Almost the pleasantest thing in the world is to be told a splendidstory by a really nice person. There is not the least occasion forthe story to be true; indeed I think the untrue stories are thebest—those in which we meet delightful beasts and things that talktwenty times better than most human beings ever do, and whereextraordinary events happen in the kind of places that are not at alllike our world of every day. It is so fine to be taken into a countrywhere it is always summer, and the birds are always singing and theflowers always blowing, and where people get what they want by justwishing for it, and are not told that this or that isn't good for them,and that they'll know better than to want it when they're grown up,and all that kind of thing which is so annoying and so often happeningin this obstinate criss-cross world, where the days come and go insuch an ordinary fashion.
But if I might choose the person to tell me the kind of story I liketo listen to, and hear told to me over and over again, it would besome one who could draw pictures for me while talking—pictures likethose of Tenniel in Alice in Wonderland and Through theLooking-Glass. How much better we know Alice herself and the WhiteKnight and the Mad Hatter and all the rest of them from the picturesthan even from the story itself. But my story-teller should not onlydraw the pictures while he talked, but he should paint them too. Iwant to see the sky blue and the grass green, and I want red cloaksand blue bonnets and pink cheeks and all the bright colours, and somegold and silver too, and not merely black and white—though black andwhite drawings would be better than nothing, so long as they showedme what the people and beasts and dragons and things were like. I couldput up with even rather bad drawings if only they were vivid. Don'tyou know how good a bad drawing sometimes seems? I have a friend whocan make the loveliest folks and the funniest beasts and the quaintesthouses and trees, and he really can't draw a bit; and the curious thingis, that if he could draw better I should not like his folks and beastshalf as much as I do the lop-sided, crook-legged, crazy-looking peoplehe produces. And then he has such quaint things to tell about them,and while he talks he seems to make them live, so that I can hardlybelieve they are not real people for all their unlikeness to any oneyou ever saw.
Now, the old pictures you see in the picture galleries are just likethat, only the people that painted them didn't invent the stories butmerely illustrated stories which, at the time those painters lived,every one knew. Some of the stories were true and some were just akind of fairy tale, and it didn't matter to the painters, and it doesn'tmatter to us, which was true and which wasn't. The only thing thatmatters is whether the story is a good one and whether the pictureis a nice one. There is a delightful old picture painted on a wallaway off at Assisi, in Italy, which shows St. Francis preaching toa lot of birds, and the birds are all listening to him and lookingpleased—the way birds do look pleased when they find a good fat wormor fresh crumbs. Now, St. Francis was a real man and such a dear persontoo, but I don't suppose half the stories told about him were reallytrue, yet we can pretend they were and that's just what the painterhelps us to do. Don't you know all the games that begin with 'Let'spretend'?—well, that's art. Art is pretending, or most of it is.Pictures take us into a world of make-believe, a world of imagination,where everything is or should be in the right place and in the rightlight and of the right colour, where all the people are nicely dressedto match one another, and are not standing in one another's way, andnot interrupting one another or forgetting to help play the game.That's the difference between pictures and photographs. A photographis almost always wrong somewhere. Something is out of place, orsomething is there which ought to be away, or the light is wrong; or,if it's coloured, the colours are just not in keeping with one another.If it's a landscape the trees are where we don't want them; they hidewhat we want to see, or they don't hide the very thing we want hidden.Then the clouds are in the wrong place, and a wind ruffles the waterjust where we want to see something reflected. That's the way thingsactually happen in the real world. But in the world of 'Let's pretend,'in the world of art, they don't happen so. There everything happensright, and everybody does, not so much what they should (that mightsometimes be dull), but exactly what we want them to do—which is sovery much better. That is the world of your art and my art.Unfortunately all the pictures in the galleries weren't painted justfor you and me; but you'll find, if you look for them, plenty thatwere, and the rest don't matter. Those were painted, no doubt, forsome one else. But if you could find the some one else for whom theywere painted, the some one else whose world of 'Let's pretend' wasjust these pictures that don't belong to your world, and if they couldtell you about their world of 'Let's pretend,' ten to one you'd findit just as good a world as your own, and you'd soon learn to 'pretend'that way too.
Well, the purpose of this book is to take you into a number of worldsof 'Let's pretend,' most of which I daresay will be new to you, andperhaps you will find some of them quite delightful places. I'm sureyou can't help liking St. Jerome's Cell when you come to it. It's nota bit like any room we can find anywhere in the world to-day, butwouldn't it be joyful if we could? What a good time we could have therewith the tame lion (not a bit like any lion in the Zoo, but none theworse for that) and the jolly bird, and all St. Jerome's little things.I should like to climb on to his platform and sit in his chair andturn over his books, though I don't believe they'd be interesting toread, but they'd certainly be pretty to look at. If you and I werethere, though, we should soon be out away behind, looking round thecorner, and finding all sorts of odd places that unfortunately can'tall get into the picture, only we know they're there, down yondercorridor, and from what the painter shows us we can invent the restfor ourselves.
One of the troubles of a painter is that he can't paint every detailof things as they are in nature. A primrose, when you first see it,is just a little yellow spot. When you hold it in your hand you findit made up of petals round a tiny centre with little things in it.If you take a magnifying glass you can see all its details multiplied.If you put a tiny bit of it under a microscope, ten thousand more littledetails come out, and so it might go on as long as you went on magnifying.Now a picture can't be like that. It just has to show you the generallook of things as you see them from an ordinary distance. But therecomes in another kind of trouble. How do you see things? We don't allsee the same things in the same way. Your mother's face looks verydifferent to you from its look to a mere person passing in the street.Your own room has a totally different aspect to you from what it bearsto a casual visitor. The things you specially love have a way ofstanding out and seeming prominent to you, but not, of course, to anyone else. Then there are other differences in the look of the samethings to different people which you have perhaps noticed. Some peopleare more sensitive to colours than others. Some are much more sensitiveto brightness and shadow. Some will notice one kind of object in aview, or some detail in a face far more emphatically than others. Girlsare quicker to take note of the colour of eyes, hair, skin, clothes,and so forth than boys. A woman who merely sees another woman for amoment will be able to describe her and her dress far more accuratelythan a man. A man will be noticing other things. His picture, if hepainted one, would make those other things prominent.
So it is with everything that we see. None of us sees more than certainfeatures in what the eye rests upon, and if we are artists it is onlythose features that we should paint. We can't possibly paint everydetail of everything that comes into the picture. We must make a choice,and of course we choose the features and details that please us best.Now, the purpose of painting anything at all is to paint the beautyof the thing. If you see something that strikes you as ugly, you don'tinstinctively want to paint it; but when you see an effect of beauty,you feel that it would be very nice indeed to have a picture showingthat beauty. So a picture is not really the representation of a thing,but the representation of the beauty of the thing.
Some people can see beauty almost everywhere; they are conscious ofbeauty all day long. They want to surround themselves with beauty,to make all their acts beautiful, to shed beauty all about them. Thoseare the really artistic souls. The gift of such perfect instinct forbeauty comes by nature to a few. It can be cultivated by almost all.That cultivation of all sorts of beauty in life is what many peoplecall civilization—the real art of living. To see beauty everywherein nature is not so very difficult. It is all about us where the workof uncivilized man has not come in to destroy it. Artists are peoplewho by nature and by education have acquired the power to see beautyin what they look at, and then to set it down on paper or canvas, orin some other material, so that other people can see it too.
It seems strange that at one time the beauty of natural landscape washardly perceived by any one at all. People lived in the beautifulcountry and scarcely knew that it was beautiful. Then came the timewhen the beauty of landscape began to be felt by the nicest people.They began to put it into their poetry, and to talk and write aboutit, and to display it in landscape pictures. It was through poems andpictures, which they read and saw, that the general run of folks firstlearned to look for beauty in nature. I have no doubt that Turner'swonderful sunsets made plenty of people look at sunsets and rejoicein the intricacy and splendour of their glory for the first time intheir lives. Well, what Turner and other painters of his generationdid for landscape, had had to be done for men and women in earlierdays by earlier generations of artists. The Greeks were the first,in their sculpture, to show the wonderful beauty of the human form;till their day people had not recognised what to us now seems obvious.No doubt they had thought one person pretty and another handsome, butthey had not known that the human figure was essentially a gloriousthing till the Greek sculptors showed them. Another thing paintershave taught the world is the beauty of atmosphere. Formerly no oneseems to have noticed how atmosphere affects every object that is seenthrough it. The painters had to show us that it is so. After we hadseen the effect of atmosphere in pictures we began to be able to seefor ourselves in nature, and thus a whole group of new pleasures inviews of nature was opened up to us.
Away back in the Middle Ages, six hundred and more years ago, folkshad far less educated eyes than we possess to-day. They looked at naturemore simply than we do and saw less in it. So they were satisfied withpictures that omitted a great many features we cannot do without.
But painting does not only concern itself with representing the worldwe actually see and the people that our eyes actually behold. Itconcerns itself quite as much with the world of fancy, of make-believe.Indeed, most painters when they look at an actual scene let their fancyplay about it, so that presently what they see and what they fancyget mixed up together, and their pictures are a mixture of fancy andof fact, and no one can tell where the one ends and the other begins.The fancies of people are very different at different times, and youcan't understand the pictures of old days unless you can share thefancies of the old painters. To do that you must know something aboutthe way they lived and the things they believed, and what they hopedfor and what they were afraid of.
Here, for instance, is a very funny fact solemnly recorded in an oldaccount book. A certain Count of Savoy owned the beautiful Castle ofChillon, which you have perhaps seen, on the shores of the Lake ofGeneva. But he could not be happy, because he and the people abouthim thought that in a hole in the rock under one of the cellars abasilisk lived—a very terrible dragon—and they all went in fear ofit. So the Count paid a brave mason a large sum of money (and the paymentis solemnly set down in his account book) to break a way into thishole and turn the basilisk out; and I have no doubt that he and hispeople were greatly pleased when the hole was made and no basiliskwas found. Folks who believed in dragons as sincerely as that, musthave gone in terror in many places where we should go with no particularemotion. A picture of a dragon to them would mean much more than itwould to us. So if we are really to understand old pictures, we mustbegin by understanding the fancies of the artists who painted them,and of the people they were painted for. You see how much study thatmeans for any one who wants to understand all the art of all the world.
We shall not pretend to lead you on any such great quest as that, butask you to look at just a few old pictures that have been found charmingby a great many people of several generations, and to try and seewhether they do not charm you as well. You must never, of course,pretend to like what you don't like—that is too silly. We can't alllike the same things. Still there are certain pictures that most nicepeople like. A few of these we have selected to be reproduced in thisbook for you to look at. And to help you realize who painted them andthe kind of people they were painted for, my daughter has written thechapters that follow. I hope you will find them entertaining, and stillmore that you will like the pictures, and so learn to enjoy the manyothers that have come down to us from the past, and are among the world'smost precious possessions to-day.
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