Chapter VII (2)

In the same spirit, Shaw praised Madox Brown as a realist, “because he had vitality enough to find intense enjoyment in the world as it really is, unbeautified, unidealized, untitivated in any way for artistic consumption.” The sad, sensuous daydreams of Rossetti, the gentlemanly draughtsmanship of Leighton, the whole romantic trend of English art, with its delicacy of sentiment, its beauty-fancying, its reality-shirking philosophy, found Shaw coldly, cruelly condemnatory. “Take the young lady painted by Ingres as 'La Source,' for example. Imagine having to make conversation for her for a couple of hours.” This gives the tone of his criticism. His deepest scorn was aroused by that form of art which sets up “decorative moral systems contrasting roseate and rapturous vice with lilied and languorous virtue, making 'Love' face both ways as the universal softener and redeemer.” The artist who sought to depict life with perfect integrity--in Browning's phrase, “to paint man man, whatever the issue”--the artist who sought to express the veracity and reality of life rather than its imagined beauty and poetry, found in Shaw an unhesitating champion. This passion for unidealized reality was the outcome of long and deliberate study of art works, concerning each of which Shaw deliberately forced himself to form an intelligent and conscious estimate. This was the solid residuum of his studies, rescued from a ruck of sophistication. “I remember once when I was an art critic,” wrote Shaw in 1897, “and when Madox Brown's work was only known to me by a few drawings, treating Mr. Frederick Shields to a critical demonstration of Madox Brown's deficiencies, pointing out in one of the drawings the lack of 'beauty' in some pair of elbows that had more of the wash-tub than of 'The Toilet of Venus' about them. Mr. Shields contrived without any breach of good manners to make it quite clear to me that he considered Madox Brown a great painter and me a fool. I respected both convictions at the time; and now I share them. Only, I plead in extenuation of my folly that I had become so accustomed to take it for granted that what every English painter was driving at was the sexual beautification and moral idealization of life into something as unlike itself as possible, that it did not at first occur to me that a painter could draw a plain woman for any other reason than that he could not draw a pretty one.”[99]

Shaw stood forth as a champion of all forms of art--pictorial, fictive and dramatic--which aim at realistic exposure of the sheer facts of life without idealistic falsification and romantic sublimation. He lauded Madox Brown, for example, as he lauded Ibsen, and for the same reason: they both took for their themes “not youth, beauty, morality, gentility and prosperity as conceived by Mr. Smith of Brixton and Bayswater, but real life taken as it is, with no more regard for poor Smith's dreams and hypocrisies than the weather has for his shiny silk hat when he forgets his umbrella.” It is no matter for surprise that the unshirking student of sociological conditions should have chosen to write _Widowers' Houses_ and _Mrs. Warren's Profession_; it would have been astounding had he not done so. And yet the catholicity of his taste in art enabled him to realize, not simply one aspect of English art, but the real English art-culture of to-day. To Shaw, indeed, the significance of the modern movement in England had its germ in the growing sense of the “naïve dignity and charm” of thirteenth-century work, in a passionate affection for the exquisite beauty of fifteenth-century art. “The whole rhetorical school in English literature, from Shakespeare to Byron,” he once wrote, “appears to us in our present mood only another side of the terrible _dégringolade_ from Michelangelo to Canova and Thorwaldsen, all of whose works would not now tempt us to part with a single fragment by Donatello, or even a pretty foundling baby by Delia Robbia.” He maintained that William Morris made himself the greatest living master of the English language, both in prose and verse, by picking up the tradition of the literary art where Chaucer left it; that Burne-Jones made himself the greatest among English decorative painters by picking up the tradition of his art where Lippi left it, and utterly ignoring “their Raphaels, Correggios and stuff”; and that Morris and Burne-Jones, close friends and co-operators in many a masterpiece, form the highest aristocracy of English art of our day.[100]

The only controversial question that came up during Shaw's period as an art critic was raised by the Impressionists; and his reputation, with the select few, for consistency is sustained by the course he adopted. He recognized Impressionism as a new birth of energy in art, a movement in painting which was wholly beneficial and progressive, and in no sense insane and decadent. Despite the fact that the movement, like all new movements in art, was accompanied by many absurdities--exhibition of countless daubs, the practice of optical distortion, the substitution of “canvases which looked like enlargements of obscure photographs for the familiar portraits of masters of the hounds in cheerfully unmistakable pink coats, mounted on bright chestnut horses”--Shaw supported it vigorously because, “being the outcome of heightened attention and quickened consciousness on the part of its disciples, it was evidently destined to improve pictures greatly by substituting a natural, observant, real style for a conventional, taken-for-granted, ideal one.” It is needless to say that Shaw did not fall into the Philistine trap and talk “greenery yallery” nonsense about Burne-Jones and the pre-Raphaelite school: his admiration was checked by the sternest critical reservations. He applauded the Impressionists for their busy study of the atmosphere, and of the relation of light and dark between the various objects depicted, _i.e._, of “values.” Like Zola in his championship of Monet, Shaw led a miniature crusade in behalf of Whistler, whose pictures at first quite naturally amazed people accustomed to see the “good north light” of a St. John's Wood studio represented at exhibitions as sunlight in the open air--for example, Bouguereau's “Girl in a Cornfield.” More than this need not be said: that Shaw never joined the ranks of the _moqueurs_ who called Mr. Whistler “Jimmy.”

It is worthy of record that Shaw vigorously and ably championed the Dutch school, earnestly advocating the claims of James Maris as a great painter; and he stood up for Van Uhde, not only in defence of his pictures of Christ surrounded by people in tall hats and frock coats, but also in favour of his excellent painting of light in a dry, crisp, diffused way then quite unfashionable. But his most signal art criticism of the last decade, beyond question, has had to do with photography. In 1901, he announced that “the conquest by photography of the whole field of monochromatic representative art may be regarded as completed by the work of this year.” His position is based on the dictum that “in photography, the drawing counts for nothing, the thought and judgment count for everything; whereas in the etching and daubing processes where great manual skill is needed to produce anything that the eye can endure, the execution counts for more than the thought.” This is no new or sudden notion, derived from the study of some photographic exhibition, but the mature statement of a judgment arrived at over a quarter of a century ago. In _An Unsocial Socialist_, Trefusis astounds Erskine and Sir Charles Brandon with those same remarkable views on photography which to-day, in the mouth of Bernard Shaw, so delight the patrons of the Photographic Salon.[101]

“It is more than twenty years since I first said in print
that nine-tenths (or ninety-nine hundredths, I forget which)
of what was then done by brush and pencil would presently
be done, and far better done, by the camera. But it needed
some imagination, as well as some hardihood, to say this at
that time ... because the photographers of that day were not
artists.... Let us admit handsomely that some of the elder
men had the root of the matter in them as the younger men of
to-day; but the process did not then attract artists.... On
the whole, the process was not quite ready for the ordinary
artist, because (1) it could not touch colour or even give
colours their proper light values; (2) the Impressionist
movement had not then rediscovered and popularized the great
range of art that lies outside colour; (3) the eyes of artists
had been so long educated to accept the most grossly fictitious
conventions as truths of representation that many of the
truths of the focussing screen were at first repudiated as
grotesque falsehoods; (4) the wide-angled lens did in effect
lie almost as outrageously as a Royal Academician, whilst the
anastigmat was revoltingly prosaic, and the silver print,
though so exquisite that the best will, if they last, be one
day prized by collectors, was cloying, and only suitable to a
narrow range of subjects; (5) above all, the vestries would
cheerfully pay fifty pounds for a villainous oil-painting
of a hospitable chairman, whilst they considered a guinea a
first-rate price for a dozen cabinets, and two-pound-ten a
noble bid for an enlargement, even when the said enlargement
had been manipulated so as to be as nearly as possible as bad
as the fifty pound painting. But all that is changed nowadays.
Mr. Whistler, in the teeth of a storm of ignorant and silly
ridicule, has forced us to acquire a sense of tone, and has
produced portraits of almost photographic excellence; the
camera has taught us what we really saw as against what the
draughtsman used to show us; and the telephoto lens and its
adaptations, with the isochromatic plate and screen, and the
variety and manageableness of modern printing processes, have
converted the intelligent artists, smashed the picture-fancying
critics, and produced exhibitions such as those now open at
the Dudley and New Galleries, which may be visited by people
who, like myself, have long since given up as unendurable the
follies and falsehoods, the tricks, fakes, happy accidents, and
desolating conventions of the picture galleries. The artists
have still left to them invention, didactics, and (for a
little while longer) colour. But selection and representation,
covering ninety-nine-hundredths of our annual output of art,
belong henceforth to photography. Someday the camera will do
the work of Velásquez and Peter de Hooghe, colour and all; and
then the draughtsmen and painters will be left to cultivate the
pious edifications of Raphael, Kaulbach, Delaroche, and the
designers of the S. P. C. K. But even then they will photograph
their models instead of drawing them.”[102]

In a paper Maurice Maeterlinck wrote for Mr. Alvin Langdon Coburn, who kindly gave me a copy, he charges art with having held itself aloof from “the great movement which for half a century has engrossed all forms of human activity in profitably exploiting the natural forces that fill heaven and earth.” Maeterlinck lauds the camera as an instrument of thought, proclaiming it the best of mediums, because it serves “to portray objects and beings more quickly and more accurately than can pencil or crayon.” Just as Maeterlinck concludes that thought has at last found a fissure through which to penetrate the mystery of this anonymous force (the sun), “invade it, subjugate it, animate it, and compel it to say such things as have not yet been said in all the realm of chiaroscuro, of grace, of beauty and of truth,” so Shaw expresses his belief that “the old game is up,” and that “the camera has hopelessly beaten the pencil and paint-brush as an instrument of artistic representation.”

Shaw is a vigorous champion of the photographic art in its integrity; attempts at imitation of etching or painting draw his hottest fire. The idea of sensitive photographers allowing themselves to be bull-dozed into treating painting, not as an obsolete makeshift which they have surpassed and superseded, but as a glorious ideal to which they have to live up!!! One day Mr. Shaw was showing me some striking examples of his own photographic work--a remarkable picture of Sidney Webb, I recall in especial, an effect got by omitting to do something in taking the photograph. Mr. Shaw remarked that some of the most unique and fantastic pictures he had ever taken were the results of accidents. One day, for instance, he spilled some boiling water over a photograph of himself, which immediately converted it into so capital an imitation of the damaged parts of Mantegna's frescoes in Mantua that the print delighted him more in its ruin than it had in its original sanity. And, in view of his violently-expressed detestation of photographic imitation of painting, it is very refreshing to hear him confess that his own experience as a critic and picture fancier had sophisticated him so thoroughly, that “those accidental imitations of the products of the old butter-fingered methods of picture-making often fascinate me so that I have to put forth all my strength of mind to resist the temptation to become a systematic forger of damaged frescoes and Gothic caricatures.”

Mr. Shaw was harshly ridiculed and sharply censured for permitting the exhibition in 1906 of a nude photograph of himself by Alvin Langdon Coburn. In this connection, I recall a conversation with Éduard J. Steichen, who was showing me a collection of his masterly prints, including several nudes. The faces of the nude figures were averted; and Steichen told me, with a laugh, that Shaw had ridiculed him unmercifully for permitting his subjects to call attention to their embarrassment and shame by averting their faces. And in 1901, Mr. Shaw wrote:

“The camera will not build up the human figure into a
monumental fiction as Michelangelo did, or coil it cunningly
into a decorative one, as Burne-Jones did. But it will draw it
as it is, in the clearest purity or the softest mystery, as no
draughtsman can or ever could. And by the seriousness of its
veracity it will make the slightest lubricity intolerable.
'Nudes from the Paris Salon' pass the moral _octroi_ because
they justify their rank as 'high art' by the acute boredom into
which they plunge the spectator. Their cheap and vulgar appeal
is nullified by the vapid unreality of their representation.
Photography is so truthful--its subjects are so obviously
realities, and not idle fancies--that dignity is imposed
on it as effectually as it is on a church congregation.
Unfortunately, so is that false decency, rightly detested by
artists, which teaches people to be ashamed of their bodies;
and I am sorry to see that the photographic life school
still shirks the faces of its sitters, and thus gives them a
disagreeable air of doing something they are ashamed of.”[103]

One morning in Paris, during the period that Shaw was sitting to Rodin, Coburn, with his camera, caught Shaw coming out of his morning bath; whereupon he laughingly bade Shaw to “be still and look pleasant.” “I casually assumed, as near as I could recall it,” Mr. Shaw told me, “the pose of Rodin's '_Le Penseur_.' It was all done in a moment, and although I am not like '_Le Penseur_,' at least my pose is not unlike his.” Mr. Shaw permitted the photograph to be put on exhibition as an object-lesson, so to speak, to the photographic life school; as Steichen expressed it to me: “I believe Mr. Shaw wanted to show the courage of his convictions, by publicly taking the medicine he so unhesitatingly prescribed for others.”

It is needless to point out that Bernard Shaw, the analytic critic and clear thinker _par excellence_, would naturally prefer photography to painting. When away from London he is seldom to be seen without a camera slung over his shoulders; and he has been taking pictures, and dabbling away at interesting photographic experiments, for many years. Without talent as an artist himself, but with almost a passion for photography, we need not be surprised to hear him praise the photographer because he is free of “that clumsy tool--the human hand--which will always go its own single way, and no other.”

Steichen and Coburn, he has told me and he has told them, are the two greatest photographers in the world; and he once said to me of Coburn: “Whenever his work does not please you, watch and pray for a while and you will find that your opinion will change.”[104]

To Shaw the true conquest of colour no longer seems far off in the light of Lumière's discoveries, and the day will soon come, he surmises, when work like that of Hals and Velásquez may be done by men who have never painted anything except their own nails with pyro. “As to the painters and their fanciers, I snort defiance at them; their day of daubs is over.” He once declared for two photographs of himself against anything of Holbein, Rembrandt, or Velásquez. “When I compare their subtle diversity with the monotonous inaccuracy and infirmity of drawings, I marvel at the gross absence of analytic power and of imagination which still sets up the works of the great painters, defects and all, as standard, instead of picking out the qualities they achieved and the possibilities they revealed, in spite of the barbarous crudity of their methods.” There are certain quite definite things the photographer has not yet achieved: Shaw's imagination as a creative dramatist teaches him this, even though he insists that the decisive quality in a photographer is the “faculty of seeing certain things and being tempted by them.” Oscar Wilde acutely remarked that in certain modern portraits--Sargent's, notably, I should say--there is often as much of the artist as of the subject. Bernard Shaw insists that in the pictorial and dramatic phases of the photographic art of the future, both the artist and the subject must be imaginative artists, working in conjunction. “As to the creative, dramatic, story-telling painters--Carpaccio, and Mantegna, and the miraculous Hogarth, for example--it is clear that photography can do their work only through a co-operation of sitter and camerist which assimilates the relations of artist and model to those at present existing between playwright and actor. Indeed, just as the playwright is sometimes only a very humble employee of the actor or actress manager, it is conceivable that in dramatic and didactic photography the predominant partner will not be necessarily either the photographer or the model, but simply whichever of the twain contributes the rarest art to the co-operation. Already that instinctive animal, the public, goes into a shop and says: 'Have you any photographs of Mrs. Patrick Campbell?' and not 'Have you any photographs by Elliott and Fry, Downey, etc., etc.?' The Salon is altering this, and photographs are becoming known as Demachys, Holland Days, Horsley Hintons, and so forth, as who should say Greuzes, Hoppners and Linnells. But, then, the Salon has not yet touched the art of Hogarth. When it does, 'The Rake's Progress' will evidently depend as much on the genius of the rake as of the moralist who squeezes the bulb, and then we shall see what we shall see.”

FOOTNOTES:

[93] _Who I Am, and What I Think._ Part II., in the _Candid Friend_, May 18th, 1901.

[94] Mr. A. B. Walkley, Mr. Shaw lately told me.

[95] _The Author to the Dramatic Critics_, Appendix I. to the first edition of _Widowers' Houses_. London, Henry and Co., Bouverie Street, E.C., 1893.

[96] Note of the Editor, G. B. Shaw, of Fabian Tract No. 113: _Communism_--a lecture by William Morris, published by the Fabian Society.

[97] Obituary essay: _Morris as Actor and Dramatist_, in the _Saturday Review_, October 10th, 1896. Reproduced in _Dramatic Opinions and Essays_, Vol. II.

[98] In this connection, compare _The Author's View. A Criticism of Modern Book Printing._ By Bernard Shaw. In the _Caxton Magazine_, January, 1902.

[99] _Madox Brown, Watts, and Ibsen._ In the _Saturday Review_, March 13th, 1897.

[100] Cf. _King Arthur_. In the _Saturday Review_, January 19th, 1895.

[101] Compare _Photography_, October 26th, 1909.

[102] _The Exhibitions--I._, by G. Bernard Shaw. In the _Amateur Photographer_, October 1st, 1901.

[103] _The Exhibitions--II._, in the _Amateur Photographer_, October 18th, 1901.

[104] Compare Shaw's article, _Coburn the Camerist_, in the _Metropolitan Magazine_, May, 1906.

THE MUSIC CRITIC
“CORNO DI BASSETTO” AND “G. B. S.”

“Don't be in a hurry to contradict G. B. S., as he never
commits himself on a musical subject until he knows at least
six times as much about it as you do.”--_Music._ In the
_World_, January 18th, 1893.