Discourses delivered to the students of the Royal Academy

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REYNOLDS DISCOURSES yVvSWtSW

Speaking of the value of Reynolds' Discourses to art students of the present day GEORGE CLAUSEN, A.R.A.,

Preface

It is a pleasure to acknowledge help received from friends in many discussions of the more difficult and abstract questions suggested by Reynolds' theories. My thanks are due to many, but I wish to acknowledge my indebtedness in particular to the late Mr Theodore Llewelyn Davies and the Hon. Bertrand Russell for assistance in elucidating the philosophical, and to Mr W. Bateson, F.R.S., in the scientific, ideas involved in Reynolds' conception of beauty as the common form. I have also derived assistance from Mr G. Santayana's admirable study of aesthetics, " The Sense of Beauty."

The introductions have in one or two cases taken inevitably the form of commentaries. In such cases — of which that of the Third Discourse is the most aggravated — the reader will do well to read the introduction after and not before the Discourse itself.

I have made some use of almost all previous editions of the Discourses, of which much the most thorough is that published in German by Dr Leisching. I have made use of several of his identifications of Reynolds' classical quotations, but, like him, I have failed to find the simile attributed to Pliny the younger on p. 151. All other editors have maintained on this and many other points a discreet silence.

In the illustrations I have selected, so far as possible,

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Preface

the pictures mentioned by Reynolds. I have, however, taken the opportunity to include the works of some artists whom he does not mention, because they seemed necessary to complete the very brief survey of a now forgotten and unfashionable phase of art which was familiar to Reynolds and his hearers. I take this opportunity of thanking Lady Wantage and Mrs Ludwig Mond for their kind permission to reproduce pictures in their possession.

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Of Reynolds the man there is no need to speak here at length; the outlines of his character are so simple, so familiar, they have been retraced so often by his contemporaries and successors, and that with such a remarkable uniformity of commendation — if we except a few spiteful phrases in Cunningham's Life and the singular view of his actions taken by Sir Walter Armstrong — that to repeat them here again would be superfluous. One need only refer to the rounded completeness and harmony, the deliberation and method he showed in all his undertakings, and the freedom from all that is petty or narrow, which distinguished him in life as much as in art, and made each so nicely complementary to the other. And as a critic his moral qualities, his sweet reasonableness, his elevation and detachment of mind, and — to put down his limitations as well — a certain eighteenth-century cautiousness which sometimes gives the appearance of coldness — profoundly affect his work. It is to them he owes the power to hold the balance true between praise and blame — the nice poise of mind which for just criticism is so necessary, and yet so rare, a complement to keenness of perception and quick sensibility. In any case, it is not a little to these moral qualities that the Discourses owe their permanent value. The geniality of

vii the man arouses our affection, and, disarming all querulous and captious opposition, inclines us to a favourable attitude for learning.

Of Reynolds as an artist also this is not the place to speak in detail. But since it affects the value of his teaching we must consider briefly the charge of inconsistency brought against him. Cunningham in his Life says : " Barry was a proud artist and a suspicious man. . . . He followed his own ideas in the course he pursued, but probably he reflected that he was also obeying the reiterated injunctions of Sir Joshua, who, constantly, in his public lectures and private counsels, admonished all who loved what was noble and sublime to study the great masters and labour at the grand style. This study had brought Barry to a garret and a crust ; the neglect of it had spread the table of Reynolds with that sluttish abundance wThich Courteney describes, and put him in a coach with gilded wheels and the seasons painted on its panels." The fact is as true as the implication of motive is unfair. Reynolds found by his own failures in poetical composition that he had not the particular gift of invention, without which such work falls into turgid rhetoric, and though he continued from time to time in such endeavours he probably never concealed from himself his real failure. He saw that his imagination was interpretative rather than creative; that it was stimulated by definite objects before his eyes rather than by poetical ideas ; and he conceived that his real work lay in giving to portraiture something

viii of the representative and universal character which is the mark of the greatest creations. Still more, he saw that it might be enriched by all the beauties of what he defined as the ornamental style. Thus it comes about that he scarcely ever attempted the Michelangelesque — the Mrs Siddons as the Tragic Muse is, indeed, almost the only work which gives palpable proof of Reynolds' prolonged study of the Sistine Chapel. On the other hand, he found the beauties of the Caracci more within his range, and in several works, notably the St John the Baptist, in Sir Frederick Cook's collection, he strove to surpass Lodovico's quality of colour, and to approximate to his refinement of design. No less marked at times is the influence of Guercino in the general lighting and disposition of his portraits, and of Guido Reni in the movement and expression. But Reynolds must have been aware that he never could compass mastery in draughtsmanship, and that for him expression must take for the most part the way of chiaroscuro and colour. He studied Rembrandt, and still more Tintoretto, for the former, and Titian above all for the latter, while his feeling for Rubens amounted at times to enthusiastic admiration. The notion that Reynolds as a critic ought to have bound himself within the limits of his own talent as an artist, that he was to recommend others to do no more than he had done himself, is palpably absurd. It is just because he had the gift, an unusual one among artists, of rising to a general view of art as a whole, and of regarding his own performance with objective impartiality, that he is so remarkable

ix as a critic. He was, moreover, intensely optimistic about the future of art in England, and he, therefore, looked forward to a generation which should surpass himself as much, or more, than he had surpassed Hudson and Richardson. That he put before the rising generation ideals higher than he himself could compass is a sign only of his generosity and detachment from personal feelings.

In considering Reynolds as a critic we come to the crucial question of the value of Reynolds' Discourses for the artist and amateur of to-day. The present edition has been undertaken from a belief that their value still persists, that the Discourses are not merely a curious and entertaining example of eighteenth-century literature, but that they contain principles, and exhibit a mental attitude, which are of the highest value to the artist. The artist can make as little use of the pure aesthetics of professed philosophers as the practical engineer can of the higher mathematics ; what he requires is an applied crsthetics, and it is rarely indeed that a writer has at once the practical knowledge and the power of generalisation requisite to produce any valuable work in this difficult and uncertain science. Reynolds was one of the first, and he remains one of the best, who have attempted it. He keeps, as a rule, close to the point at which the artist must attack the problems of aesthetics, and he succeeds in proportion as he does so. When he endeavours to find support in abstract philosophical principles he is less happy, though he never fails to be ingenious and suggestive. It results

x from this — from his approaching the subject with the artist rather than with the philosopher — that his methods will often be found of real value even when the greater knowledge and greater critical insight which our generation may justly claim, invalidate his conclusions.

Reynolds' limitations are obvious enough to us; for him classical sculpture was summed up in the Apollo Belvedere and the Portland Vase, and Italian painting began with Michelangelo and Raphael. To suppose that this argues a lack of critical power on Reynolds' part is unfair; he was the child of his time, and his caution prevented him from venturing on what would have appeared impossible paradoxes to his contemporaries. Rather, one may well be surprised at the many small indications of his appreciation of primitive art. It is not improbable that in his Discourses he may have minimised this admiration out of deference to contemporary opinion, for the strongest expressions of it are found in his more intimate notes on a "Journey to Flanders and Holland." There we find a genuine admiration of Hubert van Eyck's altarpiece at Ghent ; 1 and a comparison between Jan van Eyck's altarpiece at Bruges with two heads by Rubens to the disadvantage of the latter. Elsewhere he admires pictures by Pieter Breughel 2 and Quentin Matsys.

1 " It contains a great number of figures in a hard manner, but there is great character of truth and nature in the heads, and the landscape is well coloured."

2 " This painter was totally ignorant of all the mechanical art of making a picture ; but there is here a great quantity of thinking, a representation of variety of distress, enough for twenty modern pictures. In this respect he is like Donne, as distinguished from the modern

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Again, in his Italian sketch-book, now in the British Museum, we find, as Mr Laurence Binyon was the first to point out,1 studies from Mantegna's Eremitani frescoes. In his own collection were to be found two Holbeins, a Durer, a Quentin Matsys, a Lucas van Leyden, a Pieter Breughel ; nor was he blind to the beauties of Memlinc, since he bought for a patron the exquisite Madonna now in the Goldschmidt Collection in Paris. We are rather, then, forced to the conclusion that Reynolds was ahead of his generation in critical acumen ; that he was, in fact, on the verge of making the discovery of primitive art, and that had he thought fit in the Discourses to give free rein to these inclinations instead of repressing them he would have appeared as a pioneer in art criticism.

As it is, however, the difference between his survey of art and that which we now command is great enough to make it a question for us how far it destroys the value of his teaching.

The two great discoveries made since Reynolds wrote are the discovery of Greek as opposed to Gncco-Roman art, and the discovery of the art of the Middle Ages and early Renaissance. These discoveries both make in the same direction — the discovery of Greek art has dissipated for our eyes the over-blown beauties of that

versifiers, who, carrying no weight of thought, easily fall into that false gallop of verses which Shakespeare ridicules in * As you like it.' 99

" It is much more entertaining to look at the works of those old masters than slight commonplace pictures of many modern painters/'

1 Catalogue of Drawings by British Artists, preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum. By Laurence Binyon, vol. iii. p. 206.

xii art which kindled the enthusiasm of Winkelmann and Goethe. The discovery of Botticelli and Van Eyck, though it has not lessened our love for Michelangelo, and has hardly interfered with Raphael's fame, has made us unfairly indifferent to the beauties of seventeenth-century Italian art. Moreover, we now recognise the essential kinship between Greek and Gothic sculpture. Classic and Gothic have ceased to be opposites, and the frontier has become one of time rather than place. The degree of development of an art, not the race or the religion that produced it, has become the essential point. Our warmest affections have turned from a later to an earlier stage of that development ; we love sincerity and intensity of feeling more than the artifices of a careful rhetoric.

And hence arises a question which must be faced. It is impossible for us to doubt that the beauties we find in Mantegna and Van Eyck are real artistic beauties, and yet most of Reynolds' precepts are directed towards a kind of beauty which is at least very different from theirs, possibly incompatible with it. There runs throughout the Discourses a constant appeal to the student to aim, above all, at unity. He is to look with the "dilated eye," to seize the general effect, to avoid all detail which will interfere with this; to subordinate and sacrifice parts, however excellent and expressive in themselves, to this general agreement and coherence of the parts in the whole. Reynolds does not deny that other methods are possible to the artist, as his unstinted praise of Jan Steen declares, but he appears to deny that any other method is compatible with

xiii the lofty key of great imaginative art. And in so far as he does this we are bound, I think, to differ from him, and to admit the possibility of another kind of unity, even in the grand style.

There are, in fact, two contending principles in art — one of which makes for richness of content, the other for unity of expression. Some kind of balance between these seems to be necessary for a great work, since, on the one hand, a chaos of unrelated forms, however beautiful in themselves, would distress us by the impossibility of bringing them together ; and, on the other hand, a skilfully arranged composition of vapid and meaningless forms could only arouse a languid interest in the artist's dexterity. Two examples may make this clear. As an example of such a unity as Reynolds had in view we may take the Rubens's altarpiece of St Augustine at Antwerp ; for our other the Worship of the Lamb, by Van Eyck, in St Bavon's at Ghent.

In Rubens's picture, almost before the eye has had time to realise what the forms represent, it is struck by the completeness and unity of the pattern they make. The great spiral curve of figures which descends from the Virgin's throne, and ends in the nude figure of St Sebastian, is reinforced again by a second variant of the main theme in the great diagonal of the bishop to the right ; higher up, the extraordinary figure of St John the Baptist seems to find its only explanation in the admirable way that it takes up again the line, and carries it into the clouds, whence it re-enters the composition by the diagonal of the curtain. In such a composition the unity is so self-contained, the

xiv lines return so completely into the pattern, that we cannot imagine its being continued outside the limits of the frame. The parts cohere like the atoms in a molecule, so that we feel that the detachment of one part would break up the whole conformation. Now, such a disposition affects the mind vividly, and predisposes the imagination to be moved by the images which present themselves to the eye with such a single impact, but it can hardly be accomplished without sacrifices. Even a Rubens, exuberant inventor and vital delineator as he was, in order to accede to the demands of so vigorous a scheme of pattern, has to give to some of his figures more strained and more theatrical poses than either their character or the situation quite demand — and that precisely because, in those rhetorical gesticulations of arms and legs, there is a greater flexibility and flow of contour than in poses more self-contained. These figures have vitality, extraordinary vitality, and some of them have even noble character; but it is not the life or the character that quite agrees with the finest conception of such a scene : the character cannot here be rendered in its profounder aspects. Amid all this turmoil of convolved forms only the salient and obvious distinctions can be seized, and these must be so underlined, in order that they may tell at all, that there is no room for finer shades. There is not one of these saints that seizes the imagination deeply enough to join that circle of ideal characters which dwells permanently in our minds and becomes a part of our life.

Let us turn now to our example of the opposite

xv tendency in art, in which wealth and intensity of content is aimed at before formal unity.

In Van Eyck's altarpiece we have an open stretch of undulating country, fertile and intensely green, with here and there thickets and bosky dells. Through this land there converge in a central space bands of holy men and women, coming forward to where the Lamb stands on an altar by the Fountain of Life. With all this mass of detail ; these crowds of people, each one carefully and separately realised ; these thick woods, where each branch, each leaf, is perfectly delineated, we can scarcely expect to find any large pattern in the forms, any dominating silhouette, any of those leading lines and large contrasts, which bound together Rubens' design. We find a generally symmetric arrangement of the groups of figures, one nearer and one more distant group on either side of the central altar and fountain ; but there is no apparatus by which these are summed up, there is no system of subordination by which the eye can deal with a whole group as a single mass, and count it as a single unit in the design. Each of the foremost groups contains nearly fifty figures, and each figure is realised as an end in itself.

And yet, though there is no unity in Reynolds' sense, if we examine the picture in detail we shall find the most marvellous sense of relationship in the parts — not a face of all these hundreds but has that stamp of uniformity which makes for us a definite character, not a fold of drapery that does not fall harmoniously with its neighbours, not a spray of foliage which fails of the rhythm expressive of organic life. As the eye

xvi follows along any contour it will be conscious of purpose, and singular Tightness of purpose, in each minutest change of form; it will find that down to the smallest atomic divisions of the parts the pervading sense of creative purpose informs and animates the design. Now, this implies a highly-developed sense of relationship and rhythm, and these are the essentials of that unity which Reynolds so rightly praises. What are we to say, then, of Van Eyck's failure to attain the same visible unity in his whole composition which the separate parts discover so unmistakably? The answer is that his parts cohere by reason of a different principle. Visibly, indeed, they cohere only by the general symmetry of disposition, which is here a weak and negative force, affording, as it were, an intellectual approval of order rather than any strong visual gratification or assistance. But we must consider that the unity is here essentially poetic and imaginative, and not visual. It lies in the conception of all these kings and heroes, saints and virgins, gathering from all parts of the earth to adore the mystic Lamb. That, it is true, might have been visibly realised in an arrangement of large silhouettes and strong chiaroscuro — we can imagine Tintoretto treating it as he treated the story of the eleven thousand virgins — and such an arrangement would have conformed to Reynolds' conception of unity. But this would have been at the cost of telling us only that a number of people came together to worship the Lamb, and Van Eyck wanted to tell us who these people were, and in what a place, adorned with what miraculous beauties of fruit and flowers. To b xvii do this he was obliged to give to each part the fullest possible detail; and when he has told us who each of these men and women were, given us a sense of the reality and the nobility of each saint and hero — a reality almost as insistent as that of a character in Shakespeare — the fact that these great, and to us now intimately known, men and lovable women have gathered around the Lamb has an altogether richer and more stimulating effect on our emotions than any mere representation of a scenic effect, however imposing.

It would appear, then, that the unity of a picture may lie in its perfect conformity to a poetical idea, as well as in the subordination of its parts to a single easily-apprehended pattern ; and that where, as in Van Eyck's picture, that poetical idea can only be strongly aroused by the complete and independent realisation of all the parts, this may yet acquire such a hold upon the mind that the enjoyment of each part is indefinitely heightened by the consciousness of its relation to that ideal whole. So that, although we can get no very intense feeling, if we regard the picture with the "dilated pupil," the eye being constantly baffled by the multiplicity and insubordinate equality of the parts, yet as we examine it in detail, as we in imagination walk over the enamelled meadows, and address in turn each of these profound and stately, but intensely human, spirits, we experience an intense imaginative satisfaction at finding them thus brought together, and at finding in so delectable a place such fit inhabitants.

Some such reflection as this seems needful if we are still to apply Reynolds's doctrine of unity and yet

xviii retain our new-found admiration for that primitive art which at first sight seems to contradict it so palpably.

If, then, Reynolds' value as a critic is not altogether impaired for us by his ignorance of certain aspects of art with which we are now familiar, we shall certainly be ready to admit his value as a teacher. Nor has there ever been a time since their first publication when the main tendencies of his teaching were likely to be better understood than the present. Reynolds' contention was that art was not a mechanical trick of imitation, but a mode of expression of human experience, and one that no civilised human society could afford to neglect ; that this expression required for its perfection serious intellectual effort, and that, however diverse the forms it might take, it depended on principles which were more or less discoverable in the great traditions of past masters. He regarded this tradition as embodying, approximately, these fundamental principles somewhat as the actual laws of a country embody the ideals of jurisprudence. Finally, he maintained a belief in the possibility of an organised cooperative advance in the knowledge of these principles of artistic expression comparable in some degree with the advance in scientific knowledge.

That his hopes in these respects have not been fulfilled is no proof that they are altogether vain. There have been times when tradition did secure this community of knowledge, this gradual building up, step by step and generation after generation, of positive acquisitions in the knowledge of how to find artistic

xix expression for feelings and ideas, and there is nothing chimerical in hoping for their recurrence.

It must, however, be conceded that the history of nineteenth-century art has been uniformly unfavourable to such hopes. Tradition may, indeed, degenerate into complete sterility, for the laws of artistic expression differ in this from those of science, that their value is not fixed once for all — it depends upon the ardour and force of conviction with which they are accepted. For want of this a complete bankruptcy of tradition was reached in the first half of the nineteenth century, and the subsequent history of art has been the story, not of a gradual process of construction, but of successive revolutions, each illuminated by one or more heroic figures, and each ending without establishing more than a provisional government. The greatest art of the period has been an art of revolt, and it bears the trace of its origins in its extravagant individualism, its feverish and quickly exhausted energy, its waste of power in fruitless experiment, and its small actual accomplishment. We have tried, in fact, every alternative ; denied, in turn, every principle that governed the act of the past, and nearly always the genuine artist has been among the iconoclasts.

But this process has left us almost paralysed, without faith, and with no very certain notion of how a work of art is made. Everyone has to build for himself from the foundations for want of that organised and collective experience without which no complete human creation can be brought into being. Ten years ago the revolutionary forces were still strong; it still seemed

xx worth while to destroy and to liberate ; but the rising generation of artists, especially in England, is turning with a new reverence to the art of the past; is beginning to realise that there are definite things to be learned, a positive knowledge to be acquired and handed on from master to pupil ; that there are problems in art the solution of which requires the persistent application of intelligence rather than the improvisation of genius. We are tired of a too self-assertive individualism ; the cult of genius has passed its climax with the death of Whistler; and we are ready to listen with profit to the sage counsels and constructive policy of Reynolds.

Whether we accept his indications of the laws of artistic expression or not — and he himself would have welcomed investigation and correction — we may at least admit that he remains one of the few writers who have approached the subject from the artist's point of view, and that he more than any other has suggested the lines along which profitable generalisations may be deduced from past experience. The mere belief in the existence of law in an activity which is assigned, by romantic enthusiasts on the one hand, and by contemptuous sceptics on the other, to caprice, is already much, and in that belief Reynolds never faltered. His creed may be defined in Goethe's words : " The genuine law-giving artist strives for artistic truth ; the artist who knows no law, but follows a blind inner instinct, strives for natural verisimilitude." 1

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