I promised I would give you something like a report of one of the discussions that take place at night in the billiard-room during our annual visit to Wales. I fear I shall not be able to recall any particular night, therefore you must be content with a “blot” or “impressionist memory” of several. A smoking chat, well mixed with chaff, is not easily reportable or profitably readable, so I will omit a good deal that may not be interesting or teach you anything.
WHITE: Our photographer was painting today; how did he get on?
BLACK: I was much complimented by the miller, who takes an acute interest in art. His great desire is, he says, to go to London to see all the pictures in the Tower. He had never seen me painting before, and it gave him great satisfaction. He said in his best Anglo-Cambrian, “Ah! you do do them by hand too. It is well when a man can turn his hand to anything. You do yours by machine mostly, and can make many, but it takes the other gentleman a long time to do them by hand!”
WHITE: Ante up the product.
BLACK: There is the interesting and valuable result. Speak your mind, Brown, you are a great painter; but as is often the case with great painters, now-a-days, you don’t know much about art, but we will take your opinion on the smudgery part of it.
BROWN: Oh! I can’t be bothered with such juvenile efforts. You ought never to waste good oil-colors. Turn it upside down and begin another if—and only if—you can’t find something better to do. But why do you bother yourself with paint?
BLACK: Eliger Goff says, “When a man forgets his first mother it’s time for him to be born again,” and this is not the first time I have painted.
GRAY: The Renaissance was a healthy time for art.
BLACK: The appositeness of the application excuses the interruption. I don’t see why I should not paint occasionally; I acknowledge that disuse of the brush has made it more difficult for me to express my thoughts in the easier vehicle than with the camera. There was a time when painting was easier to me than photography, and I don’t know now which is the less difficult, the machine—as the miller calls it—or the brush; if, indeed, the brush also is not a machine.
GRAY: We are all machines in our way. We—even we painters—we can own it among ourselves, are all adepts at turning on steam and stoking. It is, perhaps, shameful, but nevertheless true, that we are most of us manufacturers. As I read in a provincial paper the other day: The great painter turns out so many pictures a year, just the same as the machine turns out so many legs and backs. All his materials are provided for him, and are very convenient. His tubes, his easels, his fanciful brushes, his arrangements of light, all simplify the task for him; and, perhaps, as he sits and paints, a faint dream crosses his mind of a happy day when artists will paint portraits by electricity, playing them out on the keys of a piano-like instrument.” The writer should have made exception, but I am afraid he is right in the main.
WHITE: Really, Gray, I wonder how you can be so dreadfully candid. Success has made you reckless. It does not do to exhibit your thoughts in the nude in that barefaced manner; you should clothe them a little. It is positively indecent to talk as you are doing.
BROWN: Especially now we have got the public to believe that painters are the only poets in art; and that Black here, with his machine, isn’t in it.
GRAY: You know I don’t agree with you there. I have always maintained that there were art possibilities in photography. The difficulty has been in the ease of the process. The art work of the few in photography has been swamped in the rubbish of the million. All men are not born to play Bach’s fiddle fugues, as Browning somewhere says, and it is reserved for the few to get the right tune out of the camera box. Photography has not had time enough to produce a large crop of geniuses. There are those who think that really great geniuses in painting—an old art like that—are only lately born, and that “only we, the latest seed of time,” know anything about it. I am an old-fashioned painter myself, and don’t believe it.
BROWN: Well, I think we are showing them how to do it, if I may be allowed to say so.
BLACK: “Thy modesty’s a candle to thy merit.”
BROWN: Go to! irreverent youth. Tell me if anything has ever been seen in art like some of the suggestions of nature some of us give you?
BLACK: Never! Small things were never done so greatly, so few great things done.
BROWN: Your emphatic “never” scarcely sounds like applause. Let us see what the others have been doing. Ah! Gray and White have been painting the same scene. Both of the pictures are like the subject, but they are a long way from looking like each other. This shows how man’s mind comes in. The photographer cannot do that with his boxes.
BLACK: Can’t we? As usual, you are perversely ignorant of what we can do. I never yet saw two photographs of a scene that were alike, and if I saw two by different men, and I had been accustomed to their work, I could tell you who had produced which.
GRAY: Different people see differently and translate what they see differently, it is astonishing to how great a degree. Ask any two men to describe the effect of no rain for forty days. One will go from Charing Cross to Yokohama to describe it; the other will just walk round his garden and do it better.
BLACK: That is what I claim for Photography.
WHITE: Take it, and be happy.
BROWN: Both sketches are good. White’s only wants the details of the trees, which he can easily get from one of Black’s photographs, to make it a finished picture.
BLACK: Just like you painters; everybody’s property is your own. You only look on photographs as something you may possibly purloin. I totally differ on this subject. Why should the photographer play jackal to the painter’s lion, and collect scraps for him? The photographer should be above this, and complete pictures for himself. I would no more copy another man’s photograph than I would his sketches. I don’t mind painters “refreshing their memory” with photographs, but there are some who are not ashamed of stealing complete and perfected ideas. They soothe their honor by persuading themselves that the photograph not the work of man but of nature, and nature, they say, is open to everybody. I am often pirated. Once there appeared in one of the London galleries a large painting, copied, “lock, stock, and barrel,” from one of my photographs. After I had kicked up the demon’s own row, and threatened to claim the painting, as I could do under the Copyright Act, the painter apologized for the “inadvertence!” Ancient Pistol said, “Convey the wise it call,” but the modern art euphemism for making a mistake in the ownership of property is “inadvertence.”
WHITE: Do you object to painters photographing?
BLACK: I no more object to painters taking photographs and copying them than I would object to their making sketches with a pencil for the same purpose; but he must be a very experienced painter with a fine memory for color who could make a good use of photographs. It must be very deleterious practice for the young, immature student. He had much better keep to nature and draw and think for himself. Now for Brown’s picture.
BROWN: There it is. If you see anything worthy of your approbation you can put your hands together, but don’t wake the house.
BLACK: It reminds me of the criticism of a famous R. A. on your last year’s great effort, “and he had so much promise!” Take it away.
BROWN: It is not composed artificially enough to suit Black. A picture is not a picture if not composed, or I have read what he has written on the subject wrongly. Composition is not the whole of art.
BLACK: I agree with Brown for once. Chalk it up. In the endeavor to be simple and clear, I believe I am often too definite and precise. Many people think that I am trying to teach art when I am struggling to give them some notion of composition and light and shade. It is nothing of the sort. I know perfectly the distinction between the means and the end. I am afraid I am sometimes wearisome in the way I explain that rules, and laws, and principles are only the skeleton of art, and not the living soul; yet dense fellows, like Brown, will misread me.
GRAY: The principles of composition are the principles of common sense, and run through all the doings of civilized life—from a picture or building to a dinner or a company of friends. These annual holidays of ours, for instance, have been going on for twenty years, and how harmonious they have been!—never a hitch anywhere. This is all due to skilful composition. The components were selected and put together by an artist who understood composition. We have balance, contrast, light and shade—and haven’t we our “values?” The result is a harmonious whole.
BROWN: Ingenious, but too gaudy. It would be interesting to know what you photographers do, that you claim to be artists and judges of art.
BLACK: Everybody is a critic now-a-days, so why not photographers? Touching the other of your question, we invent, we select, we modify, we execute. What more do you want? Modern painters do little more. We confess there are many things we cannot do. We do not aspire to such subjects as “The Last Judgment,” or the “Battle of Waterloo.” We have the sense, which painters have not, to avoid such impossibilities. But we can do many things. If nature does not suit us, we can alter nature, just as a painter does.
WHITE: Your alter-native is to alter nature?
BLACK: Yes, if nothing short of a pun will suit you, we even alter the natives when they do not suit us raw, or provide substitutes for them. Like that grim Earl Doorm we read of in the Idylls to-day, we compel all things to our will. See the changes I have had made in the river to suit my work.
BROWN: It is not every photographer who can lay waste a country side for the sake of his pictures.
WHITE: And call it art!
BLACK: I only want to show our resources. I do not advocate an indiscriminate felling of timber. I could go into details touching invention, etc., and how we can modify nature, also how we can modify our execution of what you would call “treatment”—but it would be the old tale over again; we have had it over a score of times. You all agree with me, but, being excellent draughtsmen, you love to “draw” the photographer.
GRAY: Whether he is an artist or not, we must all agree that his affection for art reminds us of that ardent lover who worshipped the very smoke that came out of his mistress’ chimney.
BROWN: Perhaps the analogy is nearer than you intend. You imply that the photographer gets no nearer the flame of art than the smoke.
BLACK: It certainly seems to come under the head of contentious matter, but I am content to accept the compliment Gray intended. I am not to be drawn any further. I feel that my verdancy begins to assume a russet hue. I am not so green as I have been. Good night.