Read Complete Works of Wilkie Collins Online
Authors: Wilkie Collins
“Don’t forget the salad, gentlemen,” he exclaims. “The emblem, as I always fancy, of human life. The sharp vinegar corrected by the soft oil, just as the misfortune of one day is compensated by the luck of another. Heigh-ho! let moralists lecture as they will, what a true gambler’s existence ours is, by the very nature of it! Love, fame, wealth, are the stakes we all play for; the world is the table; Death keeps the house, and Destiny shuffles the cards. According to my definition, gentlemen, man is a gambling animal, and woman — ” Endless pauses for a moment, and lifts the glass to his lips to give himself a bacchanalian air before he amazes the company with a torrent of eloquence on the subject of woman. Unhappy man! in that one moment Mr. Spoke Wheeler seizes on his host’s brilliant gambling metaphor, and runs away with it as his own property immediately.
“The worst of gambling,” he says, with a look of ominous wisdom, “is, that when once a man takes to it, he can never be got to give it up again. It always ends in ruin. I know a man whose son is in the Fleet, and whose daughter is a maid of all work at a lodging-house. The poor devil himself once had twenty thousand pounds, and he now picks up a living by writing begging-letters. All through gambling. Degrading vice, certainly; ruins a man’s temper and health, too, as well as his property. Ah! a very degrading vice — very much so, indeed!”
“I am afraid, my dear sir, you have novices,” says Endless, getting angry and sarcastic as a fresh pause follows this undeniable commonplace. “The bottle stands with you. Do you abjure even that most amiable of human failings — the cheerful glass? Ha!” exclaims Endless, seeing that his guest is going to speak again, and vainly imagining that he can cut him short this time, “Ha! what a debt we owe to the first man who discovered the true use of the grape! How drunk he must have got in making his immortal preliminary experiments! How often his wife must have begged him to consider his health and his respectability, and give up all further investigations! How he must have shocked his family with perpetual hiccoughs, and puzzled the medical men of the period with incurable morning headaches! To the health of that marvelous, that magnificent, that inestimable human being, the first toper in the world! The patriarchal Bacchus quaffing in his antediluvian vineyard! What a picture, gentlemen; what a subject for our artists! Scumble, my dear friend,” continues Endless, breathlessly, feeling that Mr. Spoke Wheeler has got his topic again, and anxious to secure assistance in preventing that persistent gentleman from making any use of the stolen property — ”Scumble, your pencil alone is worthy of the subject. Tell us, my prince of painters, how would you treat it?”
The prince of painters has his mouth full of turkey, and looks more puzzled than flattered by this complimentary appeal. He hesitates, and Mr. Spoke Wheeler darts into the conversation on the subject of drunkenness forthwith.
“I’ll tell you what,” says the Talk-Stopper, “we may all joke about drunkenness as much as we please — I’m no saint, and I like a joke as well as anybody — but it’s a deuced serious thing for all that. Seven-tenths of the crime in this country is owing to drunkenness; and of all the incurable diseases that baffle the doctors, delirium tremens is (next to hydrophobia) one of the worst. I like a cheerful glass myself — and this is uncommonly good wine we are drinking now — but there’s more than you think for to be said on the temperance side of the question; there is, indeed!”
Will even the most indiscriminate of the surviving admirers of Endless, and of the great talkers generally, venture to assert that he, or they, could have shown off with the slightest approach to success in the company of Mr. Spoke Wheeler, or of Mrs. Marblemug, or of Colonel Hopkirk, or of any of the other dozens on dozens of notorious talk-stoppers whose characters I refrain from troubling the reader with? Surely not! Surely I have quoted examples enough to prove the correctness of my theory, that the days when the eminent professors of the Art of Conversation could be sure of perpetually attentive audiences, have gone by. Instead of mourning over the loss of the great talkers, we ought to feel relieved (if we have any real regard for them, which I sometimes doubt) by their timely departure from the scene. Between the members of the modern generation who would not have listened to them, the members who could not have listened to them, and the members who would have confused, interrupted, and cut them short, what extremities of compulsory silence they must have undergone if they had lasted until our time! Our case may be lamentable enough in not having heard them; but how much worse would theirs be if they came back to the world now, and tried to show us how they won their reputations!
IF anything I can say here on the subject of the Painter’s Art will encourage intelligent people of any rank to turn a deaf ear to all that critics, connoisseurs, lecturers, and compilers of guide-books can tell them; to trust entirely to their own common sense when they are looking at pictures; and to express their opinions boldly, without the slightest reference to any precedents whatever — I shall have exactly achieved the object with which I now apply myself to the writing of this paper.
Let me first ask, in regard to pictures in general, what it is that prevents the public from judging for themselves, and why the influence of Art in England is still limited to select circles — still unfelt, as the phrase is, by all but the cultivated classes? Why do people want to look at their guide-books before they can make up their minds about an old picture? Why do they ask connoisseurs and professional friends for a marked catalogue before they venture inside the walls of the exhibition rooms in Trafalgar Square? Why, when they are, for the most part, always ready to tell each other unreservedly what books they like, or what musical compositions are favorites with them, do they hesitate the moment pictures turn up as a topic of conversation, and intrench themselves doubtfully behind such cautious phrases as, “I don’t pretend to understand the subject,” “I believe such and such a picture is much admired,” “I am no judge,” and so on?
No judge! Does a really good picture want you to be a judge? Does it want you to have anything but eyes in your head, and the undisturbed possession of your senses? Is there any other branch of intellectual art which has such a direct appeal, by the very nature of it, to every sane human being as the art of painting? There it is, able to represent through a medium which offers itself to you palpably, in the shape of so many visible feet of canvas, actual human facts, and distinct aspects of nature, which poetry can only describe, and which music can but obscurely hint at. The art which can do this — and which has done it over and over again both in past and present times — is surely of all arts that one which least requires a course of critical training before it can be approached on familiar terms. Whenever I see an intelligent man, which I often do, standing before a really eloquent and true picture, and asking his marked catalogue, or his newspaper, or his guide-book, whether he may safely admire it or not — I think of a man standing winking both eyes in the full glare of a cloudless August noon, and inquiring deferentially of an astronomical friend whether he is really justified in saying that the sun shines!
But we have not yet fairly got at the main obstacle which hinders the public from judging of pictures for themselves, and which, by a natural consequence, limits the influence of art on the nation generally. For my own part, I have long thought, and shall always continue to believe, that this same obstacle is nothing more nor less than the Conceit of Criticism, which has got obstructively between Art and the people — which has kept them asunder, and will keep them asunder, until it is fairly pulled out of the way, and set aside at once and forever in its proper background place.
This is a bold thing to say; but I think I can advance some proofs that my assertion is not altogether so wild as it may appear at first sight. By the Conceit of Criticism I desire to express, in one word, the conventional laws and formulas, the authoritative rules and regulations which individual men set up to guide the tastes and influence the opinions of their fellow-creatures. When Criticism does not speak in too arbitrary a language, and when the laws it makes are ratified by the consent and approbation of intelligent people in general, I have as much respect for it as any one. But when Criticism sits altogether apart, speaks opinions that find no answering echo in the general heart, and measures the greatness of intellectual work by anything rather than by its power of appealing to all capacities for admiration and enjoyment, from the very highest to the very humblest — then, as it seems to me, criticism becomes the expression of individual conceit, and forfeits all claim to consideration and respect. From that moment, it is obstructive — for it has set itself up fatally between the art of painting and the honest and general appreciation of that art by the people.
Let me try to make this still clearer by an example. A great deal of obstructive criticism undoubtedly continues to hang as closely as it can about poetry and music. But there are, nevertheless, statable instances, in relation to these two arts, of the voice of the critic and the voice of the people being on the same side. The tragedy of “Hamlet, “for example, is critically considered to be the masterpiece of dramatic poetry; and the tragedy of “Hamlet” is also, according to the testimony of every sort of manager, the play, of all others, which can be invariably depended on to fill a theater with the greatest certainty, act it when and how you will. Again, in music, the “Don Giovanni” of Mozart, which is the admiration even of the direst pedant producible from the ranks of musical connoisseurs, is also the irresistible popular attraction which is always sure to fill the pit and gallery at the opera. Here, at any rate, are two instances in which two great achievements of the past in poetry and music are alike viewed with admiration by the man who appreciates by instinct and the man who appreciates by rule.
If we apply the same test to the achievements of the past in painting, where shall we find a similar instance of genuine concurrence between the few who are appointed to teach and the many who are expected to learn?
I put myself in the position of a man of fair capacity and average education, who labours under the fatal delusion that he will be helped to a sincere appreciation, of the works of the Old Masters by asking critics and connoisseurs to form his opinions for him. I am sent to Italy as a matter of course. A general chorus of learned authorities tells me that Michael Angelo and Raphael are the two greatest painters that ever lived; and that the two recognised masterpieces of the highest high art are the “Last Judgment,” in the Sistine Chapel, and the “Transfiguration,” in the Vatican picture-gallery. It is not only Lanzi and Vasari, and hosts of later sages running smoothly along the same critical grooves, who give me this information. Even the greatest of English, portrait-painters, Sir Joshua Reynolds, sings steadily with the critical chorus, note for note. When experience has made me wiser, I am able to detect clearly enough, in the main principles which Reynolds has adopted in his Lectures on Art, the reason of his notorious want of success whenever he tried to rise above portraits to the regions of historical painting. But at the period of my innocence, I am simply puzzled and amazed, when I come to such a passage as the following in Sir Joshua’s famous Fifth Lecture, where he sums up the comparative merits of Michael Angelo and Raphael:
“If we put these great artists in a line of comparison with each other” (lectures Sir Joshua), “Raphael had more taste and fancy, Michael Angelo more genius and imagination. The one excelled in beauty, the other in energy. Michael Angelo had more of the poetical inspiration; his ideas are vast and sublime; his people are a superior order of beings; there is nothing about them, nothing in the air of their actions or their attitudes, or the style and cast of their limbs or features, that reminds us of their belonging to our own species.”
Here I get plainly enough at what Sir Joshua considers to be the crowning excellence of high art. It is one great proof of the poetry and sublimity of Michael Angelo’s pictures that the people represented in them never remind us of our own species; which seems equivalent to saying that the representation of a man made in the image of Michael Angelo is a grander sight than the representation of a man made in the image of God. I am a little staggered by these principles of criticism; but as all the learned authorities that I can get at seem to have adopted them, I do my best to follow the example of my teachers, and set off reverently for Rome to see the two works of art which my critical masters tell me are the sublimest pictures that the world has yet beheld.
I go first to the Sistine Chapel; and, on a great blue-coloured wall at one end of it, I see painted a confusion of naked, knotty-bodied figures, sprawling up or tumbling down below a single figure, posted aloft in the middle, and apparently threatening the rest with his hand. If I ask Lanzi, or Vasari, or Sir Joshua Reynolds, or the gentleman who has compiled “Murray’s Hand-book for Central Italy,” or any other competent authorities, what this grotesquely startling piece of painter’s work can possibly be, I am answered that it is actually intended to represent the unimaginably awful spectacle of the Last Judgment! And I am further informed that, estimated by the critical tests applied to it by these competent authorities, the picture is pronounced to be a masterpiece of grandeur and sublimity. I resolve to look a little closer at this celebrated work, and to try if I can get at any fair estimate of it by employing such plain, uncritical tests as will do for me and for everybody.