The Book of Art for Young People

Almost the pleasantest thing in the world is to be told a splendid story by a really nice person. There is not the least occasion for the story to be true; indeed I think the untrue stories are the best-those in which we meet delightful beasts and things that talk twenty times better than most human beings ever do, and where extraordinary events happen in the kind of places that are not at all like our world of every day.

It is so fine to be taken into a country where it is always summer, and the birds are always singing and the flowers always blowing, and where people get what they want by just wishing 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 happening in this obstinate criss-cross world, where the days come and go in such an ordinary fashion.

But if I might choose the person to tell me the kind of story I like to listen to, and hear told to me over and over again, it would be some one who could draw pictures for me while talking-pictures like those of Tenniel in Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. How much better we know Alice herself and the White Knight and the Mad Hatter and all the rest of them from the pictures than even from the story itself. But my story-teller should not only draw the pictures while he talked, but he should paint them too. I want to see the sky blue and the grass green, and I want red cloaks and blue bonnets and pink cheeks and all the bright colours, and some gold and silver too, and not merely black and white-though black and white drawings would be better than nothing, so long as they showed me what the people and beasts and dragons and things were like. I could put up with even rather bad drawings if only they were vivid. Don't you know how good a bad drawing sometimes seems? I have a friend who can make the loveliest folks and the funniest beasts and the quaintest houses and trees, and he really can't draw a bit; and the curious thing is, that if he could draw better I should not like his folks and beasts half as much as I do the lop-sided, crook-legged, crazy-looking people he 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 hardly believe they are not real people for all their unlikeness to any one you ever saw.

Now, the old pictures you see in the picture galleries are just like that, only the people that painted them didn't invent the stories but merely illustrated stories which, at the time those painters lived, every one knew. Some of the stories were true and some were just a kind of fairy tale, and it didn't matter to the painters, and it doesn't matter to us, which was true and which wasn't. The only thing that matters is whether the story is a good one and whether the picture is a nice one. There is a delightful old picture painted on a wall away off at Assisi, in Italy, which shows St. Francis preaching to a lot of birds, and the birds are all listening to him and looking pleased-the way birds do look pleased when they find a good fat worm or fresh crumbs. Now, St. Francis was a real man and such a dear person too, but I don't suppose half the stories told about him were really true, yet we can pretend they were and that's just what the painter helps us to do. Don't you know all the games that begin with 'Let's pretend'?-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 right light and of the right colour, where all the people are nicely dressed to match one another, and are not standing in one another's way, and not interrupting one another or forgetting to help play the game. That's the difference between pictures and photographs. A photograph is almost always wrong somewhere. Something is out of place, or something 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 hide what 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 water just where we want to see something reflected. That's the way things actually 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 happens right, and everybody does, not so much what they should (that might sometimes be dull), but exactly what we want them to do-which is so very much better. That is the world of your art and my art. Unfortunately all the pictures in the galleries weren't painted just for you and me; but you'll find, if you look for them, plenty that were, and the rest don't matter. Those were painted, no doubt, for some one else. But if you could find the some one else for whom they were painted, the some one else whose world of 'Let's pretend' was just these pictures that don't belong to your world, and if they could tell you about their world of 'Let's pretend,' ten to one you'd find it 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 worlds of 'Let's pretend,' most of which I daresay will be new to you, and perhaps you will find some of them quite delightful places. I'm sure you can't help liking St. Jerome's Cell when you come to it. It's not a bit like any room we can find anywhere in the world to-day, but wouldn't it be joyful if we could? What a good time we could have there with the tame lion (not a bit like any lion in the Zoo, but none the worse 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 and turn over his books, though I don't believe they'd be interesting to read, but they'd certainly be pretty to look at. If you and I were there, though, we should soon be out away behind, looking round the corner, and finding all sorts of odd places that unfortunately can't all get into the picture, only we know they're there, down yonder corridor, and from what the painter shows us we can invent the rest for ourselves.

One of the troubles of a painter is that he can't paint every detail of 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 find it 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 little details 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 general look of things as you see them from an ordinary distance. But there comes in another kind of trouble. How do you see things? We don't all see the same things in the same way. Your mother's face looks very different 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 bears to a casual visitor. The things you specially love have a way of standing out and seeming prominent to you, but not, of course, to any one else. Then there are other differences in the look of the same things to different people which you have perhaps noticed. Some people are more sensitive to colours than others. Some are much more sensitive to brightness and shadow. Some will notice one kind of object in a view, or some detail in a face far more emphatically than others. Girls are 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 a moment will be able to describe her and her dress far more accurately than a man. A man will be noticing other things. His picture, if he painted one, would make those other things prominent.

So it is with everything that we see. None of us sees more than certain features in what the eye rests upon, and if we are artists it is only those features that we should paint. We can't possibly paint every detail 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 beauty of the thing. If you see something that strikes you as ugly, you don't instinctively 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 showing that 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 of beauty all day long. They want to surround themselves with beauty, to make all their acts beautiful, to shed beauty all about them. Those are the really artistic souls. The gift of such perfect instinct for beauty 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 people call civilization-the real art of living. To see beauty everywhere in nature is not so very difficult. It is all about us where the work of uncivilized man has not come in to destroy it. Artists are people who by nature and by education have acquired the power to see beauty in what they look at, and then to set it down on paper or canvas, or in some other material, so that other people can see it too.

It seems strange that at one time the beauty of natural landscape was hardly perceived by any one at all. People lived in the beautiful country and scarcely knew that it was beautiful. Then came the time when 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 about it, and to display it in landscape pictures. It was through poems and pictures, which they read and saw, that the general run of folks first learned to look for beauty in nature. I have no doubt that Turner's wonderful sunsets made plenty of people look at sunsets and rejoice in the intricacy and splendour of their glory for the first time in their lives. Well, what Turner and other painters of his generation did for landscape, had had to be done for men and women in earlier days 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, but they had not known that the human figure was essentially a glorious thing till the Greek sculptors showed them. Another thing painters have taught the world is the beauty of atmosphere. Formerly no one seems to have noticed how atmosphere affects every object that is seen through it. The painters had to show us that it is so. After we had seen the effect of atmosphere in pictures we began to be able to see for ourselves in nature, and thus a whole group of new pleasures in views of nature was opened up to us.

Away back in the Middle Ages, six hundred and more years ago, folks had far less educated eyes than we possess to-day. They looked at nature more simply than we do and saw less in it. So they were satisfied with pictures that omitted a great many features we cannot do without.

But painting does not only concern itself with representing the world we actually see and the people that our eyes actually behold. It concerns itself quite as much with the world of fancy, of make-believe. Indeed, most painters when they look at an actual scene let their fancy play about it, so that presently what they see and what they fancy get mixed up together, and their pictures are a mixture of fancy and of 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 you can't understand the pictures of old days unless you can share the fancies of the old painters. To do that you must know something about the way they lived and the things they believed, and what they hoped for and what they were afraid of.

Here, for instance, is a very funny fact solemnly recorded in an old account book. A certain Count of Savoy owned the beautiful Castle of Chillon, which you have perhaps seen, on the shores of the Lake of Geneva. But he could not be happy, because he and the people about him thought that in a hole in the rock under one of the cellars a basilisk lived-a very terrible dragon-and they all went in fear of it. So the Count paid a brave mason a large sum of money (and the payment is solemnly set down in his account book) to break a way into this hole and turn the basilisk out; and I have no doubt that he and his people were greatly pleased when the hole was made and no basilisk was found. Folks who believed in dragons as sincerely as that, must have gone in terror in many places where we should go with no particular emotion. A picture of a dragon to them would mean much more than it would to us. So if we are really to understand old pictures, we must begin by understanding the fancies of the artists who painted them, and of the people they were painted for. You see how much study that means 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, but ask you to look at just a few old pictures that have been found charming by a great many people of several generations, and to try and see whether 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 all like the same things. Still there are certain pictures that most nice people like. A few of these we have selected to be reproduced in this book for you to look at. And to help you realize who painted them and the kind of people they were painted for, my daughter has written the chapters that follow. I hope you will find them entertaining, and still more that you will like the pictures, and so learn to enjoy the many others that have come down to us from the past, and are among the world's most precious possessions to-day.