No artist of the brush can afford to dispense with models; when he draws
from his inner consciousness the composition is tame and the
draughtsmanship wild. The novelist, though his object is not portraiture,
but creation, can as little afford to keep aloof from real men and women.
When George Eliot ceased to draw from models and fell back on intuition
and her library, she produced "Daniel Deronda." But I would demur
altogether to the use of "photography" in literary criticism as
synonymous with realism. The photograph is an utter misrepresentation of
life, and this not merely because of its false shades and its lack of
colour, but because the photographer is not content with literalness. He
aspires to art. So far from being a realist, he is the greatest idealist
of all. He not only puts you into poses you would never fall into
naturally, he not only arranges you so as to hide your characteristic
uglinesses, and bids you call up an expression you never use, but he
touches up and tones down after you are gone, and treats his pictures,
indeed, as though they were actors and he the dresser. And as each
photographer has his own style, no two portraits are ever alike. My
portraits of Annabel pass as a collection of pretty actresses. Still, if
they are not like one another, they resemble one another in being unlike
her. The only good photographs I have ever seen of myself were done by an
amateur--most of the others might just as well have been taken in my
absence. And there is always a painful neatness about photographs: my
humble study was once photographed, and it looked like a princely
library. Bags come out with artistic interstices, fustian gleams like
satin. It is the true Platonic touch, glorifying and gilding everything.
Filth itself would come out like roses. No, no, let us hear no more about
Zola's "photography."
[Sidenote: The Great Unhung]
What becomes of all the old pins is a problem that worries many simple
souls. What becomes of all the rejected pictures is a question that seems
to trouble nobody. And yet at every exhibition the massacre of innocents
is appalling. The Royal Academy of London, which is the most hospitable
institution in the world toward "wet paint," still turns away very many
more canvases than it admits. Their departure is like the retreat of the
Ten Thousand. Into the Salon one year six thousand eager frames crowded,
but when the public came to see, only thirteen hundred were left to tell
the tale--
All that was left of them,
Left of six thousand.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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