most inexplicably begin to make their voices "heard in the land." Porson, as all the world knows, observed of the Germans of his day that "in Greek" they were "sadly to seek." It is no discredit to Mr. Whistler if this is his case also; but then he would do well to eschew the use of a Greek term lying so far out of the common way as the word "aesthete." Not merely the only accurate meaning, but the only possible meaning, of that word is nothing more, but nothing less, than this--an intelligent, appreciative, quick-witted person; in a word, as the lexicon has it, "one who perceives." The man who is no aesthete stands confessed, by the logic of language and the necessity of the case, as a thick-witted, tasteless, senseless, and impenetrable blockhead. I do not wish to insult Mr. Whistler, but I feel bound to avow my impression that there is no man now living who less deserves the honour of enrolment in such ranks as these--of a seat in the synagogue of the anaesthetic....

... Such abuse of language is possible only to the drivelling desperation of venomous or fangless duncery: it is in higher and graver matters, of wider bearing and of deeper import, that we find it necessary to dispute the apparently serious propositions or a.s.sertions of Mr. Whistler. _How far the witty tongue may be thrust into the smiling cheek_ when the lecturer pauses to take breath between these remarkably brief paragraphs it would be certainly indecorous and possibly superfluous to inquire. But his theorem is unquestionably calculated to provoke the loudest and the heartiest mirth that ever acclaimed the advent of Momus or Erycina. For it is this--that [38]"Art and Joy go together," _and that_[39] _tragic art is not art at all_....

[Note 38: _REFLECTION:_

Is not, then, the funeral hymn a gladness to the singer, if the verse be beautiful?

Certainly the funeral monument, to be worthy the Nation's sorrow buried beneath it, must first be a joy to the sculptor who designed it.

The Bard's reasoning is of the People. His Tragedy is _theirs_. As one of them, the _man_ may weep--yet will the artist rejoice--for to him is not "A thing of beauty a joy for ever"?

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[Note 39: At what point of my "_O'clock_" does Mr.

Swinburne find this last--his own inconsequence?

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[Sidenote: _REFLECTION:_

Before the marvels of centuries, silence, the only tribute of the outsider, is by him refused--and the dignity of ignorance lost in speech.

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... The laughing Muse of the lecturer, "quam Jocus circ.u.mvolat," must have glanced round in expectation of the general appeal, "After that let us take breath." And having done so, they must have remembered that they were not in a serious world; that they were in the fairyland of fans, in the paradise of pipkins, in the limbo of blue china, screens, pots, plates, jars, joss-houses, and all the fortuitous frippery of Fusi-yama.

[Sidenote: _REFLECTION:_