Page:Constable by C. J. Holmes.djvu/54

 figures. Henry Moore had a tendency to mistake violence for strength. He dispensed with conventional composition, and never quite found a substitute for it. He used in his large pictures the raw colour and shapeless handling that were an unavoidable necessity when he sketched his shifting skies and foaming waves from nature. His paintings thus lack the design, the harmony, and the pleasant pigment which one finds in Hook; but the sea of Henry Moore is undoubtedly more like the real thing than anything else ever done. With Hook the direct influence of Constable comes to an end. Landscapes, it is true, are still turned out by the hundred, which at the first glance might seem to be reminiscences of Constable, for the subjects are rustic as were his, and are treated in a straightforward realistic manner. The realism, however, is marked by a certain incoherence of design and colour, which prevents such work from being artistic, and the rusticity has become mechanical from lack of that intimacy and affection which made Constable the first true painter of the country.

The best work done in England of recent years has been done by the painters who have inherited the tradition of Constable indirectly through the science of Monet or the poetry of Corot. Such work may not be great art, but it is frequently good art, for its primary impulse has been the creation of something beautiful. If the search for dignity, simplicity, and repose may sometimes seem to have been carried too far, so that one finds oneself wishing for a wider outlook, for more deliberately planned brushwork, or a more vehement emotional impulse, it is well to remember that dignity, simplicity, and repose are not only enough in themselves to make good art, but that they have always been uncommon qualities in painting, and never more so than at present.

The landscape work of some members of the Glasgow school might perhaps suggest a more direct descent from Constable on account of the roughness of their handling, the freshness of their colour, their recognition of the sky as a compositional quantity, and the air of breezy vigour which pervades them. Their naturalism, however, differs radically from that of Constable in the method of its adaptation to pictorial purposes, in that it is governed by the principles of ordered selection that characterize the art of the Far East. The true culmination of these ideals is found in the exquisite landscapes of Mr. Whistler, where there is 34