MR. SARGENT AT THE ROYAL ACADEMY

WHAT is the secret of the weariness, the depression of spirit that follow a visit to the Royal Academy? It is not the number of the pictures. After walking for hours in the National Gallery or the Louvre or the Uffizi Palace you may feel tired in body, and perhaps in mind, but you do not feel depressed in spirit: you feel elevated, exhilarated, braced up. It is not that the average of execution is low. There is a vast amount of cleverness in painting to be noticed ; the level of mere executive ability is high. What is it, then? Why, surely this: that the pictures, in spite of being painted with talent, have nothing to say to you; that you come upon scarcely any fresh ideas; that your emotions are unstirred, your mind left vacant, your eyes even unsatisfied. Painting is, after all (or ought to be), a vehicle for the expression of ideas. The mere technical dexterity of brush and palette-knife are but the means, not the end. They are the painter's parts of speech. To knowledge of these a painter who is to win us must add either the profundity of mind that originates ideas or an alert intelligence which picks up the best ideas that are going in its time. A picture that expresses no idea is as wearisome as a babbler who will be talking with nothing worth saying to say. No torment disturbs and harasses the soul more than to be belaboured with empty words and phrases, to undergo a stream of chatter that gives the mind nothing to work upon. There are people, it is true, who can dress up matter of little interest in so attractive a form of words that the charms of the envelope make us forget or overlook the blankness of the sheet enclosed. Just so there are painters who have little to express, but who express it so gracefully that their lack of ideas is gladly forgiven. At the Academy, however, not only have the pictures little or nothing to express; they most of them lack equally any freshness or charm in the manner of expressing it. They are a saddening commentary upon Matthew Arnold's denunciation of our English middle class for (amongst other things) its stunted sense of beauty. They convey no charm. They excite no feeling whatever. They are as commonplace as the mass of the people who trail listlessly before them.

If we adopt this view of the cause that makes the Academy

wearisome, we can make it serve as well to explain a thing that puzzles a number of persons who wish to take an intelligent interest in painting, and this is the supremacy of Mr. Sargent. This year it is less disputable than ever. It is a Sargent year, indeed. His pictures are the only ones that leave a deep impression: among hundreds of meritorious exercises in paint, these stand out with astonishing force and with vivid evidence of a mind fiercely at work. Many people say, 'Now, why are Mr. Sargent's pictures so wonderful? I can't say I like them, and yet '-and yet no one can help feeling their power and their fascination. Why? Why, for the very reason that Mr. Sargent has something to express, that he has something to say to you, that you feel, in front of his work, that your stock of ideas is the larger, that you are looking at something from a fresh point of view. He sees things for himself; his vision is as individual as was the vision of Velasquez. He looks at a figure and he sees in a moment all its harmonies and contrasts of colour, all the play of light and shade upon it, how to express its lines in the most striking manner, how to convey to you the impression which, as a whole, it leaves upon him. More than this, too, for he forms at the same time an impression of character, and he leaves upon the canvas the record of that as well. In his painting he carries realism very far, but it is always subjective and never objective realism. He never tries to paint things exactly as they are by common consent, but exactly as they present themselves to him. He has the intuitive gift which great art always possesses of knowing what to leave out. He chooses the materials for his effect with the same unhesitating swiftness and rightness that characterised Greek art. His convention is scarcely ever at fault. He merges the individual in the universal without apparent effort. The miracle is accomplished to all appearance between one brush-stroke and the next. There is nothing photographic or slavish about realism of this nature, which is, in truth, nothing but the ability to convey impressions with the utmost directness and power. His pictures may give you pleasure or they may not. Of those at the Academy, that of the two ladies-one of his most perfectly painted portraitsa picture that has all the certainty of handling and all the maturity of style of the great English portrait-painters-this one can scarcely be called pleasing. The family groups, on the other hand, may be enjoyed without any awkward feeling of intrusion, without any confused uncertainty as to whether one ought not to murmur an apology and pass discreetly by. He has painted the children in these with far more feeling for the charm of childhood than he showed in his portrait of the little girl with the riding-whip at the New Gallery last year. But, whether they please or do not please, there can be no question that Mr. Sargeant's pictures do express ideas.

For a painter to express ideas, however, even though he express them with the greatest possible skill of hand, is not quite enough to make him a great painter. The next question we must ask ourselves is: Does he express noble ideas-ideas that fill us with noble emotions-ideas that are beautiful and serviceable and true? We are not now quite so sure of our ground. There is much that is very beautiful in Mr. Sargent's work-the red velvet robe and the red rose in the Wertheimer portrait, the marvellous painting of detail— tapestry, cabinet, bric-a-brac-in the Sitwell group, the lamp in the portrait of Professor Bywater. But do his pictures leave with us the feeling that our range of appreciation has been widened? Do they give us that lasting satisfaction which comes from the contemplation of real forms so treated as to come near to the ideal? Before me as I write there hang six small-quite small-reproductions of famous portraits of women by Reynolds, Romney, Gainsborough, Raeburn, and Lawrence. The delight of these is inexhaustible. No one could grow weary of them. They are a perpetual refreshment. Now, will Mr. Sargent's pictures reproduced small in a hundred years' time give this same sort of pleasure? Do they give it now? For myself I answer: No, they do not. And why do they not? Surely, it can only be because they fall short of our conceptions of the beautiful; because we do not feel in them any striving after an ideal of beauty; because, though they do offer us ideas, they do not offer us the noblest ideas, the ideas that must animate the work of a great painter.

What ought to be the painter's constant aim, if not to interpret to his fellows the forms of Nature and to show their underlying perfection? For painting,' wrote Cennino Cennini, 'we must be endowed both with imagination and with skill of hand, so as first to discover unseen things concealed beneath the obscurity of natural objects, and then to arrest them with the hand, presenting to the sight that which before did not appear to exist.' And Ruskin meant just the same thing, though he expressed it less clearly, when he wrote that all the noblest pictures . . . are true or inspired ideals, seen in a moment to be ideal; that is to say, the result of all the highest powers of the imagination, engaged in the discovery and apprehension of the purest truths, and having so arranged them as best to show their preciousness and exalt their clearness.' How far are the painters of to-day from realising these precepts! Most are content to offer us the baldest transcripts from Nature. It is well, indeed, if we can recognise in their canvases the works of Nature at all. A painter lacking the sense of beauty has mistaken his craft. His industry is futile, had better have been devoted to some more useful end. And why do the painters of to-day lack the sense of beauty? Because they do not study to steep themselves in beautiful ideas. Draw and paint what you see,' cry the false prophets of Art. Never mind what it is so long as the public can recognise it and not

feel bewildered and out of their depth. O foolish Galatians! who hath bewitched you?' One of the surest signs of greatness in a work of art is that it shall bewilder those who look upon it, bewilder them by its suggestion of infinite, undreamed-of possibilities of loveliness. And it is only by seeking after these possibilities, 'always without intermission either on holidays or weekdays' (to quote the excellent Cennini once more), that 'good practice becomes a second nature,' and the painter's understanding, 'being always accustomed to gather the flowers, would scarcely know how to take the thorns.' Study Bellini's pictures, and you will see how he arrived gradually and painfully, only after toil and tribulation, at the perfect type of Madonna which gladdens life for many of us after all these centuries. He set before himself the ideal of his imagination, but it was long before his skill of hand could carry out exactly the behest of his mind. No doubt there were plenty of cheerful Venetians who said to Bellini, 'Why take so much trouble? Paint what you see.'

Well, you may say, in Bellini's time, in Italy throughout all the fourteenth and fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, life was so fair a thing that all painters had need to do was to paint what they saw. Never believe it. Was there no squalor, no ugliness, no brutality in Venice, and Florence, and Siena, and Assisi, when the Quattrocentists were covering every church wall with their gracious and beautiful fancies? Read the chroniclers and see. Even such a painter as Carpaccio, who did paint what he saw and whose fascinating interiors (as the bedroom of St. Ursula, the house of the Blessed Virgin, and the study of St. Jerome) tell us with faithful exactitude what the dwellings of his day were like-even Carpaccio must have selected with infinite pains what he had best leave out. Where did Bellini see the face of the Madonna in the Frari Church at Venice? Where did Della Robbia see the rapt expression of the St. Francis in his exquisite altar-piece in the Convent of the Osservanza near Siena? Where did Beltraffio see the entrancing type of childhood that hangs in the delightful little picture gallery at Bergamo? Of course, they did not see them, they imagined them, and this is what the greatest painters in the world have all done. They have gazed more deeply into the objects they painted than would be possible for the rest of mankind. They have 'discovered unseen things' (of course Cennini meant beautiful things') 'concealed beneath the obscurity of natural objects.' They have set down as far as in them lay exact renderings of their ideal forms of beauty. Sometimes they completely failed in one direction. Crivelli's faces are nearly all grotesquely ugly. Luca Signorelli in his figure-drawing seldom hit the happy mean between effort and grace. Mantegna failed again and again to represent horses correctly. But you may see how they strove against their failings and how keen their sense of beauty was. Though they might fall short of achievement, there was never any slackening of effort, never any conscious abandonment of the ideal.

It is just this untiring pursuit of the ideal that is so sadly to seek in the painting of to-day. There seems to be a minimum of mental effort devoted by painters to their work, a sluggish acceptance of the outsides of things as the only possible concern of the artist. The few who do stand out from amongst the mass in this respect stand out with a distinction which shows at once what a difference an ideal of beauty makes to a painter's work-even though it be an ideal that he shares with but a few. What made Burne-Jones's fame? Simply and solely his unswerving pursuit of his ideals. Whether he was or was not one of the world's great painters, as he certainly was one of the world's greatest masters of design, the future must say. But this is beyond question: that there was in him the same spirit which animates the greatest painters. He had a clear conception of what he considered the beautiful, and he followed it with steadiness of purpose and a wholesome disregard of the opinions of others. Everything he did bore upon it not only the stamp of that sincerity which commands respect and even reverence, but the impress also of a mind given over solely to the search for truth, which is the highest form of beauty, and beauty which is the surest envelope of truth.

Of how many painters can this be said to-day? The most of them float hither and thither, borne about by every wind of popular fancy, every gust of pictorial fashion. Those who pursue the even tenor of some way they have made their own pursue it with a mechanical regularity that is pathetically meaningless from any point of view but the rigidly commercial. The few who paint with their heads and with their hearts, and with understanding of what should be the painter's aim, have to be sought here and there, and win the appreciation of the few only. You find them here and there even upon the walls of Burlington House. Mr. Waterhouse never abandons the pursuit of the ideal. Mr. Abbey's Crusaders have a light in their eyes that fills the picture with force and meaning; it may be restless in composition, a little hard in colour, too, even allowing for the clear thin air of Palestine, but it tells us what the painter felt. Mr. Ridley Corbet's Val d'Arno is full of an ineffable charm, emotional in the right sense. The winning radiance of evening light, the grey solemnity of gathering dusk, the spacious beauty of the plain with its distant, guardant hills, have entered into the artist's soul, and, because he felt deeply, he had the power to communicate his emotion to all capable of sharing it. Mr. Byam Shaw's colour sense may lead him on the right lines; he seems to strive; but he is principally a decorator, and his ideas are not of the first order. Mr. Shannon's Flower Girl has beauty and an engaging quality of tenderMr. Clausen's study of dusks and lights has something of the grand style about it. Mr. La Thangue fills and refreshes the eye with his sunlight and open air, but does not paint with any emotional force. In the Sculpture Rooms, amongst a good deal of Canovery,' and many

ness.