International studio (34.1908)

John Buxton Knight


“ NAIRN ” (WATER-COLOUR)

(The property of William Iceton, Esq.)

BY J. BUXTON KNIGHT

little enough for art. At best he simply repeats
ingeniously and effectively what some one has said
before. He originates nothing and he contributes
nothing to the store of information laid by for the
benefit of future generations : he stimulates no new
thoughts and throws no fresh light upon ancient
truths. What influence he exercises is narrowing
and unenlightening, tending mainly in the direction
of dull and formulated practice which contains no
germ of progress and no note of vitality. His
great fault is that he makes art a dead thing, ruled
and regulated by conventions which forbid as
unorthodox all liberty of opinion and freedom of
action : he misleads the men who, better directed,
might conceive original ideas, and calls upon them
to follow him when he is but a follower himself and
unfit for the responsibilities of leadership.
It may be taken, then, as one of the principles of
criticism that the artist who is worthiest of atten-
tion is the one who chooses for himself a way
which leads him out of the beaten track, but who
at the same time does not mistake eccentricity for
originality. Eccentricity is too often nothing but
affectation, an aberration on the part of the artist
who, lacking real originality, thinks that he can

gain by extravagance some amount of notoriety.
It is a confession of weakness, of inability to
succeed by legitimate means, and it is commonly
the resort of the man with small mental powers
and an exaggerated idea of his own importance.
The really original artist is too much in earnest to
play tricks for the amusement of the public : his
originality has in it no self-consciousness and is
not meant to be an advertisement of a kind of.
sham cleverness.
He is, indeed, original because he is endowed
naturally with the capacity to see rightly; he wants
no conventional aids to make his meaning intel-
ligible or his work effective. And it is his rightness
of vision that gives authority and value to his art,
for this capacity is the foundation of all fine
achievement and the source of all poetic inspira-
tion. It is, too, the rarest of all the qualities by
which an artist earns the measure of appreciation
to which he is legitimately entitled; and unfortu-
nately it is the one which is least cultivated because
it is the least likely to make the worker a popular
favourite while he is alive. Few men have the
courage to struggle for a principle against what
they know to be their material interests, and even
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