by A.R.
Originally published in The Monitor (Joseph Dollard) vol.1 #6 (Jun 1879).
It may, perhaps, be doubted whether the Celtic genius has much affinity with the combination of workmanlike, dramatic, and observant qualities which constitute the pictorial capacity. Art records impressions, the Irish character is occupied with feelings; art is simple and positive, the Celtic genius is (if we may employ a much abused word) transcendental; and having borrowed one term from metaphysics, let us sum up the whole contrast at once and say that art is objective, while the cast of Irish thought is distinctly subjective. National music, unrivalled for character and beauty, national poetry of an equal spiritual charm—these are the natural expressions of the national genius. All praise of Irish music is trite enough; but what has never been fully acknowledged, is the debt, in this matter, of the sister island. England has had some true musicians; but in hardly a single case can their origin be inquired into without the discovery of Irish or of Jewish blood—the mighty Jewish musical genius, indeed, having influenced even the great schools of Germany to an incalculable extent. The Scotch and the Welsh have the musical faculty, but by some chance they have been more self-contained in regard to it, and have not leavened the English nation as Ireland has done.
Nevertheless, though not the land of artists, Ireland is the home of art—in this sense, that a picturesque faith, a picturesque climate, a picturesque landscape, a picturesque people which does picturesque things by some happy instinct, offer a whole world of living pictures to the painter. The Irish make many pictures if they paint few. We have not found, and we cannot imagine, in any country more perfect compositions of figures at labour, of glen and hill, of light and cloud and colour, than are met with among the Kerry mountains. As an example of the poetical instinct by which the people make pictures in their own lives—an instinct without parallel even among the Italian peasantry—there occurs to us a scene, acted often and without ostentation or self-consciousness, without witnesses, and without record. A batch of young emigrants is on the eve of quitting some poor village for ever; upon the hill-side is a tract of holy ground; the church has gone to ruin, but the churchyard remains, and a little mournful pilgrimage is made thither; the oldest woman of the village, the mother of many mothers, cuts a sod of the consecrated earth of Ireland, three times sacred as being blessed by the Church, as being the soil of the fatherland, and as lying over Irish dead; and this the young exiles are to bear with them to that new world which has no history, nor poetry, nor faith. Passing from the Ireland of to-day to the Ireland of the past, the annals of no country, whether secular, sacred, or legendary, are so full of noble suggestiveness. It is impossible, for instance, to read the life of St. Patrick without calling up mental pictures of those years of his youth when he kept sheep and prayed alone among the wild hills. The scenery is unchanged; and the very dress of a shepherd of his times is still preserved. But these are not the subjects chosen by such artists as have elected to paint Irish life. They have almost invariably followed each other in treating a serious and pathetic country as the scene of a conventional kind of buffoonery. Humour is admittedly an element, and a fine element, in the national character; but it is tragedy, and not low-comedy, which is acted in this wild and solemn scenery, and by these people who think and speak so constantly and so familiarly of death, who are so poor, so great, and so unfortunate. The artist who treats Ireland as a joke has seen nothing through his own eyes; he has borrowed those of unintelligent predecessors, and adopted a stale tradition. Ireland has thus been given over to the travesties of the stranger, because she has no great and worthy national painters. Besides the transcendental, literary, and musical bent of Irish art-power, this lack of any school of painting of our own may be attributed in part to the prosiest of reasons. The people are poor, and those who might be patrons of national art have few or no national sympathies. In 1771, Benjamin Franklin, writing in young America, said:—"There is no doubt of the arts flourishing here-after on our side of the Atlantic as soon as the number of wealthy inhabitants shall increase." Of course, the prediction has been fulfilled; and there can be little question but that a larger number of Celts would join the Anglo-Saxons in the conquest of that peculiarly Latin art—the art of painting—if Ireland counted among her wealthy men such eager and intelligent collectors of pictures as there are now in Boston, Philadelphia, or New York. For painting and poetry, like commoner things, are governed by questions of supply and demand.
Painters, Ireland indeed has had, though they have not watched their mother's moods, or lingered lovingly over her aspirations and her acts, as her poets and her musicians do and did. The name of Maclise may be said to be immortal; and Barry, a Cork man, like Maclise, had a great reputation in his day. He was the friend of Burke, he won the praise of Dr. Johnson, and was not only an Academician, but the Academy's Professor of Painting. In Sir Martin Archer Shee, who was born in Dublin in 1770, Ireland supplied the Royal Academy with a president; and she might, for the matter of that, have supplied it with a second, for the post was offered to Maclise, and declined. Not all members, not even all presidents of the Academy are great artists; the fame of far the larger number of them is destined to die, and among the rest, it is to be feared, that of even the ambitious Barry and of Shee Maclise will have more claim on posterity. He was entirely destitute of dramatic power and incapable of expression, but he could draw like a master, and his skill in detail was something more than mere imitative dexterity. When the majority of his works, with their familiar mannerisms, have ceased to be prized, a few will yet remain to make his name, though not his nationality, remembered. Among these will be his elaborate composition of Caxton showing his first printing-press to Edward the Fourth, now exhibited at South Kensington. It is familiarly known by the engraving, and was once popular enough—perhaps less for its real merits than for the cheap Protestant clap-trap embodied in it by the introduction of the shadow of two monks which falls upon the open page of the first Bible, to typify that men of their cloth have obscured the light of the Word! This incident illustrates the un-Irish sentiment of this Irish painter—a peculiarity which is altogether indisputable in spite of the fact that he sometimes chose national subjects, such as his "All-Hallows' Eve," his "Marriage of Strongbow and Eva," and his "Earls of Desmond and Ormond." Yet, as a man, he possessed many traits characteristic of the land of his birth, and was not above the perpetration of a fine, free,and rampant bull—if we may judge from an unpublished letter of his which lies before us, and in which he excuses himself from an evening appointment because he has been "so saturated with dry detail at the Academy all day." He was Irish, too, in the fitfulness of his capacity for work, and in his generous carelessness of money. He kept his coin in the bottom of a cupboard, whither he and his sister went, whenever they needed any, without burdening either their memories or their book-shelves with accounts of expenditure, or of receipts, or of balances in hand. Charles Dickens used to say that Maclise, had he cared to figure in literature, might have done so with signal success.
That the poverty of the past, as regards Irish art, is shared by the present, needs no further demonstration than that given by a visit to the great annual exhibition of contemporary paintings now open at Burlington House, the magnificent quarters of the Royal Academy in Piccadilly. Out of the fifteen hundred and eighty-six titles in the catalogue, we have noted only four which appertain to Ireland, viz., a view of " Turnberry Point" on the west coast, by Joseph Henderson; "Donegal Bay," by Walter F. Stocks; "Interviewing the Member," by Erskine Nicol, A.R.A.; and "'Listed for the Connaught Rangers," by Mrs. Butler. Clever and humorous as Mr. Nicol's picture is, the large canvas that comes last on our list is the only one that fulfils the conditions of a really earnest national work. An English critic has spoken of it as "the one really memorable picture of the exhibition;" certainly it is the only one, from an Irish standpoint, which is representatively true. For there is much more on this canvas than a mere recruiting incident, as we shall presently show. Even in a finished engraving of "'Listed for the Connaught Rangers," the colour would be lost; the pure green-blue of the sky, the rich aërial purple of the mountains, the glow of the storm-clouds as they roll away, and the strongly accentuated colour of the figures in cloud shadow against the brilliant background—would all be turned to sober black and white. And much more than this—the expression of the faces is missed in our rough little sketch of the picture which the artist herself has made; but which will, nevertheless, show the composition and give a general idea of the work.
The story of the picture is soon told. A recruiting party has passed through a remote Irish village, and two sons of the soil have accepted the Queen's shilling. The big fellow who marches next to the sergeant is called Foley; he is an excellent specimen of the Kerry men, who are usually smaller than he among those hills. Though he carries himself with seeming dare-devilry, and smokes the pipe, if not of peace, at any rate of warrior-like indifference, he will make a splendid soldier in the course of a year, by dint, we are sorry to add, of an occasional visit to the blackhole. Foley's brother recruit will be moulded by the gentlest military discipline. He attributes his slightly inferior physique to the fact that he has been brought up on potatoes, while the more fortunate Foley, who comes from the little seaport of Cahirciveen, close to Valencia Island, has luxuriated on herrings. None the less he will make a magnificent soldier—the soldier who goes from remote Connemara to India, to China, to Canada, and to the Cape, where these Connaught Rangers are now fighting, and where the bones of many a Kerry boy may, at this moment, be bleaching under the sun by the Afric river and on the Afric sand. Well might the Duke of Cambridge when, in his speech at the Royal Academy banquet, he singled out this picture for especial praise, lament that the ranks were not recruited by more such men as they. But they are everywhere emigrating, and while they make their way to America, the British army is replenished by garret boys—the scum and the off-scouring of iniquitous cities.
Mrs. Butler has a double claim on our notice here, being not only the painter of an Irish picture, but the wife of an Irish husband. Whether an artist should marry has long been a discussed question, even in the case of men, and much more in the case of women. When Flaxman told Sir Joshua Reynolds that he had taken to himself a wife, the great man remarked, "then you are ruined as an artist"—he himself, it is said, having been jilted by Angelica Kauffmann—a fact which explains the acerbity of his dictum. But the painter of the "Roll Call" is a woman first and an artist afterwards; and she had not long changed the name of Miss Thompson for that of Mrs. Butler before she set to work at the picture under notice. The landscape was faithfully studied in Kerry, at that most beautiful time of the Irish year, September (the September of 1877), when there is a glorious medley of sunshine and of rain. The mountains to the right are the Reeks, and the recruiting party are passing through Glencar—the glen of stones. The whitish-grey boulders and the golden gorse—among which are interspersed the Killarney fern, holly trees, and all kinds of mosses—give a brightness of colour to the middle distance which it would not have in July or June, the time of heather. The ruined cabin to the left stands in nature about five hundred yards distant from the exact spot depicted, and it was a wise thought of the artist to go a little out of her way to include the characteristic spectacle in her canvas. It affords, says Mr. George Augustus Sala—for it is hardly a secret that the art critic of the Daily Telegraph is he—play to "that pathos in the suggestion of which Mrs. Butler excels. Journeying across the Green Isle from Dublin to Cork one used to see, sixteen years ago, hundreds of such ruined homesteads. These battered apparitions meant only one cruel, miserable thing—eviction. They were the wretchedest landmarks in the history of a beautiful and unhappy country." Precisely—it was because the desolated cabin was an historical landmark that Mrs. Butler recorded it on canvas. This is what we meant when we referred to her work as being really national and representatively true. A great picture is not a mere literal transcript of an actual incident or scene; a great artist paints not only what lies before him, but much more—
"The light that never was on sea or land,
The consecration and the poet's dream."
The Archbishop of York, speaking on this subject the other day, made some observations that deserve to be rescued from the oblivion of a local newspaper column. "Art," said his Grace, "is not mere imitation. If that were so, the photograph would be the highest product of art. Realism may happen to be the enemy of art. The bespattered boots of the fallen Emperor in Delaroche's great picture attracted very often the attention due to the head and bent figure, heavy with the weight of a crushed empire, with the ruin of a thousand schemes of a selfish life. Interpretation, not imitation, is an artist's function. Let us take, at a venture, three examples in this year's academy—the 'Waning of the Year,' by Mr. Parton; the portrait of Mr. Gladstone, by Millais; and the 'Remnants of an Army' (Mrs. Butler's second academy work). In one sense they are imitations of an autumn landscape, of a statesman's face, and of an exhausted horseman and a spent horse. It is not the imitation, however, which is the charm of each, and will arrest the admiring eyes of thousands in the coming months. No; in one sense the artist is confronted with an autumn scene, and it speaks to him of the decline of the year, and the withdrawal of exuberant summer life. The sadness of such a scene, or at least its solemnity, comes from within; for it reminds us of the waning of our own year of life. Consequently, all features in the real landscape that are void of this significance would be omitted by the artist. So the portrait of the statesman comes from one who could understand that he was in the presence, not merely of a strong and vigorous head, but of one which is a speaking record of a long, earnest, passionate career, marked with its force, but also with its sorrows and disappointments. The third picture bears out its idea with even more clearness. Alone, exhausted, snatched out of universal death, and sustained by sheer force of will to the end of the desperate flight, amidst an arid, stony landscape, which says, 'expect no help nor shelter of roof or tree from me,' the man has come back to tell of a powerful army blotted out, of the shame and humiliation of a great people." So in Mrs. Butler's other work—the one which we have especially selected for notice, because it concerns our own land—there is the touch, not of the mechanical artist only, but also of the creative genius which has comprehended and expressed the whole history of modern Ireland in this one simple scene. The long, lingering look of that young recruit tells us, as Mr. Sala well says, that somebody is sorrowing for the peasant lad who has 'listed in the Connaught Rangers; that "somebody down there in the purple shadows of the wild mountainous country grieves for Alec, or Phil, or Harry who has gone for a soger." And it tells us more. It typifies thousands of such tearings asunder of beloved ties—it is the epitome of a long chapter of national wrong and sorrow which needs no ruined roadside cabin's corroboration, of the domestic sentiment and the love of country which is so strong in the heart of every son and daughter of Erin. And throughout the composition there are similar touches to be found. Thus it is that we hail Mrs. Butler as a national painter; and we are happy to hear it is not improbable that her claim to this title may rest not merely on "'Listed for the Connaught Rangers," but also on some of her future works. Others, once she sets the example, will follow, not as mere imitators, but as learning from her canvases their own latent talent, and having aroused in them aspirations too long suppressed. Thus, haply, in the day of Ireland's regeneration, when she recovers whatever she has lost and gains new glories, she may have this also—a school of painting of her own, rich in worthy memorials of her history, her scenery, her faith.
"O Eire, it is not ended! Soon
Or late, thy flower renews its bud!
In sunless quarries still unhewn
Thy statue waits; thy sunken moon
Shall light once more the autumnal flood!"
So sings the greatest of her living bards, Mr. Aubrey de Vere, and her people say, "Amen."