PAINTING
WITH BOTH HANDS;
Or the Adoption of the Principle of the Stereoscope in Art, as a Means to
BINOCULAR PICTURES.
BY
JOHN LONE.
"Let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth'
LONDON: CHAPMAN & HALL, 193, PICCADILLY. 1856.
Price One Shilling.PAINTING
WITH BOTH HANDS;
Or the Adoption of the Principle of the Stereoscope in Art, as a Means to
BINOCULAR PICTURES.
BY
JOHN LONE.
" Let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth"
LONDON
CHAPMAN & HALL, 193, PICCADILLY. 1856.LONDON i MITCRKI.L AND SON, PRINTERS, WARPOUR ST., OXFORD ST.PAINTING WITH BOTH HANDS.
The camera confirmed, and photography has proved perspective, but the Stereoscope, one of the most wonderful and pregnant of discoveries, and which will bind up the name of Wheatstone in the great sheaf of the combined truths of nature and art, holds up to painting a promise and an ideal which demands new efforts, and a revolution of method, on the part of the artist. The science of perspective gave superficial or illusory depth to pictures of natural objects, and thus European art attained a point to which Chinese art, for instance, could not reach. But the stereoscope produces solid or real depth, and its depictions, so far as this quality goes, are for the first time pretty accurate mirrors of visual truth.
Look at one of them, and observe its consummate reality. And as you gaze through at the tiny picture, lo ! like a truth as it is, it expands, and the size of nature is realized also; proving that dimension lies not in feet of canvas, but in harmony of truth. Here a picture for the first time is truly optical; and being so, it is like the eye, whose retina is as big as the world of sight; nay, the fibrillae and pulp-atoms of its optic and cerebral threads are equal, for representative sight-purposes, to the reaches of great landscapes, and to the indefinite mileage of the air.
How shall the painter attain this new steep which science commands him to climb, before he can in any sense rival the
a 24
perfection of the binocular stereoscope ? The problem is not perhaps so difficult of solution ! Nay, perhaps it is capable of being resolved in several different ways. It is clear, from the approaches to perfection which all great artists have made, that they have so managed their lines, as to involve to a certain extent both the lines of binocular pictures. And it is possibly connected with this reason, that straight, sharp, and manifestly single lines have no place in works of art; but breaks, compromises and indeterminateness, run like a gauze before a picture, and set the imagination free to realize more than the eye has fairly before it. Thus, within certain limits, the least determinate artists, as for example Turner, are the nearest to suggesting the verity of natural things, simply because they are the nearest to the double lines of nature.
The solution which I have to offer, is comprised in the position, that ambidextrous or two-handed painting will realize in art also, binocular or two-eyed pictures: that pictures painted with both eyes, or what is the same thing, both hands, will at length repose upon the basis of a complete physiological truth.
Drawings and paintings hitherto, as the productions of man's right hand, (and the same remark applies to a large part of the manual arts,) have been produced from right to left. But the stereoscope shews that the mode whereby nature imprints her pictures on the brain of two-eyed persons, is by the double or decussating method; by one picture proceeding from right to left, married to another picture proceeding from left to right. It is however perhaps impossible that any artist should follow out this way literally, by painting two pictures of a scene, each true for one of the eyes; and then uniting them by means of an instrument like the stereoscope. Nor does it seem at all probable that the stereoscopic plan is the only one by which the natural decussation can be produced. At all events the ambidextrous method of producing pictures deserves a trial, as .tending to realize artistically the same end.5
The suggestion of such a method, involving, as it does, a new and difficult education, would be monstrous, if painting remained as it was; but this, as I have said, is no longer the case; for the stereoscope, by beating it on its own, basis, has shewn that it is not true to nature, and moreover has demonstrated mechanically where the failing lies. It remains for the artist to obey experience, to put on the harness of the Baconian method, (which is as indispensable for him as for the man of science,) and with all his senses to imitate the picture-producing necessities of nature.
How this is to be done,* we by no means undertake to foreshadow ; nor to dictate a single stroke of the pencil. The only thing we deafly foresee is the general necessity, that to do what the stereoscope does there shall be a coequal productiveness of both hands, and an entireness of picture flowing out of the instincts of each. In short, once unparalyze the left hand, and make it equally facile with the right, and instinct will manage all the rest; as it has already worked marvels even in the one-sided and one-eyed pictures of the present and former ages. I do not say, make the left hand equal to the right, lest a dangerous fallacy of some kind should lurk in the word equal; but let each have its own proper functions, and we may safely leave the notion of equality on one side. It may indeed be objected, that one does not see clearly how the stereoscopic effects are to be produced by ambidextrous, or more properly speaking, bimanual
* Since this little pamphlet was written, one artist has put the matter to the proof, and with good approximative effects ; and in so doing, has suggested a bimanual method which I had never thought of. This method consists in holding the brush or pencil with both hands at once ; and not in employing, as I had conceived, two pencils. In this case the left hand has a good share of power, as guiding and moving the right. "Whether stereoscopic truth will arise in this way, remains to be seen; as also whether the plan will, or will not, give place, on further development of sinistral power in the artist, to the free, in distinction to the combined movement of the two hands. But it is very interesting to find that there are different ways of approaching tke same bimanual end.6
handling; and I grant this; and only state the matter as highly worthy of experiment: but then I do see beyond a question, that importing a new and untried half of human power, a complementary set of faculties, into artistic productiveness, must have a new, unknown, and complementary effect, highly agreeable to nature : and it remains to be seen whether this effect is any other than the stereoscopic or binocular.
That such will be the effect is indeed demonstrable on rational ground, though not proved till experiment proves it. The picture of nature which the left eye sees, is verily the left stereoscopic picture; and if this eye worked through its own hand, the combined instincts of theSfe two agents must tend to realize that picture. The same may be said of the picture of the right eye, flowing into delineation through the power of the right hand. The question therefore committed to experiment, is, whether the two pictures combined in the same space of canvas, would produce the stereoscopic effect. In nature this is assuredly produced by an apparently single picture in one expanse, made up of the impressions of both eyes, because seen by both. There is therefore every probable reason for the trial.
Moreover, it is combination of forms, and not colour, which gives the complete appearance of depth or trine dimension to stereoscopic pictures. Now every form flowing through the left hand, or from left to right, must be radically different from, and complementary to, every form flowing from right to left, whence we have again the strong promise of stereoscopic effects in bimanual pictures.
The distance of the two shoulders from each other affords another argument in support of the probability of our plan: for in case both hands be used for painting on the same canvas, the principle of this distance, however near the hands come together in their work, must inevitably come into the picture ; and it is that principle which constitutes in the case7
of the shoulders the widest two-sidedness that belongs to the body; a two-sidedness which must thu%be transferred to the painting. A natural preparation is here seen for making the works of the two hands broad and strong. I need scarcely here remind the reader that the distance between the two eyes is the preparation for seeing nature stereoscopically, i. e., broadly and truly; each eye being like a separate optical person commanding a side of the object, because placed on that side. And the distance of the two eyes* in perception is carried out and amplified in power, in the distance which separates the two central abodes of manual power, or the two shoulders.
I was by no means aware, until I set thought to observe, how the phenomenon of right and left-handedness extends its principle to other organs than the hands; even to eyes, nostrils, mouth, and ears. But on investigation it will be found, that the most of persons are right-eyed as well as right-handed, and that very few, I do not know how few, are two-eyed. Of course, I am now alluding not to the existence but to the usage of the eyes ; and not to the passive, but to the active usage. Indeed it is quite possible to be nearly blind of one eye, and yet never to find it out until some accident obliges the owner to attempt to rely upon that eye. And in nearly every case there is a difference between the power and brightness of the two eyes, which is unknown to the individual. The present painting is the very drama of one-eyedness; the best exhibitions, like the philosophies, are the dance of human fragments; there is no wholeness in them, for they are evolved through one half of the organs of power,
* We might here open an interesting set of remarks on the diverse breadth of depth in vision which different persons and different types and nations enjoy, in consequence of having the eyes near together, or wide asunder. But it is sufficient here to indicate the subject, which is rather a fruitful one, and rich in mental and moral analogies, without diverting the reader's main attention from our present theme.8
the hands, by one half of the visual instincts, the eyes; from the right and not from the left mind; and out of the right, and not also out of the left inspiration. Hence, besides having no depth in it, there is not even any breadth in painting ; but only a slanting surface from right to left, seen sideways. In short, it contains but one dimension, the process of the point into the line; although this is repeated to make illusory, and where most successful, embossed surface. This is the reason why it is impossible to get a first-rate point of view for any picture, the fault being radical to the picture. For the same reason artists, feeling that they are cutting nature in half at every touch, literally chopping her sacred unity, are accustomed to regard their works in mirrors, in order to reverse the right-handedness; and to make the picture bimanual by giving it two right aspects. This state of things cannot, it seems, be mended, otherwise than by the development of the left series of powers, left eye, left hand, left mind, and left genius, which make man and his works broad and wholesome in nature's appointed way.
Inasmuch as the stream of art has hitherto flowed almost exclusively through the right hand, it is manifest that both eyes have hitherto looked towards production through the right eye; so that the left eye has only seen nature as it were askance, and has had no proper member to work through. How greatly this may have stunted visual observation for artists, I leave to others to determine; but in the meantime it is clear, that pictures painted virtually by one eye and hand, are only adequate to one eye's criticism; and hence perhaps arises the fact, that to the most of observers, pictures are best seen by shutting one eye, or so entubing the main eye as that it alone is prominently the organ of gazing. On the other hand, it again remains to be seen whether bimanual pictures will not also be binocular; or in a new and surprizing sense, be best seen with a coequal gaze of both eyes.
The fact that pictures look better to one eye than to two,9
and generally better to the right eye than to the left, appears to depend upon this, that they are painted with the right eye and hand, as one fair half of the natural power of painting. The right eye therefore sees its own just part of the picture, and sees a semi-illusion, which only wants the left-eye-paint-ing to be a,double-semi or in other words a complete illusion. Now when the left eye looks, it does not see its own proper semi-illusion, but a complete flat of the palate; and this flat mixes with the just right-eye picture, and disconcerts or super-ficializes it. Thus even at present pictures are inevitably made up of two, but one of them a powerful and the other a paralytic picture. Whence it is that pictures shew more reality to the right eye than to both eyes combined. For the false left-eye-picture spreads a film of flatness over the true right-eye-picture, and reduces its reality by one half.
I also leave it to future critics to say, whether or not the great artists of the present and former times, have occasionally without fixing the fact into a method, produced portions of their works bimanually; and whether this has not been the secret of certain felicitous and inimitable passages on canvas, which have been the admiration and the mystery of the lovers of art.
And I would also ask whether certain powers of criticism and observation, to which both nature and art are now becoming subject, may not depend on a certain anticipation by the mind of the awakening of the left eye in the head of the artist; whether the breadth of glance of Ruskin himself may not proceed from the fact, that that organ in his mind is becoming a little impatient of its lid, and struggling to chip the shell which keeps it from direct commerce with sinistral nature. If this be so, we can easily see how unsatisfiable he must be with all that can be done on the present plan; and even with himself, until he is fairly awake, and knows that he is a denizen of a bilateral universe. I fancy that the very bulk and size of his books, their enormity of increment, is a10
proof that he is wheeling round the world out of sight of his proper prey; and that his final swoop is yet to come, when his left eye is opened. But let me not do him injustice: he hops along on one leg of criticism with a power and rapidity quite new; and sometimes moves so fast that his Hopping even mimics Progress.
Let me further remark, that this suggestion of bimanual painting touches in no way any of the common questions regarding Imitation in Art; which may be as base, or as sublime, as the Pre-Raphaelite, the Dutch school, or the Tur-nerian school, may please to determine. Under the bimanual process, all these schools may exist over again with a new perfection ; the sensualist may paint microscopically, or the ima-ginationist, aerially; or a third may embrace the pettiest detail, and subjugate its atomic exactness to central objects and figures of life or of glory; yet so that the ground, sensual as sand, or absolute as the mould and grass of the earth, shall, by virtue of its very truth, retire, as honest and well-made-out dirt alone can do, from the main incarnation of the canvas. All this is beside the question of bimanual painting; which may be as sketchy as you please, or as formal, provided the composition enwraps in the folds of its own unity, the works of both the artist's eyes, and of both his hands. I do not therefore seek to introduce any new element into art, except a farther imitation of the wholeness of nature in the basis of its production.
This result, however, may possibly arise; that as the bimanual method will (posito, non concesso) in all cases produce the true dimension of nature, and consequently the verisimilitude of nature, to a degree which the greatest illusion-painter never dreamt of, truth of this sort, present everywhere, will come to be thought of less than at present; and thus the controversy between the illusionists and their opponents will die a natural death, by the plenitude and unexpected perfection of illusion, which by the new method will take care of11
itself, and require no looking after. I augur this from experience about photography and the stereoscope; for we now dwell no longer on the inimitable truth of laces, dresses, foregrounds of sand and pebbles, or feathers of birds, any more than we dwell on the naturalness of the pictures in the camera; we know that each object is nature over again; and there is an end of it: this emancipates us to look beyond the frames of things and the accuracy of the unimportant, and to fix all our regard on that which is properly artistic,—the evolution of figures and scenes worthy of the human soul and imagination, upon the given basis of nature.
A second result also may be conjectured, and which exists to a very limited extent in any human painting : I mean, the power that objects will have of growing to the size of their originals. This growth, which the stereoscope realizes, appears to depend entirely upon the double influences of its pictures. I know very well, that all fine works of art, especially if you shut one eye, can grow thus in a way, but it is obvious that the meanest stereoscopic effect, in this respect, beats all the great masters hollow. This is because they have only half-filled their canvas; and a half-seed can only grow in imagination ; whereas a whole seed grows quite naturally in the soil of facts and the senses. As we before remarked, size of area has nothing to do with size of visual nature; through one pane of glass we may see a third-part segment of thirty or according to altitude a hundred miles of landscape; proving that that pane is big enough for the representation of that landscape ; through the corneas of the two eyes we do see all that is seen through the pane; proving that a properly-divided and oculated inch is big enough for the same: and so on, pursuing the matter into the indefinitely minute granules of the cerebral substance; each one of which is an eye, and an earth and a firmament, regarded as an optical theatre. But the truth in the manner of representation is the one indispensable12
condition of the objects represented by the artist, growing up to the stature of the works of creation.
Stereoscopic objects, also, I may remark in passing, are not only true to nature in realizing her dimensions; but they are also true to her in that they do grow in visual size. For nature also grows visually in the same way. This is familiar to every one who has stood in grand and well-proportioned buildings; they disappoint by their apparent smallness at first, because the human size of the cornea limits them, until the beautiful truth of their construction makes them free of that boundary, and then the mind sees them at first hand as they really are. And the same thing is still more strikingly obvious in grand mountain scenery, which is at first sight so much cabined in by the window of the eye that sees it, that I have heard it said that all mountains are of the same size at first. But built as they are of truth as much as of granite or other stone, they gradually unfold their importance in detail, and the pictures in which they communicate themselves, will hold and house all the knowledge of size which the traveller gradually gathers about them. And so also, I am bold to hope, it will one day be with works of art which aim to convey our best impressions of the grandeur of nature; but then this result must manifestly be attained by art quitting its present single eye and hand, and claiming to make use of the common sense of mankind, which wherever nature is in question, is binocular.
The same process, also, which gives the artist, as an artist, two eyes and two hands, and restores him to mankind, and to his whole body, will give the public at large a far stronger hold of art, and a more easy appreciation of it. To judge fairly and finely of pictures, will indeed always require more than common gifts; just as to discriminate the beauty of any piece of nature demands a faculty for the beautiful \ but to love good pictures will be easy and universal when they stand13
on the truth of nature. At present, artists alone love good pictures; and the reason is, that the uneducated public, (who only understand the lower story of the matter, and that, by their instincts,) find a fault and an unsatisfactoriness at the very basis, which prevents them from entering, by the portal of attraction, (which for them is not sufficiently opened,) into the temple of the artist's mind. Bimanual art will, however, give all the world the password towards the sanctuary; and then each can enter, according to his faculty, to whatever depth the work contains, or the explorer can endure. But obviously no common man can get in at all, unless the very check-taker at the door is nature herself in some familiar guise.
To illustrate this, I have heard that the Chinese can no more understand our portrait-painters, than we theirs. They object to the needful spotches of shadow on a human face, and tell you that there is no such soil in the original; and straightway they go up to the cheek, look at it quite close, and prove that they are right. And they are right, at least so far as this, that they want a picture in which the mechanism is not apparent, an Ars qua celat artem, such a picture as the stereoscope, full though it be of shadows, produces. A delineation of this kind would pass through sight into appreciation and acknowledgment, without exciting a single question on the way.
I dwell upon this, because being no artist, I have always felt instinctively in works of art that want which the principle of Wheatstone's stereoscope magnificently satisfies: I have always felt that while certain creations of art were glorious, and the soul of it everlasting, the body and the bones of it were so much doll-like carpentering, no incarnations at aD, and no true basis of its spirit.
A most important question however remains behind,— how, and to whom, is the suggestion of bimanual drawing and painting applicable ? For the most part, I am afraid, only to14
the young. We cannot expect the masters of art to resign their admired proficiency, and to interpolate their beautiful though flat pictures with faltering left-handed experimentations. They have not time for the trial. They of all men, being educated most absolutely in the old way, have most to lose by it. They would give abundant beauty away for doubtfulness, and the power-sweep of a mature wing, for the flut-terings of a young bird upon the ground. Only those who believed desperately in the bimanual principle would take the trouble to, surmount the formidable difficulties which a lifelong and skilful onesidedness would pile in their way. I do not therefore offer these remarks with any considerable hope of touching the practice of mature and excellent artists. Let them give us their best and their beauty, and we shall be thankful for it. More especially because, if the bimanual principle be true, the grandest pictures can be painted over again in that sense, and the foundations of the house of art be rebuilt little and little, even under the time-honored edifice itself. Thus future copyists will leave the pictures standing, with all our homage kneeling about them, and simply put nature under them as a pedestal. It will be quite easy with two hands to bring forth their living but buried beauty from the tomb of their imperfect manipulation.
Bimanual practice appeals then to the young, and comes prominently if not exclusively under the head of education. Now if I were a drawing-master instead of a lawyer's clerk, I would assuredly make a fuss with this crotchet; I would teach upon it as a principle, and cause the pupils to practice drawing equally with right hand and left, being quite sure that to the young, whose nerves are quick and flexile, no harm could come of it; and on the other hand, that as sure as night follows day, new issues must arise from new powers in operation. I should know indeed in the meantime that all this was not art, but a mere mechanical basis of art, and that the new result, (like an embryo forming into a child, and like an15
embryo, ugly against daylight up to the very last, and perhaps for a few days after the last,) would not approve itself to any sense of beauty until the young artist had attained a perfect bimanual command. If contrary to my expectation the pictures were still as flat and in that respect as little natural as Turner or Landseer, or Poussin, or Canaletti, I should have lost nothing by finding my pupils still derided by the stereoscope, and still standing on the general flatness : on the contrary, even in that case, they might prove handier than their fellows. And at any rate they would have lost no time in the pursuit of the bubble; for by education it is doubtless as easy to develop two hands artistically as one; just as it is as easy to teach a child three mother tongues at once, as one. If on the other hand my two-handed art did produce a binocular picture, I do not think it possible to over estimate the contents of the effects to follow, in art in all its manifold departments, high and low. In that case the flat canvas would be a veritable quarry of nature, and painting at its base would be level with sculpture. Sense would be so sure underneath, that imagination could build towers upon it such as were never yet founded upon a visionary bottom. The entireness of the workman in his work would also be a far more likely circumstance for inspiration to occur to him, than when he is only " half there." Yet it seems safest not to endeavour to command the promise which is so securely locked in the closed fist of experiment. Suffice it to say, that future pictures would exhibit uniformly the verisimilitude of the depth of nature, and that furthermore they would be as much greater than the stereoscopic delineations, as the works of imagination founded upon science and progress, are loftier than the raw material of the senses.
But I cannot help seeing further, that binocular or bimanual painting will eclipse the stereoscope on its own ground. For the stereoscope must be adjusted to one part and one plane of every scene, and only that plane is given with the16
wholeness of nature : whereas binocular art will produce plane behind plane in succession in all its depth and verity, and thus be true to nature throughout the whole foreground and background, which at present the stereoscope is not. Moreover the canvas can be greater than any stereoscopic area; and pictures seen freely in' the light of day will have a power and reality which looking through the stereoscopic box tends greatly to injure.
New manual arts often involve new principles of manipulation : the human frame has to learn so to speak new movements, and to bring its inexhaustible mechanical resources to bear in new directions, in order to execute novel works of the hand. Skill itself, regarded as in the body, is a field requiring assiduous cultivation. The only difference in this respect between my proposal of bimanual drawing, and other arts which involve new dexterity, is, that whereas in former cases the art called forth the energies of the hand, in this instance a new and untried hand, which hitherto has hung dangling and semi-paralytic by the left side, is the hope of the idea, and the promise of the art. Already there is an exceptional tribe of left-handed people, and a majority of the right-handed; a prophecy of a possible equation in a new development, which will educate a goodly number into a race not now extant artistically, of two-handed individuals. When this is begun in drawing, it may perhaps extend to many other branches; .but I cannot speak precisely on this point, because owing to the small field of my own calling, I have not been able to inform myself how far the two hands are already employed coequally in any kind of artizanship. Though music certainly is two handed.
The various ways of educating the left hand as a coequal producer with the right, in order that the left eye, and the tiers of left faculties above it may enter upon their own rights of property, and have something to possess of their own mediate creating,—these ways must be discovered by the17
drawing masters, and artists themselves. But perhaps if artists will " let the left hand go " its own way, putting conscious effort as far as possible in abeyance, the spirit of the new method may come upon them without much difficulty, and the education be taken up a good deal by nature herself. Already I have seen one instance in which this has been the case, and an adult artist has been singularly helped. And what makes me hope that it may perhaps turn out to be a common case, is, that wise passivity appears to be the only acquirement needful for some very extraordinary and otherwise impossible effects. Those people can swim at once, who do not endeavour to swim proprio Marte, but emulate the ducks and fish in letting the water and their own lightness do three fourths of the work : merely helping levity by a little unflustered movement. And all our actions become, after education, instinctive and habitual; even as the actions of animals are such before education. Now the right hand is already educated; so far at least as is possible before the left hand comes into the field to marry it. And there is such sympathy between the two halves of the body, that with passivity, the right hand will easily lead forth the left into actions corresponding to its own. And after faith in the new principle is attained, and fear as to the result put aside, possibly the only means of learning the requisite passivity, will be, to keep the mind strongly fixed on the object before the painter, and to allow the double manipulation to flow as it may. Just as birds do not think of their two wings, but only of the goal to which they are flying; which keeps the wings intensely active so far as outward activity is concerned; yet passive in the sense of originating no movement of themselves; for they allow every stroke to be summoned forth by the end they propose to gain. The same passivity appears to be that by which alone the painter can keep himself bilaterally afloat in the artistic atmospheres.
Already it has been remarked that young persons are those
B18
most proper to be educated in bimanual handling; and this leads me to touch briefly on the important consequences to health which must flow from the balance of spine and of spinal innervation which the new practice will favor in those who adopt it. I submit to medical men, whether it is not just possible, that spinal deformities depend in many instances upon the habit of degrading the left half of the muscular system for long generations; and whether paralysis may not frequently be owing to the same cause. Certain it is, that many pupils acquire curvatures during their lessons in drawing and writing; and are obliged for a time to abandon instruction in these branches in consequence. Were the bimanual method adopted, results of the kind could hardly occur. This, then, enables our drawing-master on the new principle to promise some immediate practical benefit from his innovation.
Much indeed is lop-sided besides painting and drawing. Many things hop through wounded and weary lives. Many a fowl of heaven has one wing clipped with cruel scissors of fear and faithlessness. The body social only uses one eye and arm, the right or male, in the grand prosecution of arts, sciences and professions: the left or female eye and arm, no doubt one day to be the medium of a better half of all these things, is dwindled and semi-paralytic. The body industrial also is stunted half-wise : the industrious and laboring classes or right arm have the muscle and sinew and the grand folks depend in shrivel on the other side, as sleeves without thews. And so painting is not worse off than its greater surroundings. But the drawing-master will have a noble part to play, if he is allowed, by succeeding in putting the two halves of one calling well together, to hold up the mirror to his betters.
And if man be made in the image of God, it is his especial privilege that all his works may proceed on the full principles of the creation. If, on the other hand, a flounder or flat fish could paint, he, having only one fair half, must be19
everlastingly like our present greatest artists \ and any critic so little ambitious for future art as Ruskin, may exhaust the terms of praise upon his duly accomplished halfness. But with mankind the case is different. The progress of their artistic life, in the spring that grasps new prey of beauty, and in the change that inaugurates new eras of production, does not depend upon the efforts and antagonisms of diverse schools of art; upon the refinement of the individual taste; upon new tricks and dodges of manipulation; or upon any process of pains-taking, elaboration, or education whatever; but upon the union of the human imagination from time to time with new principles of science, that is to say, with new truths of nature. These principles are indeed an endless chain of Pisgahs, each seen only as a tiny fleck of cloud from the level plain of the senses, on which art first opens its animal and infantine eyes. As each elevation is reached, the cloud is realized as the firm top of a wider, a more singular, and a more veritable country. In this way poetry and painting repose continually upon the basis of a new earth; and become so. strictly progressive, that a time will inevitably come, when the date of a painting will for the most part fix where it shall be hung,—whether on the meridian line of the world's contemplation, or above, or below it. The painters of a century ago will no more be up to the mark of our beauty-wanting faculties, than the coaches or the chemists of 1700 are serviceable for our travelling or our industrial life to-day. The pictures of our annual exhibitions will be recognized, especially by their painters, as deciduous and decaying leaves on the tree of mundane art. The providential gift of new geniuses will be as punctual, as it is now fitful and irregular. Happy time ! for then immortality, which has hitherto had death in it, (namely, in this respect, that the immortality of our great works has marked that stationariness -of the soul which has forbidden their eclipse and supersession,) will be made up of its own proper parts, as a. chain of continuous and advancing
b 220
life, purging itself, by increments of truth, from death and corruption as it travels.
And for the artist, blessed time ! For then, conceit, which is the murderer of inspiration, will be the constant pabulum which he casts on one side to that dog of death which tracks all mortality. And this conceit he will reject, in the act and fact of working at a social edifice of art, whose base and cement are made of the sciences, in place of toiling in the present web of private experiences, inward fanaticisms, and scholasticisms, which leave art individual, unprogressive, and in fact, animal. For it is a clear principle, that animals, in their lives, axe individual, and man, social: in them, one generation succeeds another, but is not added to another: there is no accumulation of animal truths or goods, as such: in man, however, the past is a veritable part and insemination in the present: in the mountains of human life, generations and individuals are Caryatides, not one of which can be missed from its place of pressure, any more than a square foot of matter can be annihilated; but the whole universe presupposes its everlasting solidity, and its special shoulder. Atlas in this way is the type and honor of human matter. Now this furnishes us with a very easy means of separating between the human and the animal; the perishable and imperishable; and between art, in which a few works are immortal—for a few centuries, in defect of better and truer works arising; and that very different thing, Immortal Art, which puts on its immortality by slow degrees, in proportion as it puts off its ignorance, its old works, and its corporate obscurations. The same is indeed true of any other subject: if it makes no progress, however high its pretensions may be, or however guarded its dogmas, especially if it pretends that it was all given at first, and then stopped, it is as yet in the animal condition: if it advances like science from age to age, it is in the human state. And it becomes immortal, as its mortal systems, fixations and landmarks die; and the more fleetly and spiritually21
immortal, the sooner and the more willingly they pass away.
The distinction then between the New and the Old arts, the new and the old churches, and the new and the old philosophies and sciences, is, that the old, in all their inevitable novelties, tend to keep themselves old; whereas the new only live if they are punctually supplanted by the newer, and constantly by the newest. This is a canon by which we may sift everything, and find out without fail whether it be young, or senile: a very necessary point; for many an oldness would fain palm itself off as young blood in defect of our knowing what that set of toothmarks is which reveals its real age.
There has indeed been a vast nonsense written, about science killing art; and a poet has well said,
" When science from creation's face Enchantment's veil withdraws, "What lovely visions yield their place To cold material laws."
The point here lies in the " whenwhich a very little thought shews may be safely refunded into never. For who but science is the enchantress that throws a sacred and even sombre veil of immensity over every grain of the world; watering the very dust at our feet with intuitions which make it cohere with that other dust which glitters over our heads in the skies ? Who but science is the enchantress that couches the baby eyes of imagination ? Let astronomy speak. In the olden time, the stars were sensually reported to us, as a service of mundane lamps : the streets of air were lighted at nights with those various torches. Olden imagination worked in this and other hypotheses, of cycle and epicycle, the red-tape of a senile mathematics, about these resplendent objects. Was the business of imagination a small or a large one there ? I ween, it was rather slight and snug; and unimportant and little moral withal. No veil of enchantment covered the bridal visage of the skies, but their first material nudity was22
plucked and enjoyed by the hastily imagining senses. The veil comes on when the appearance is found to veil quite another and a stupendous reality. And science, with every thing it successfully touches, does this throughout: it shews that one thing lies sacredly, miraculously, and prodigiously under another. And the consequence is that imagination immensifies whenever it justly converses with science; in fact, Immensity is the perpetual child of the marriage of these truly human partners. Let astronomy speak again. The first imagination of the stars is versed about small dimensions and limited fires: the second imagination is about worlds, veiled in enormities of distance; veiled in laws of poise to which man was a stranger; veiled in superb questions of atmospheres, of animal hauntings and of vegetable investitures: veiled in lovely intuitions of responsible nations of universes : veiled in the destiny of that Divinity in which order lives and moves and has its being. Not less than this, but much more, is the area upon which science plants the feet of imagination; carrying it away, at first against its little will, from its small and gluey foothold in the senses. In short, if you are going to imagine about the stars when they are known only as the lights of night, you have then only the lantern series to imagine in; but if you imagine about them when known as worlds, you have then the world series to imagine in. No more talk then about dissidence between science and imagination : no more prudery between those two betrothed and heaven-appointed lovers. Art, only the dream of imagination, is the honorable child of both.
The first advances of painting to science, have been signalized, as I said at the beginning, by the insertion of perspective into drawing: the consummation of the marriage now clearly lies in the adoption and utilization by future painters, of the truths and tendencies of the stereoscope.
There are clear evidences in Art itself that something of this kind is imminent. The public generally, becoming edu-23
cated in stereoscopic or visual truth, is beginning to look at pictures with a somewhat fierce and revolutionary eye; and to out-Ruskin Ruskin in very justifiable impertinence. Already, all the small portrait-takers have received under the fifth rib the dirk of photography; and are becoming, like myself, lawyer's clerks. And the good painters are all at sixes and sevens, differing and tearing about like very theologians. Somehow, they can't get the Graces to stand to them properly; and the insulted lovelinesses of nature give them not one but a thousand apples of discord, for painting their faces, bosoms, and limbs, all flat. The poor artists paint away, and mutter that canvas is naturally flat. The stereoscope steps up, and drily shews them that the flatter the surface, the more minutely founded can the edifice of solidity and rotundity arise and rest upon it. And physiology steps up; and observes that the retina is exquisitely level, yet receives the paint of flights of moving and multiform worlds from dawn to bedtime. Every mirror in every room, plucks at the painter in the same way; the poor man can't shave without being insulted by his own face in the glass. No wonder the artists are in a pother; for they want an effect without a cause; a child without a mother; a fresh power in imagination, without, a new recourse to bountiful science. Hence Pre-Raphaelitism; or the copying old ways of trying to copy nature. Hence Millais' Chinese exercitations, which may end one day on those walls of convention denominated teacups. In short, hence the general straining for effects that won't come, by means that have failed from the first, and on subjects that dangle beyond human interest. Hence also Ruskin, rubbing his hands, or binding afresh his rods, over the painters, and himself deeply penetrated with dissatisfaction, hoping, imploring, expecting, bullying, moralizing, legislating, repeating, and altering; without anything much clearer than want in his own noble and capacious aspiration. He attributes the advancing reality of the various schools, their increased access to24
nature, to the stimulus of the Pre-Raphaelites. It is quite clear that this is solely due to the long and sharp spur of Wheatstone and the stereoscope. That is to say, to the pressure of nature herself from without.
Although criticism on art does not belong to this most imperfect essay, yet I cannot refrain from noticing the ' Scape Goat/ as not irrelevant to our present subject. When first I cast my eyes upon the picture, it hit me with the most clownish sense of white and red: my next state with it was the toy-shop, only it was not a shop of pretty toys ; and my third state was the pastrycook's shop; in all of which, crude smallness of detail, and unseasoned color, are predominant. So it led me up from these beginnings of art, but not towards the end of art. And the same is my general experience with this school; which at present is in the nursery, and will go through China in time, and then through Holland down to the time of Van Eyck; beyond whom it would be hazardous to venture. The heaven of the school, from which it is an infinite distance at present, would be petty and not inexact modelling, or rather wooden carving trimly painted. The goat himself represents a first-rate Dutch toy. The salt crust which cracks under him, is evidently not from a dread as-phaltic sea, but from some invisible but most present pastrycook's. The sea is a small spread of verdigris, the unwholesome part of sugar work, from the same place. And the mountains are to match, both in size, and material. I say this of the school through which the ' Scape Goat' is painted. In my heart I can do quite other justice to the picture, and give a very different honor to the brave painter: the eye of the goat is a tragedy which redeems and reconstructs all the wretchedness of the canvas, and attaches it to humanity and to vastness again. But still I cannot help singling out this remarkable work, as a proof that art, in its most interprizing sons, is wandering at the present in a starless night; and that reality, where most sought, is precisely that which mocks it, and runs25
away from it. When absurdity is the cap of excellence, and tragedy and comedy are indistinguishable,—when an eye of terror appears in the " awful smallness" of a twelfth cake, it is a sign that the end of all things in that department, is close at hand. But even then I would not have said so much, unless I clearly saw the way to a new kingdom of artistic truth and power which is to come.
Art has tried at a great deal with its present means; and I should be the last man to sneer at its sublime accomplishments in spite of insuperable difficulties in the past. But many parts of its plain vocation are hardly attempted. I will instance only two; which science can help it to achieve; but which are impossible to it per se, on the ground of defective experience. I. The painting of objects in rapid motion; as a swooping eagle, an express train, or a race horse in the very apparition of his fleetness. I know that all these things have been painted, but completeness of motion is not in them; the air or the land does not converge in rushing lines around them. And why? because photography, by his own more rapid arrest-glance, has not fixed the moving figure filled with all its motion, and left it on the paper, an experience of what that moving figure really is. Until this be done for it, we may safely say that Art has never seen rapid motion; perhaps no motion whatever. For it is because other motions are rest comparatively to the movement of light, that light can catch and fix them as rest in any moment of their career. In photography this permanence of the moments of motion exists for the first time on paper: through photography it comes to art for the first time as experience and edification. Prior to that experience, the artist has guessed the rapidity of his steeds, has imagined what their limbs are doing, but has by no means seen or realized it.
II. Art has never painted the starry heavens. Of course I don't mean to say, that skies and stars are not amongst the commonest attempts of the canvas; nor do . I mean, that the26
firmament is not fairly done as a part of nearly every landscape and picture. In pictures, the cope overhead may be often as unexceptionable as the ground. But go out with me on to the doorstep to night, even in my Somers Town, and look right up, with no landscape at all, at the overhanging vault. The planets are all swinging in the stratified deeps of ether, and the lights are suspended in clusters in the celestial transept of the milky way. In spite of the minuteness of the stardust, there is not one speck of smallness in all the suggestion of the sky. Immensity is the perfused presence in its dots and molecules. We feel that the sky-skape stands by itself, and wants no foot of earth to complete it. Here art is completely at fault; and possibly the artist will exclaim, that this sheer uplook towards the infinity of space is out of the domains of art. But I differ from him; because every retina since Adam's has been painted with the triumphant joy and liberty of these spaces; and has held the promise of a finite realization of them upon that second and more human retina, the canvas of immortal art. Besides, we literally want the upper sky-skape for our ceilings, in the same way as the lateral landscape for our walls. It is clear that art can only study this vast theatre of light and darkness, by means of science, which alone has the power of fixing these effects into the abiding shape of a human experience. Whether the stereoscope can assist us here, I know not; but the whole of the photographic arts and sciences are undoubtedly means from which we may look for aid. In fact, visible depth and greatness, wherever they be, are given over to our representation, or our ambition, by these newly-human arts of light.
The greatest truth on this subject lies in the experience of a certain Irishman, who could not spell correctly with a bad pen. As is the medium, so is the power, and so is the inspiration. In a country where mud and clay alone were the builder's resource, architecture would scarcely develop more than hovels; and the imagination, and the very night-dreams27
of the architect would be limited to the smallest and poorest forms of building. His genius would condescend to his possible means, and his ambition would be satisfied with dirt-houses. But give him a handy quarry of stone, and the stone by its sizes would raise his thought after it into the air, and by its sharp fracture would show him the model of his first chisel. After that, soul and possibility together, co-work, and ambition and the spire climb easy stairs of the sky. And so with painting. In all those nations where there is no science in it, none of the natural knowledge of how to represent nature,—there is also no inspiration in painting, and no ambition after such. The inspiration awaits the medium; and the medium is created by the education of original genius through progressive knowledge. Contrast Indian, Chinese, or Egyptian art with Claude or Canaletti. There is a new birth in the latter, from the union of science with their souls' brushes. In the former, no instance of proper art is even possible. Now then, when bimanual painting has made human instincts into a new and incomparably more perfect medium, art will descend in greater floods from new sources and out of higher heavens. It will be greater than present art, in a ratio far more considerable than the present is greater than the Chinese embryo of art; greater in conception and execution ; greater above all in inspiration; because corresponding qualities call each other forth by a divine necessity; and the production of the power of natural depth (suggested by nature and her fairy—the stereoscope) coheres with, corresponds to, and calls down the product of spiritual depth, which in its descending column is no other than artistic inspiration. Hope herein for human walls! Opacity become artistically transparent ; and limits glossed over with fair infinity ! How shall the halls of mankind glow and throng at once with the present and the past; and in accumulating the honorableness of all ages and countries about them, reflect that peculium of human nature, the concentration of the treasures of the earth in the28
home, and the addition of the ancestors to the children. I should burn if I saw a portrait gallery of some house of Sci-pios, all standing in real presences, and created with an accordant power. But what would be the effect of a museum of future masters, in which the revelations of the then Raphaels or Michael Angelos were projected into adequate realization ? I believe it would be long before we could contemplate it without the same kind of awe, only manifold awe, which creeps, they say, over those who see a vision of angels. It is true we are looking here far ahead after a blossom and a fruit which few perhaps have not at some time speculated about as art in heaven; but the seed is on earth, in the truth revealed by the stereoscope; and flower and fruit too can come on earth as in heaven, when that natural truth is in its fuller expansion, and inspiration, ever waiting to descend, alights to its fructification.
So then, our dry post, that bimanual painting, and bilateral artistic vision, will realize natural pictures, means also that fresh possibilities of manipulation will summon genius, imagination, fancy, conception, and all the other faculties or forces which constitute art in its widest and noblest senses, in rivers of human fire, from heights whence no wire of attraction has hitherto drawn so much as one scintle of lightning. This again reverts to the plain law, that truth at the top loves truth at the bottom; and the obeisance to science reminds us also in its reward, of the promise to those who are faithful in the least things.
And if my way is not the way, it is at least good to put it forward, as provocative of a better finder of the way. In sincere humility I would commend the quest to Mr. Ruskin, who has more leisure than a poor quill-driver, and who has an opportunity, by a fortunate find here, of benefitting art more than even he has yet done. Let my proposal be right or wrong, exploded or established; I care not: only I will take no denial of the fact that the stereoscope has made a tabula29
rasa of all ancient and modern painting: that it has shewn what the next world of painting must repose on; and that it can be adopted and utilized to the full, by experiment and finding out the how. It is true, the effort will cost much, as the railway costs much in comparison to the coachway; but then we have now learnt that every trouble for good objects is richly worth while, and that nature pays her grand interest for nothing but pains; and for them, well bestowed, ever and always.
I know there will be good artists, already masters of the present art, to object to what I must call stereoscopic truth, as too " low " to claim attention of the painter. Now it is precisely on the ground of its lowness, that it is so all-influential, so revolutionary in the best sense, and in short so fundamental to artistic progress. It is the feet of art which are to be washed in this pool of natural reality. It is for want of the lowest kind of correctness, that art has 'as yet no proper basis, but vacillates and slides about, half-shod only with observation, through the contrarieties of something very like hostile sects. Lowness then, in the sense of indispensable and self-evident truth to nature, has no alliance with baseness, but it means support of substance, and everlasting pedestal of power. It gives the artist much to learn, as well as much to imagine, and in this way tends to supply the artistic mind with one half of education in which its tendency is hitherto to be greatly and even grievously defective.
" Let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth." This is a pregnant Scripture. It involves that the left hand shall be in full work as well as the right; not idly versed in knowing, but busy with its own deeds. Therefore the text means, the absence of self-conceit and self-approbation from the worker; which is possible when no part of him is idle. It means further, the elimination of the element of critical self-consciousness from art and industry, and the presence of instinct and inspiration, which again are only possible when30
the whole man is employed. For were any part lounging, or dangling, or even too secondarily employed, vanity would come into that limb of idleness, and inspiration, which belongs only to wholeness, would go away from the man. And so this text implies the presence of that spirit which can do all things, according to the full capacity of the medium. We have chosen it for our motto, because the Scripture, so far as we know, is the final and infinite common sense of every truth; and in its internal is artistic as much as it is theologic.
LETTER FROM A FRIEND TO THE AUTHOR.
"My dear John,
"On visiting the exhibition of pictures at the Royal Academy, some days ago, and looking at the ' Death of Chatterton/ by Wallis, I was struck with an effect which I had never before observed so strongly marked, in any single picture; I mean the trine dimension of the subject, painted on a flat surface, and appearing to the eye of the spectator as a double photographic view appears, when seen through the bilateral openings of a stereoscope. I had seen a similar effect of basso-relievo sculpture, painted in bronze tints on the flat walls of the interior of the " Bourse" at Paris, but that was not so perfect an appearance as the " Death of Chat-tertonand, reflecting on the cause of these illusions, it occurred to me, that, over and above the question of bilateral vision in the eye, and bilateral representation in the stereoscope, which suggested to your mind the possible importance of bilateral handling, by the artist, another question of bila-terality was necessary to complete the entireness of optical illusion in pictorial art: I mean that light flows in upon the31
eyes of the beholder, from behind the object seen, as well as from before and from each side. The atmosphere is always more or less luminous on every side; even in the shade; but artists often represent the atmosphere in shade, as if it were not only obscured from want of light, but thickened in substance and opaque; unmindful that all things swim, as it were, in a pellucid medium, more or less obscured by being overshadowed.
" In the ' Death of Chatterton/ the light flows in upon the body from the window seen behind, just as in the stereoscope, the light falls on the photographic views, and this has caused the artist to depict the objects in the room as seen in these aerial and luminous conditions; whether by accident or by design, I cannot say; but surely the effect produced is marvellous. It equals the illusion of the stereoscope, in every part, except the arm that hangs down on the shaded side of the bed, as seen in front. And this suggests to me, that accident has caused the artist to paint his picture in that light; for if he had been conscious of the fact, that light exists with all its main conditions of circumambient irradiation, even in a darkened room or overshadowed portion of an object, he would have painted the arm in shadow or diminished light, on the same principle as the parts exposed to a full measure of illumination.
" The general defect of artists, in this respect, appears to be a habit of plastering dark backgrounds on their pictures, to give what they term brilliancy of effect to the more luminous parts; but this produces merely the appearance of embossment ,or basso-relievo modelling on dead walls. It shows no air nor light behind, or on all sides of the object represented, as in nature.
"They may and do affect to despise the mere 'trompe l'oeil" effects of painting; and not without some show of reason, so far as higher art and composition are neglected;—but that is not more reasonable than to undervalue the importance32
and pictorial necessity of linear perspective. Optical truth is just as essential in one branch of the pictorial art as in another, to produce the charm of visual illusion. Universality of luminous irradiation, differing in degrees of brightness and obscurity, or light and shadow, seems to be as indispensable to fulness of appearance as bilateral vision and manipulation. Rosa Bonheur and Wall is have shown to some extent, that this can be accomplished without lessening any other quality of a good picture.
CC ___))
FINIS.