is using. One doubts of a race and an age that
tliinks it fitting and reasonable to preach Schopen-
liauers philosophy on a trombone and teach
morality with a double-bass. They must be
wonderfully careless about artistic beauty, and
equally unconcerned about explaining their philo-
sophic ideas with clearness.
Corot had no need to whip up dull wits and blunt
perceptions with long words and vague pretensions
to symbolism, to profundity, to divine missions, and
to superior morality. Looking at the good works
of the past, his fine taste sliowed liim how much they
owed to consistency and beauty of style, to that
general harmony of design which never wearies, to
that beauty of aspect which slowly penetrates the
spectator even when he has become indifferent to
the subject. The general aspect or pattern of a
picture does not always strike the uneducated ob-
server at first sight ; but it is the most persistent
and durable of its effects. The impression that a
canvas makes on the eye unbeknown to the looker
returns in fact again and again with increasing
strengtli, and, having once gained a place in the
consciousness, cannot be easily dispossessed. When
we feel tired or dreamy, we cease to send literary
meanings into a work of art. We become receptive,
and, if we hae nerves fine enough to sympathise
with the gradations and finesses of art, we absorb
the aspect of the picture like so much nourislnnent.
After fancying one's-self occupied with other things,
liow often one catclies one's eye in the act of being-
worried by something inartistic in the arrangement
of a picture which one had never before perceived.
This may be seen even with wall-papers, and by
most people perhaps more readily than with pic-
tures. A feeling for style is the gift which enables
an artist to make his canvas speak with this har-
monious voice, and it is a faculty quite as valuable
in painting as in literature.
You may count Corot the most complete stylist
of this century. This it is which makes his work so
finished, and yet so free from troubled and embar-
rassed detail. His canvases seem empty only to
those who call nothing a fact that is not enclosed
in a hard line of contour, who turn a deaf ear to
suggestions of atmosphere and the third dimen-
sion of space. The magic of art lies in modelling
or the science of giving the illusion of depth on a
flat surface. Every inch of a Corot is full of subtle
gradations of air and effect. These are facts, and
more important facts tliau can be got from the dots
and lines of the niggling school. Corot ever souglit
a larger and a larger view of nature. From sparkles
and speckles lie passed to the great moods of the
weather, from grasses and reeds to big and aerial
plains, from twigs and leaves to vaporous and rust-
ling trees, and from spots of local colour to the
general envelope of atmospheric tone. Before him
no one suggested with so much art a multiplicity of
detail subordinated to a mass. You may niggle and
niggle, but you will never make the thousands of
leaves on a tree or the myriads of wrinkles on the
face of the sea. Through a lack of feeling for style,
or sense of measure, you are trying for the impos-
sible clumsily and mechanically instead of aiming at
the possible with ease and elegance. Inevitably
your art speaks of pettiness, of failure, and of
inadequacy more distinctly than of anything else.
These judicious and parsimonious touches of Corot's
make an artist despair. They are so beautiful in
themselves, and they so aptly sinn up and explain
his masses. Floated on a vaporous liaze of paint,
they stimulate the imagination till it perceives the
whole underlying mass instinct with suggestions of
similar forms and details. Nowadays we are open-
ing our eyes ; we are beginning to study the
Japanese ; we are almost about to accept decora-
tion for the basis of painting as melody is the
basis of music. Wlien we do so we shall find
Corot supreme ; we shall find the quality of his
decoration not only fine but appropriate. His style
is used with intention ; it befits, it explains, it
enhances his poetical view of nature. It is like a
tune, beautiful in itself, and used to good dramatic purpose in an opera.
R. A. M. Stevenson.
COROT AT WORK.
THERE is no artist about whose methods of work there is more discussion amongst painters than Corot. His effects are apparently so easily obtained, the results of his labour are so light and airy, and the completeness of his compositions is achieved with so little seeming trouble and anxiety, that it is constantly being asserted, by those who consider finish must mean ' niggle,' that there is no difficulty in making pictures in the fashion of the celebrated French landscape painter.
But the practised artist very soon finds out that Corot's success does not lie on the surface. Never was a painter's life-work more accurately set forth than in the words of Sir Joshua, 'God does not give excellence to man save as a reward of labour,' and this can be literally and strictly applied to Corot.
