FOREWORD

THAT man who is without the arts is little above the beasts of the field. Yet, there is no question about it, your ordinary man dreads the word Art. To him Art means Babble of strange sounds, of weird phrases ; to him it stands for a little coterie of men who give themselves exclusive airs of " being in the know"-men who preen themselves upon being of a cult to which in some mysterious way they have been admitted, or the inner sanctuary of which, by some profound gifts, they have usurped, but to which the ordinary man may never even hope to attain. Indeed, it is the chief source of pride of these self-constituted elect that art is only for the few -the Chosen Souls-meaning themselves. Your ordinary man is easily convinced of his limitations ; and straightway takes the apologetic attitude ; avers that he " does not know anything about art " ; shrugs his shoulders ; and flies at the sound of the word.

As one who has essayed to create art in letters and painting, I have read the effusions and listened to the loud talk and dogged dogmas of the Cult ; and I soon discovered that they knew far less of the real significance of art than many of the hundreds of youngsters who have taken a canvas and brush and paint and tried to create art. I soon discovered even more than this ; I found that the creators of this exclusive cult, not only do not understand the full significance of art, but they create a wordy code of laws and rules, and try to explain by long-winded efforts, the facts of art which they do not fully understand, and they thereby set up a tangle of misleading futilities that impress the ordinary man, and drive him still farther away from art. I [x] will go much further. I say that the ordinary man who comes before a painting, frankly and generously ready to yield himself up to the impression that the artist has sought to arouse in his senses through his vision, will feel the significance of that art much more purely and fully than the critic who has set up for himself an elaborate code of laws founded on the achievement of one or two great masters, which standard he applies to every work of art in a calculated and death-dealing manner which destroys his capacity to receive its real significance.

In short, the expert, by book-learning and by science, may come to a wide knowledge of the history of a painting and of its maker ; but he has no gifts whereby he senses the real significance of that work of art a whit better than the ordinary man, who is often endowed with superb and exquisite perception of the music that is in colour and line and mass.

It is as fatuous to measure the art of a Boucher or a Chardin by the art of a Michelangelo or a Rembrandt, as it is to measure the art of a Velazquez by the art of a Turner. The sole significance is as to whether an artist, by the wizardry of his skill, has created the impression upon our senses that he desired to create. If he shall have done so, then for us who sense it, he is a creator ; if he shall have failed, then for us whom he fails to reach he does not exist as an artist.

Asked to write a general impression of the Art of Painting throughout the Ages, the which is to gather together an hundred thousand of such impressions-some vaguely enough realised-and to set them down in the deliberate and clear testament of the pen's black ink-surely no light task !-it came to me that it were as well for an artist to essay the business and thereby perhaps bring art nearer to the ordinary man. To rid the artistic endeavour as much as possible from the Museum habit and the Museum attitude towards it ; surely this was worth the while !

[xi] For, mark you, the artist does not create a work of art to please the experts. He does not say to himself, I will build this composition so that the professor shall say I have achieved the pyramidal; he does not employ colour-harmonics to escape the censure or win the praise of the critics. He deliberately paints the work of art so that his fellow-men may be moved by the sensations that he desires to arouse in their senses through the gift of vision. He deliberately and only creates the masterpiece in order that the ordinary man shall be roused to a sense of dignity, or horror, or sublimity, or tragedy, or laughter, or tears, or the like emotion, through the sense of colour and form. All the craftsmanship and tricks of thumb whereby he achieves this result, are but as the chips of his workshop. He does not create a work of art that the experts may say, this is done by this, or that done by that. He looks to the impression of the whole. The moment he paints only to show his cleverness, he is a second-rate, and his creative force has departed. But it is his business to master every detail and trick of craftsmanship, to employ every gift, to the utterance of the poetry that is in him. And the expert has only too often the habit of missing the significance in spying out the details and tricks of thumb.

In these pages I have simply written of the greater men of genius who have contributed to the art of painting ; and I have touched upon their more famous works rather than attempted an exhaustive list of all their endeavour, the which has no value except to the dealer in antiques. The volumes are an attempt to place before the ordinary man the chief achievement of the years in the Art of Painting ; and to hint at something of the real significance of that achievement.

I have avoided all the clap-trap of so-called criticism ; you shall find no such pedantries as bottega for " workshop," a good sound English word; the ghastly epigoni or bastard epigones [xii] you shall find used never for " imitators " or "copyists," the more so since " disciples " better fits many followers of a great artist, for they are often much more than copyists or imitators. I give you no fantastic pedant's balderdash about " tactile values " or " space composition"; about your "vasomotor system" or "the materially significant " or your " ideated sensations." Each year brings forth a further crop of these futilities. I am wholly unconcerned with discovering little mediocre men because they worked in the Italian Renaissance, and are long since deservedly dead. When works of art are torn from the place that they were created to adorn, and are set up in Museums, they have already passed into the graveyard of their significance. A Crucifixion in a dining-room has lost its savour, its essential meaning, and its authority.

When I speak of an Illustration, I mean an illustration, whether it be by Raphael or by a hack-artist on the Illustrated London News ; I do not split logic to define the difference- there is none. When I speak of Beauty, I mean beauty ; when I say Decoration, I mean decoration-as any ordinary man conceives these words. It is far more simple than explaining Decoration to be something else, which, though it may prove the cleverness of the critic, were as though one held that a chalk-pit were a Spanish onion.

Let me add here a truth that has been convincingly borne in upon me in the presence of all master-work in whatsoever art. The elaborate laws and technique-mongering of the academies and of the critics had small concern for the creative artist. The artist bends every means to his end that may help to utter the emotion he desires to express. He, as often as not, does the thing half unwitting of the law of craft he is setting up, bent wholly on the perfecting of the impression. Take so profound a master as Leonardo da Vinci. When he paints maidenhood, he is concerned with its modesty, its timidities, its untried experience about [xiii] to be essayed, the mystery of virginity-when be paints the sovereign woman, sure of her spell, he utters her sphinx-like exultation, as La Forgue uttered it in his triumphant " I am Woman ! " Whatsoever was the significance of the thing he desired to create, that he wrought with all his strength, to that he brought his compelling will ; and, the moment he had achieved it, the thing interested him no more, and he left it in order to get him to other conquests.

The whole history of life, of man, and of art, is a tale of Development-Evolution, as the professors have it. So, too, in Painting. We see the artist first drawing the outline of things ; then he fills the space with flat colour ; he conquers the flatness of the painted surface. Then he essays to conquer the depth of things seen, as in a mirror. He moves always towards realism -towards uttering the sensations by means of colour and form that compel the mind at once to grasp the significance of the painted objects. The realm of the Art of Painting, so far from being exhausted, increases its domain in every century-at times by such small advances as almost to show no advance. But steadily, as mans sensations of the experience of life increase, so increases his generosity of soul to share those sensations of experiences with his fellows. His path thereto is through the faculty of the arts. Therefore it is by the arts alone that man shall reach to the fulness of life.

I cannot let these volumes go forth from the printing-press without acknowledgment of a heavy debt to the aid which I have received from my friend, T. Leman Hare, in the procuring of illustrations in colour from masterpieces scattered abroad throughout Europe. The publishers have only been balked in reaching a few supreme masterpieces by such rare difficulties as the bad lighting of works which are rigidly fixed in position, or otherwise beyond the reach of the colour camera; [xiv] and without Hare's dogged efforts to reach certain masterpieces herein displayed, and without his keen supervision of the production of the plates, a large part of the intention of this History must have failed. To the many private owners my gratitude is, in poor fashion enough, here expressed ; and I cannot lay down the pen without thanks to the Editor of The Studio for the use of several colour-blocks in the last volume.

HALDANE MACFALL.