It is difficult to conceive how, in an encyclopædia with lofty educational pretences, extravagance of statement could attain so high a point as that reached in the biographies of Reynolds and Gainsborough. So obviously indefensible are these valuations that I would hesitate to accuse the _Britannica’s_ editors of deliberate falsification—that is, of purposely distorting æsthetic values for the benefit of English artists. Their total lack of discretion indicates an honest, if blind, belief in British æsthetic supremacy. But this fact does not lessen the danger of such judgments to the American public. As a nation we are ignorant of painting and therefore are apt to accept statements of this kind which have the impact of seeming authority behind them.
The same insular and extravagant point of view is discoverable in the article on Turner. To this painter nearly five pages are devoted—a space out of all proportion to the biographies of the other painters of the world. Titian has only three and one-half pages; Rubens has only a little over three pages; and El Greco has less than two-thirds of a page! Of course, it is not altogether fair to base a judgment on space alone; but such startling discrepancies are the rule and not the exception.
In the case of Turner the discrepancy is not only of space, however. In diction, as well, all relative values are thrown to the winds. In the criticism of Turner we find English patriotism at its high-water mark. We read that “the range of his powers was so vast that he covered the whole field of nature and united in his own person the classical and naturalistic schools.” Even this palpable overstatement could be forgiven, since it has a basis of truth, if a little further we did not discover that Turner’s _Crossing the Brook_ in the London National Academy is “probably the most perfect landscape in the world.” In this final and irrevocable judgment is manifest the supreme insular egotism which characterizes nearly all the art articles in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_. This criticism, to take merely one example, means that _Crossing the Brook_ is more perfect than Rubens’s _Landscape with Château de Stein_! But the Encyclopædia’s summary of Turner’s genius surpasses in flamboyant chauvinism anything which I have yet seen in print. It is said that, despite any exception we may take to his pictures, “there will still remain a body of work which for extent, variety, truth and artistic taste is like the British fleet among the navies of the world.” Here patriotic fervor has entirely swallowed all restraint.