The Project Gutenberg eBook of On art and artists
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: On art and artists
Author: Max Simon Nordau
Translator: William Fryer Harvey
Release date: August 28, 2025 [eBook #76748]
Language: English
Original publication: London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1907
Credits: Sean/IB@DP
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ON ART AND ARTISTS ***
ON ART
AND ARTISTS
BY
MAX NORDAU
AUTHOR OF “DEGENERATION”
TRANSLATED BY W. F. HARVEY, M.A.
LONDON
T. FISHER UNWIN
ADELPHI TERRACE
MCMVII
[_All rights reserved._]
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. The Social Mission of Art 1
II. Socialistic Art—Constantin Meunier 30
III. The Question of Style 44
IV. The Old French Masters 56
V. A Century of French Art 70
VI. The School of 1830 96
VII. The Triumph of a Revolution—
The Realists 107
Alfred Sisley 123
Camille Pissarro 133
Whistler’s Psychology 145
VIII. Gustave Moreau 155
IX. Eugène Carrière 166
X. Puvis de Chavannes 185
XI. Bright and Dark Painting—Charles Cottet 201
XII. Physiognomies in Painting 217
XIII. Auguste Rodin 275
XIV. Resurrection—Bartholomé 294
XV. Jean Carriès 308
XVI. Works of Art and Art Criticisms 320
XVII. My Own Opinion 336
Index 349
ON ART AND ARTISTS
ON ART AND ARTISTS
I
THE SOCIAL MISSION OF ART
There exists a school of æstheticism which laughs contemptuously at
the mere sight of this superscription. Art having a mission! What
utter nonsense. A person must be a rank Philistine to connect with the
idea of art the conception of a non-artistic mission, be it social or
otherwise. Has a work of art any other mission than to give pleasure by
beauty? It strives to attain no goal that lies outside of itself. It
is its own object, and whoever assigns to it another, sins against the
sanctity of art.
This is, in short, the theory of art for art’s sake: _l’art pour
l’art_. I deem this theory false and a hallmark of crass ignorance, for
psychology and the history of civilisation and art, the history of all
arts, prove irrefutably the vanity and worthlessness of the concept
that denies to art any other task and mission than that of being
beautiful.
Certainly art is, in the main, a purely subjective activity, in
which the artist wishes solely to satisfy himself, without thinking
of any person or thing external to himself. The psychological roots
of all artistic creation are, in fact, an exceptional sensitiveness
and feeling on the part of the artist. We know that every moderately
strong impression which man—and, moreover, not only man, but also every
living creature, however low in the scale—receives from the external
world, excites in him processes, which, in the case of man and the
higher animals, attain consciousness as emotion or passion. The emotion
imperiously urges in towards liberation through movements, that is
to say, muscular activity, which, in many cases, is accompanied by
glandular activity, _e.g._ tears, secretion of saliva, perspiration,
etc. To men of the average type the usual forms of manifesting their
emotion suffice. If they have wept in sorrow, laughed for joy, cursed
or clenched their fist in anger, they are pacified. Their emotion has
spent itself and become exhausted, and their physical life once more
flows in its accustomed channels.
However, if, instead of the average man, we have before us a creature
of exceptional sensitiveness and emotionality, the psychical processes
assume another shape. This creature feels all phenomena more acutely;
they arouse in him more violent passions; his emotions are deeper
and more lasting. Their normal forms of expression do not suffice to
lull them. They take possession of his soul, organise themselves,
show a tendency to become compelling ideas, and oppress it with
psycho-motorial incitements or impulses until it has freed itself from
them by acts which stand in proper ratio to the number or violence of
the emotions. A being whose excessive emotionality is of an angry,
malicious nature attains relief only through deeds of destruction.
Such is the case with most sub-species of born criminals. Should the
exceptionally strong emotions not be of a destructive nature, they find
their outlet otherwise by artistic creations, which, therefore, are a
liberation and solution of emotion that has become overmastering.
But this simple, as it were, normal case, in which the work of art
actually fulfils a purely subjective mission, and aims at no other
object than to relieve the artist’s nervous system and to unburden his
mind of a compelling idea—this case is actually met with only in the
earliest ages of mankind. Art for art’s sake—the art which is practised
purely for the relief and satisfaction of the artist—is that of the
cave-man of the quaternary period. The artist who adorned the walls
of the Caves of Mouthe[1] with figures of animals; who scratched
the famous mammoth on the tusk of La Madeleine in the Dordogne;
the draughtsman of Bruniquel, of Schaffhausen; the author of the
rock-pictures in Sweden, probably did not trouble himself as to whether
he was producing any effect on others. In all likelihood he did not
work for society. His psychology is disclosed to us by the subjects he
treated. He was an enthusiastic hunter, endowed with a particularly
lively intuition and manual dexterity. On the days when he could not go
hunting, either because bad weather prevented him doing so, or external
compulsion—perhaps an accident met with in the chase—confined him to
his cave, he thought longingly of his favourite occupation. The beasts
that composed his usual booty lived in his imagination. His grotto
was peopled with the monsters of the forest and plain of primitive
times. He saw the mammoth with its stiff mane, the grisly cave-bear,
the aurochs and giant-elk, the shaggy, thick-set horse of Solutré; he
pursued, fought, slew them. He felt all the keen joys of these mighty
deeds, and became so strongly excited that he could not refrain from
realising the lively pictures of his fancy, by drawing them on bones,
tusks, or rocks, or carving them on stags’ horns and elephants’ teeth.
It would not gainsay this psychology of primitive human art, if the
artists in remote ages (as the latest pre-historic investigations seem
to attest) connected superstitious ideas with the imitation of their
animals of the chase, perhaps believed by such means they cast a spell
on the animals portrayed, and facilitated their capture. A superstition
like this would, in its turn, become a source of fresh emotions which
also seek outward expression.
Besides the hunter there was also the warrior, who liked to portray his
conquered enemies, and the sensualist, who sought delight in carving
female busts, the types of which, to our taste, seem very ugly, but may
have appeared alluring to him.
These savage forefathers who adorned the caves of the early stone age
with works of art not invariably crude; who woke the echo of the forest
valleys with plaintive or yearning melodies; who excited themselves
by sensuous dances in the moonlight nights of spring; who formed, in
symbolic and allegorical songs, their mystic impressions of the great
phenomena of the weather and sky;—these savage forefathers were the
first, but at the same time last, purely subjective artists, the only
real believers in the dogma of “art for art’s sake.”
In order to find them once more in our own times, we must seek them in
the nursery or the Board School class-room. The artist of primitive
times survives by atavism in the child. But he substitutes for the
rock-wall of the cave and the mammoth’s tooth his slate, copy-book,
school-books, often enough his desk and form, which he adorns with
drawings that, if not particularly finished, are, nevertheless,
always full of expression, and recognisable. The child does not give
way to his artistic wantonness in order to please others. He hides
it, moreover, mostly for obvious reasons, from the eyes of strangers;
he only draws to portray symbolically that which has made a strong
impression on him. He always notes down the important, distinguishing
features which have struck him in the phenomenon. This fierce
mustache, the circle drawn across which represents the head, is for
the little draughtsman the characteristic of manly dignity; this
right-angled broken stroke, which bristles up over a row of men, is
the formidable bayonet that marks the soldier; this disproportionately
big stick in another man’s hand is the dreaded badge that embodies the
schoolmaster’s power. The young artist has obeyed genuine impulses. His
art forms really spring out of the deep grounds of his emotion.
With advancing civilisation, however, this state of things quickly
changes. The artist soon notices that he is differently conditioned
to the rest, the average men; that his feelings are keener, their
manifestation more expressive than with the latter. He becomes
conscious of his superiority, fancies himself something in regard
to it, and cultivates it. Other men find æsthetic pleasure in his
creations, and encourage him by flattering applause which easily
rises to admiration. That calls forth an energetic metamorphosis
in the inmost processes of his work, in its causes and aims. What
was once organic necessity now becomes craftsmanship; uncontrollable
inspiration is replaced by custom and by style. The artist becomes his
own imitator. In years of cool, methodical, routine work, he simply
calls to mind the moment when the feverish workings of his brain
powerfully drove him into the paths of art. He observes all rites of
the creator by impulse, but they are now only an attitude which he has
learnt. In theory he is still inspired by impulse; practically, he is
a professional craftsman who performs the day’s work imposed on him by
intelligent volition. He is still always in search of self-satisfaction
whilst engaged on works of art, but it is of another nature than that
of the unsophisticated artist. The unconscious aim of his efforts is
not to find relief from an emotional tension: he strives after the
voluptuous feeling of flattered _amour propre_; he grows ambitious,
very often, indeed, only vain. He thinks of his public. He anticipates
his success. The thought of approbation takes the place of the effort
to deliver himself from a painfully obsessing conception.
This also is always the psychology of the born artist, who is one
because his organisation forces him to it. Beside him, however, swarms
the innumerable crowd of imitation artists, of average, and very
average men, who would never of themselves have thought of becoming
artists—men who would never have discovered art of themselves, if they
had not had before their eyes the example of the original artists,
their successes, their recognition by civilised society. These
individuals pursue art, not to deliver themselves from an obsessing
conception, but as a means of attaining privileges, gold, and honours.
For them art is an avocation like any other, a trade learnt, which is
to bring them, not to subjective psychological, but to practical and
social ends. They try by a sort of mimicry to become like the original
artists, but they belong to another species. Nevertheless, it is not
permissible to neglect them in this consideration, for, for one thing,
they constitute the vast majority of artists, from the moment when
the pursuit of art has become a differentiated activity, the habitual
and exclusive occupation of a separate class of society; and then the
productions of these imitators are always modelled after works done
through organic necessity. They are, to a certain extent, the small
change of originally great values; they would like to be changed for
them, and everything which is to be said of any particular problem of
art, necessarily finds its application to the imitations as well as to
the original pictures.
These are then the origins and stages of development of art. At the
outset, it is actually what the school of “art for art’s sake” asserts
of it: a subjective purpose, a satisfaction of an organic need on
the part of the artist. Soon, however, the artist ceases to confine
himself to satisfying himself in relieving himself; he also seeks to
please others. In the most secret and mysterious moments of creation,
the thought of other men is present in his mind; considerations as to
effect and success are mixed with his productive emotions. Substitute
mere craftsmanship for inspiration, then these considerations become
more and more dominant, and when art has once become a regular ordinary
business, and the imitators, the mere echoes and reflections, have
once become the majority among those who practise it, then the artist
has his eyes continually fixed on his tribunal, viz., society. In the
moment his work of art is germinating, it is strongly influenced by
consideration of the known or the supposed taste of the society whose
applause the artist courts, and the work undergoes a development more
or less remote from the form it would have acquired under the pure
influence of emotion, its primary source.
Society naturally sees what place it occupies in the artist’s mind,
what share it has in his creations, and how important to him its
verdict is. It promptly perceives its advantage. It takes possession of
the artist, forces its tastes on him, and insists on his working, not
for himself, but for it. Henceforward it has in him a paid servant; he
has to conform his special energy to the general plan of the society
organism of which he is a part, and, in this way, a manifestation
which was originally a purely subjective performance becomes a social
performance.
Art, engendered by individual emotion and transfigured into a social
work, shares this lot which we have no right to call a degradation,
with innumerable other main instincts, strivings, desires. It is the
peculiarity of civilisation that it subdues to itself human emotions,
and applies them as motive powers for the purpose of creating results
which are not always, which are not even frequently, the natural
purpose of these emotions. The whole existence of society, every
organisation, every civilisation, rests on the application of this
method; in fact, every attitude and action of man is affected by an
emotion at its base. Without emotion, man is a sluggish mass, with
which nothing can be done. In order to get anything from him, he must
first have his mind excited, and after that we must be able to direct
this excitement. All usages and regulations are merely a collection
of channels dug in order to act as conduits to the emotions, and to
utilise their force in regular employment. By the help of the emotions
of love, society has been enabled to create marriage, which does not
serve for the satisfaction of the instinct, but should guarantee
economic security for the wife and children. With the emotion of
sympathy—this preliminary condition of every social structure—with
this fount of pity, altruism, and solidarity, mankind has created the
political order, the State, with all its burdensome tyranny, which
seems no longer to have anything at all in common with sympathy, which
is, nevertheless, its emotional root. With the emotion of mysticism
and superstition, society has produced practical morality and all its
constraint; with self-love and vanity, patriotism and its caricature,
Chauvinism; with the wicked impulses to destruction and murder, the
professional qualities of the soldier, still indispensable for the
security of the political organism. In short, the whole work of
civilisation consists in making itself master of individual emotions,
diverting them from their natural goals, applying them to the good of
the whole body. The State society is a machine that is moved only by
the emotions of individuals. Social life is simply the product of a
very complex and skilfully conducted work of primitive emotions. If,
therefore, any one exclaims slightingly at the mention of the social
productions of art: “That’s common, rank utilitarianism!” we are
justified in shrugging our shoulders. Utilitarianism? Why, certainly.
Utility is the primary law of every society, of every living organism.
The lowest living creature of one cell could not support itself for
a single instant, unless all its parts were continually working with
the object of promoting its existence, of serving the demands of its
life—in short, making themselves useful to the whole.
When men came to observe that they possessed among them beings who
had stronger emotions than the rest, and made these emotions evident
by creations which were calculated to make a deep impression on other
men, they, according to the standing rule—I might say, according to
the biological rule—of society, made haste to place these exceptional
natures, these artists, in the service of the great interests of
society.
Whoever can still entertain a doubt that art has always performed a
task which was by no means æsthetic, even if fulfilled by æsthetic
means, let him cast a glance at the history of the arts.
Let him read the poems of antiquity, gaze on the sculptures and
paintings of the Egyptians or Assyrians or Greeks. Let him listen to
the far-off, and doubtless sadly distorted echo of ancient music in
the Hymn to Apollo, restored by over-daring scholarship. Where will
he find a work—a single work—which corresponds with the psychological
scheme of the origin of artistic creation and with the definitions of
the party of “Art for art’s sake”? Where is the work that has been
achieved purely for self-satisfaction, for the relief of the artist’s
nerves? Where is the work that is only to serve beauty? I cannot see
it; but what I do see is that all known works serve some purpose of
society. They glorify the gods, the kings, the commonwealth. They
extol the dignity of belief, of government, of the mother-country.
Homer shows the heroes of the Hellenic race in the bloody apotheosis
of their exploits. Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides unfold on the
stage the myths and sagas of their ancestors. On the Acropolis, in
the Parthenon, gleam the gods of the mother-country, the guardians of
the commonwealth, shaped by the magic chisel of Phidias. The Stoa,
the Poikile, the Stadium, are peopled with the monuments of athletes,
warriors, archons, legislators, of all great men who are the people’s
pride, and are to serve them as models. Tyrtæus chants his sublime
marches to excite the warriors to fight for their country. The singer
of the Hymn to Apollo composes his cantatas to make the temple service
more impressive. I am well aware that, besides these monuments, there
are the little lyric poems of the Anthology, the charming little
Tanagra figures, that is to say, very individual revelations, which
sing the joys and sorrows of a single soul, which seize the graceful
movements and gait of young women who had enraptured a single kneader
of the clay. But these pretty little things, although _chef d’œuvres_
of their kind, are not, however, to be compared with the triumphant
creations prompted by religious belief and patriotism, whose superhuman
splendour fills the centuries.
If we go from pagan antiquity to the Christian Middle Ages and the
free-thinking or the openly atheistic Renaissance, the _rôle_ of art
remains unchanged. For whom does the artist work? Only for the Church
and the palace. The pope, the bishop, the abbot demand of him the
decoration of the cathedral and monastery. The priest under the vaulted
arch, the monk in his refectory—these must have before their eyes
images to remind them of the doctrines of which they are preachers and
servants. The people, when they enter God’s house, must be caught hold
of by the representations of suffering and martyrdoms, of beneficent
and comforting miracles, of the horrors of hell and the bliss of
paradise, and be strengthened in their faith, seeing with their eyes
and touching with their hands what religion teaches. The king’s castle,
the palace of the great vassals, plume themselves on the works of arts
that are consecrated to the glory of their ancestors, of their rank,
or, simply, of the dominant system. Here the stately tombs of kings or
knights, here the statues showing the ancestor as hero or demi-god.
Here the pictures of battles and sieges, of butcheries and victories.
Here the painted memorials of great state ceremonies, triumphal
entries, receptions of ambassadors, conclusions of advantageous
treaties, famous meetings of mighty lords. The object of all this art
is always to flatter the vanity of the great, to impose on the populace
a high notion of their wealth and power, to make it feel, by all
possible means of expression, the superiority of its leaders. We must
go down to the Italian Renaissance in order to discover, by the side of
religious, dynastic, aristocratic, and political art—for historical art
was always designed to serve a political idea or arrangement—in order
to discover, I say, by the side of this prescriptive art, the beginning
of a purely æsthetic art. When Mantegna paints the “Muses on Olympus,”
or Leonardo the “Mona Lisa,” they are no longer desirous of kindling
faith or strengthening subjects in obedience, but they want to enrich
and brighten existence. But whose existence? That of a wealthy and
distinguished patron, of him who has placed the order with them. It is
not before the Renaissance that we see the artist gradually emancipate
himself from the rule that sternly dictates to him the choice of his
theme, and even, up to a certain point, the method of his treatment.
He then acquired to some degree the freedom to follow his own power of
imagination, and could hope to get a return for his creations, even
if he did not serve a dogma or a policy, even if he did not glorify a
saint, a king, or a nobleman; if he simply tried to move a man’s soul
by revealing the secret movements of a human soul.
We see then that, through long centuries, art had the sole task to
serve the great institutions of society: religion, monarchy, or one’s
native country under another form of government, the dominant castes.
The mechanism by which art was held in bondage was the simplest and
most naïve: the artist had no other customer for his works except the
powers that be. These bound him by his necessity to eat daily, or
nearly so. The Church, the king, the republic, the city, the ruler,
gave the artist commissions, and paid him. If he found no patron in
the castle or palace, he had no gold or honour to hope for from any
other quarter. Now neither the Church, nor the Government, nor the
privileged classes were in the habit of throwing their money out of
the window. The money they expended had to bring them profit. They
wanted the artist in their pay to become a champion for their cause,
in exactly the same way as the cross-bowmen of their body-guard, their
judge, their herald, steward, aye, their jailer and executioner. Art,
in those days, preached the fear of God and his servants, submission to
the king and the State, respect for nobles and officials. The ruling
powers made the artist suggest to the people all that was favourable
to them. Art was the school of the good subject, the artist the main
prop of priestly and monarchical-aristocratic society. The common herd,
the million, found none of their human emotions satisfied in art; the
voices that rang out of these works only cried to them: “Pray, obey,
tremble.”
The Netherlanders, a free people, were the first to know an art
other than the traditional one. In Flanders and Holland, writers,
and especially painters, began to speak no longer exclusively of God
and the saints, the king and the great, but of the humble, obscure,
and nameless multitude. _Genre_ painting revived for the first time
since ancient days. It told the everyday life of the middle and
lower classes, their somewhat gross joys, their somewhat commonplace
sorrows; it showed the ale-house and the mill, the sitting-room and
the retail shop. This was not edifying, it is true. The philosophy of
this art is low; it hardly widens the spiritual horizon, and is of
poor comfort amid the narrowness and bitterness of real life. And yet
this art was a forerunner. It denoted a turning-point, the beginning
of great and important things. One great king, Lewis XIV., was not
deceived about it. With the sharpened keen feeling of the mighty for
everything that can encroach on their superhuman dignity, he perceived
at once that this new art offended against his kingly majesty. How?
There are painters who dare to treat of plebeian subjects! What should
that mean? Does art perhaps even fancy that it can be other than a
continual homage to the greatness and omnipotence of kings? And, with
an annihilating wave of his hand, he banished from his august presence
these daring little pictures, these democratic works of Teniers,
Ostade, Dirk Hals, and Gerard Dow, whilst uttering the historic words:
“_Enlevez-moi ces grotesques._”
But time stands not still; development is achieved. Modern democracy
appears, and transposes all the conditions of existence of society and
its members. Art cannot escape the general revolution. It experiences
its influence spiritually and economically; changes its judgment hall
and its mart. We do not realise the tremendous meaning of this change.
The court that decided as to the worth of the artist and his work was
formerly the small circle of possible patrons—princes of the Church,
the great, the courtiers. To-day this court is criticism, professional
criticism. In earlier times it was enough for the artist to please a
few people, perhaps only one individual, if the latter happened to be a
magnate. He had not to trouble himself about the crowd; moreover, the
crowd followed docilely the lead from above. When Dante said:
“Credete Cimabue nella pintura
Tener lo campo, ed ora ha Giotto il grido,
Si che la fama di colui oscura;”—
What did _grido_ mean? What was _fama_? It was the opinion of a court,
that of Rome or Pisa, perhaps of Ravenna. We must go to Aretino to
discover a specimen of an art critic who was neither a Mæcenas like
Leo X. or Lorenzo the Magnificent, or even a painter like Vasari,
but merely an audacious spirit who arrogated to himself the right of
dealing out praise and blame, and conferring glory in the name of
something absolutely novel, in the name of public opinion.
From that time it is professional criticism which suggests to the
multitude, and imposes on the mighty, its judgment on the artist.
But the criticism is disinterested, or at least can be so. It does
not expect of the work of art a direct personal advantage, its own
glorification, the vindication of its spiritual and material influence.
Its measure, therefore, grows larger and broader. It brings to its
office philosophical and æsthetic considerations, which the popes and
kings could not know when they gave commissions to the artists, their
_protégés_. In order to secure success, the artist must now please
the critic—many critics—and the latter pass a verdict on him with
perceptions, with taste and spiritual prepossessions that very seldom
are those of the bishops and great men.
And as the artist has got another tribunal, he also comes before the
public under other material and spiritual conditions, and seeks in
other ways a market for his work.
In feudal times, as we have seen, the church and palace were the places
for works of art. They were seen there under circumstances little
favourable for a purely æsthetic appreciation. In the cathedral people
were intimidated by the significance of the vast space, the acts of
faith, and the perfume of incense; in the castle, by the magnificent
garments of the officials, and the weapons of the guard. It was in
1673 that a “Salon,” _i.e._, a regular art-exhibition, was opened in
Paris; and besides the “Salon” public museums were opened everywhere,
to which every one had access without invitation or introduction.
The artist was now quite independent; he could work without waiting
for orders. He no more needed, in order to become known, to crave
humbly a visit to his possibly poverty-stricken studio. Here was
a definite place where he could exhibit his work to thousands of
spectators—connoisseurs, judges, possible buyers. From that time he
worked with an eye to the great public which was sure not to be lacking
at his regular rendezvous. If the professional critic became his judge,
the mass of people became his Mæcenas. Universal suffrage has dethroned
Church and royalty, and remains the artist’s only patron.
I say expressly—the only. It still happens that the State, _i.e._, a
high official, perhaps a monarch, orders works, assigns to the artist
the task of adorning churches and palaces, perhaps even public places
and walks, or even creating a monument of political import. But who
receives these commissions? The artist pointed out by public opinion,
_i.e._, the democratic crowd acting under the suggestion of the
critics, who also belong to the crowd. The artist who has gained the
advantage of an officially favoured position otherwise than by popular
acclamation, who owes it to the whim of a ruler, the mere favouritism
of a bishop or some other great personage, is nowadays not esteemed,
but despised. He may receive some alms in the shape of money; he may
collect ridiculous titles and wretched tags of coloured ribbons, but he
will be branded with the name of court-artist, and this name excludes
him irredeemably from fame.
The literary man in earlier times lived by the favour of a protector,
whom alone he had to trouble about pleasing. Nowadays he lives,
through newspapers and books, by the public at large. The dramatic
poet had, for his productions, only the subsidised theatre, the
theatre royal, which imposed on him its regulations. To-day this
theatre is insignificant as compared with the free and independent
stage, and the poet need know no other care and consideration than
that of getting a good grip on his public. Then the artist had
nothing to hope for, unless he served religion, the monarchy, or the
aristocracy. Now subjects from these spheres have actually become
laughing-stocks—_pompiers_, as they are termed with an expression of
contempt; and the artist, if he would become rich and famous, must
fish for his subjects in other streams of thought. This is so true
that there are rulers who, from feeling that art is making itself
independent of them, and will no longer serve as the herald of their
thoughts, try even to produce works of art, and would impress their
works on the admiration of the multitude, which, nevertheless, does not
admire.
The great revolution is consequently accomplished; art now works only
for the masses. It is still always the State that commissions; it is
still always the few rich who buy; but it is really universal suffrage
that imposes on them its own inclinations. But we do not believe that
that new Mæcenas, the people at large, has other habits of mind or ways
of acting than had the Mæcenas of the past. The people too, exactly
like the priests and kings of old, demands that art should please and
flatter it. But it further demands something else, something more than
pleasure and obsequiousness—viz., a high satisfaction, a corrective
of an evil of which it is perhaps not clearly conscious, but which,
nevertheless, it feels strongly. And I will now try to point out this
evil.
One of the most striking phenomena of modern life is specialisation
applied to all departments. Every one tills merely a very little bit
of field or rather he ploughs only one and the same furrow. This is
true of mental craftsmen. It is still more true of handicraftsmen.
What existence does such a man lead nowadays? There is no longer one
who fabricates an entire chair. One always makes the arms, another the
legs, a third the back, a fourth the cane-work. A knife goes through a
dozen hands, a needle, I believe, through thirty. In order to attain
that extreme skill which competition demands of him and which he must
supply, if he would earn his bread, the workman continually repeats
the movement, becomes a machine, less than a machine, a tiny part of
a machine, a single wheel, a single screw. His being shrivels up, his
soul suffers. All development is denied him; all his faculties, except
the one he is always employing, become crippled, and disappear. The man
gradually sinks almost to the low level of a polypus, which is only an
organ of a hydramedusa.
Whence comes the strange fascination that the foremost men of the
Italian Renaissance exercise on us? The reason is that they were
complete men. All their faculties were fully developed—all that
offered a possibility in them was developed to the utmost. Nothing
human was alien to them. With marvellous freedom they circumscribed
the whole circle of human knowledge and faculties. Then the learned
man was an universal scholar; his knowledge was encyclopædic. The
poets were at the same time men of action. Men of rank were artists
and writers, and the artists were all they wished to be. Michael
Angelo painted, modelled, built the cupola of St Peter’s, and wrote
charming verses. Benvenuto Cellini handled the spatula as well as the
mallet, the crayon as well as the pen, and the sword as well as all
these tools. Macchiavelli governed as wonderfully as he wrote, and
Leonardo painted the “Last Supper” between a musical composition, a
treatise on mechanics, a plan of a fortification, the model of a
triumphal car, and the plan of a canal for the purpose of irrigation.
Count Castiglione’s “Cortegiano” shows us the ideal of the man at
the time of the Renaissance. He was probably the fairest flower ever
produced by the human plant. The modern man may envy him; he can never
be his peer, but must shrivel up in his narrow corner. Hypertrophy of
a single, often subordinate faculty, atrophy of all the rest—such is
the lot to which he is ruthlessly condemned. And there is no change
possible in respect of it; no herb grown can prove an antidote to that
bane. Division of labour gives to the whole advantages too great to be
dispensed with out of consideration for the individual. Division of
labour is the true condition of all progress, though in this case, as
in so many others, progress exacts a heavy, very heavy, price for its
services.
Every one is painfully aware of this reverse side of progress; many
consciously take themselves to task for it. Why has the madhouse
philosophy which extols the superman been able to subjugate
spirited youth? Because it meets the longing for a fuller life of
the personality. And anarchism? What is the secret that makes it
attractive to true consciences and loving hearts? Nothing except that
anarchy seems to promise unchecked development of the individuality.
In all these nonsensical, wild, and criminal movements there is
some little revolt against the pinching and tightening in of the
personality entailed by the modern conditions of labour, and this is
the ingredient that recruits adherents among those unaccustomed to
rigorous examination of their thoughts. And when the workmen demand an
eight-hours’ day, what do they want? To find time to go and drink at
the public house, to be able to idle, as the ill-wishers who calumniate
them assert? No; they want to have a few hours in which to cease to be
mechanical tools, in which they may again be men, and participate in
the great life of the community.
But by what means can we give back to men what division of labour
and specialisation—these irrefragable consequences of contemporary
progress—have taken from them? By what means can we remake beings
developed from them harmonic? Perhaps in a very distant future science
will effect this necessary, demanded, and longed for miracle. Perhaps
mankind will once more see these workers who earn their bread during a
part of the day by handicraft, and during the rest of the time linger
on the highest summits of human thought and knowledge; a Socrates, who
is a stonemason; a Spinoza, who polishes spectacle glasses. But, as I
have said before, that will be feasible only in a very remote future,
for science is not easily accessible; the way leading to it is long and
rough, and the full life through science is possible only to men of a
higher spiritual development than the average people nowadays.
But if science is no longer the usual companion of the man of the
masses, and, unfortunately, will not be so for a long time, art, on the
other hand, admits him to familiar intercourse. No tedious initiation
is requisite for it, nor any hard labours which the majority cannot
perform. It is sufficient to have eyes and ears, and a human heart
in one’s breast. After an apprenticeship, which may be very short;
after some habituation which one easily acquires by intercourse with
beautiful works, almost every one arrives so far that, even if he
cannot appreciate the technical and philosophical merits of a work of
art with consciousness, yet he can feel its charm and be susceptible of
emotions from it.
Art it is, then, which can give to modern humanity what it most
needs—the means of attaining the full life. Here lies, unless I am
deceived, the greatness, the lofty mission of art in a democratic
society which rests on a civilisation, the marks of which, the real
condition of which, are severe specialisation and division of labour
carried to an extreme.
Art raises man out of industrialism and introduces him to a higher
world. In this artist-created world the man who is bundled together
stretches himself straight; the shrivelled broadens out; the fraction
of a man becomes complete. Here he who belongs to his machine or
observation-instrument becomes once more a free man and citizen of the
world—a man participating in the life of the community, and enjoying
with the rest all the beauties of heaven and earth, all the greatness
of heart and soul of the pick of men. Through art a person imprisoned
in his daily avocation comes into communion with all civilisation.
Here is the paradise to which the astronomer descends from his
constellations, to which the miner ascends from his pit, in order to
participate in the same joys and raptures, to bring to flower whatever
potentialities they possess. The mission of art in society present and
future is, in short, to liberate the prisoner of subdivided labour,
to restore the dignity of manhood to the being degraded into a little
wheel of a machine.
But art, which is to fulfil this new and lofty mission, cannot,
manifestly, be conventional art. On this theocracy, monarchy, and
aristocracy have stamped the character that suited them. The multitude
at the present day find no sort of joy in works which depict to
them the bliss of paradise and the torments of hell, which extol
some paste-board king with crown and sceptre, which offer for their
admiration the greatness of blue-blooded privileged beings. Like the
patrons of earlier times, the people, who now represent Mæcenas of
old, are interested in art only for themselves. The sources of their
emotions in art are the emotions of their own lives. In the work of
art that is to attract them, they must find themselves again, but, as
formerly the priest and king did, magnified and ennobled. The work of
art must show him his own likeness, but a beautiful one; it must raise
the people in their own eyes, and teach them to respect themselves.
This the common realism has not comprehended, which broke in on art
with a din, and dared to call upon the democracy. The genuine people
has never had a mind to realism of this sort, but has always dismissed
it roughly. The rough proof of a hateful and tedious reality, such as
the pictures of Courbet or Bastien Lepage, has never attracted any but
the superfine, and this only, by the well-known psychological law of
contrast, whereby an impression that is the exact opposite of the usual
impression can impart a pleasurable feeling for a short time. The rich
and luxurious like to see works of ugliness and misery; the poor and
afflicted do not like them. It is the same in regard to literature.
Reluctant protests have frequently become loud, in these socialistic
days, against the realism which a party organ offers its readers.
The working class do not wish to know anything about this realism
which professes to be modern and democratic, yet is, in reality, only
wretched and repulsive. It coops them up in the narrowness of their
everyday existence, but their wish is to get out of it.
Pictures such as Millet’s, sculptures such as Constantin
Meunier’s—works which seek to show the dignity and beauty of the
occupations of the masses, which constitute a hallowing of work, an
apotheosis of the tragedies and idylls, of all the sweet and bitter
emotions of the people’s life—these works, to my thinking, exhibit the
type of future art.
Some great genius will, perhaps, find another formula. What one may,
however, say for certain is this, that the art of the future will
not be realistic in the narrow sense of the word. But it will not be
mystical and æsthetic either. The people will never interest themselves
in half-tone angels of boundless length, in violet-hued Virgins
with lilies in their hands in a conventional bush, in enigmatical,
mysterious verses. And esoteric art will never give the people what
they need, viz., the liberating ideal. The art of the cultivator of the
Ego, the _dilletante_, of the snobs of a Talmi-aristocracy, presumes
to demand the future for itself. Is that to be an art of the future,
an art of progress? One can only laugh at the notion. The art of the
future will be no “little chapel,” but a mighty cathedral, wide enough
to admit the whole of mankind. And that will be exactly its vocation:
to be the hallowed place wherein mankind will rise again to the
childship of God for which religion has educated them in past stages of
evolution.
II
SOCIALISTIC ART
CONSTANTIN MEUNIER
Is there a socialistic art? Can such a thing exist? So far as Socialism
is an economic and political philosophy it is hardly comprehensible
with the means of expression of art. If the plastic arts are to
be instructive, they do not amount to more than chill symbols and
halting allegories. On the other hand, they are not prevented from
digging down to the psychical roots of Socialism, and presenting the
fundamental feelings and ultimate intuitions from which it springs. One
of these fundamental feelings is pity for the disinherited. One of the
ultimate intuitions is that of the dignity of all work done with moral
earnestness and entire devotion.
The artist can show us the destitute, to whose presence amidst our
civilisation applies more sharply, what the Psalmist[2] asserts of the
life of man in general: “And if it has been splendid, it has been toil
and labour”—toil and labour without a ray of happiness; severe physical
exertion rendered more wretched by sorrow and distress. Such a picture
grips our hearts, and urges on us painful questions: is this misery
inevitable? Is it cruelly ordained by nature herself or a consequence
of faulty institutions, capable of improvement on the part of man?
Cannot we introduce into the lot of this ill-used brother something of
joy?
And the artist can also show us the worker, not in want and suffering,
like the beast of burden, humiliated into the slave of matter, but
rather as creating eagerly, proud of displaying his strength, joyful
in the conviction of success, regarding his skill as his honour. This
aspect fills us with respect, perhaps with admiration. It opens to us
the comprehension of the import of the workman, and the lofty reality
of his achievement.
In both cases the artist fashions fully from life; he need not
exaggerate, he need add nothing; he can confine himself to the plain
facts of life. He need not betray any prejudice or any extra-artistic
aim. He will, nevertheless, so contrive that one will be able to speak
without falsification of his art as of a socialistic one. For his work
will put the spectator in the mood in which he will be inclined to hail
as progress every transformation which can improve the earthly lot of
the worker, and increase his value in the community.
The school of æsthetes, which maintains the principle of art for art’s
sake, will, I grant, admit works of this sort as a form of Socialism,
indeed, but not as a form of art. I do not belong to this school. I
oppose it at all times and everywhere as strongly as I am able. I am
convinced that art has a social mission which reaches far beyond mere
gratification, that it must necessarily be moral, and, in the highest
sense of the word, useful; not useful in the simple way of painted or
chiselled aids to intelligence, not moral in the vulgar way of tracts;
but moral through stimulating what is most human and noble in our
spirit and soul, and useful through educating us to deeper and wider
conceptions of phenomena. In one point, however, I agree with the
heralds of _l’art pour l’art_—I demand beauty in a work of art; not
beauty alone, but beauty in the first place.
In order, then, that we can speak of a Socialistic art, the works
that would deserve this designation must not only excite sympathy
with the disinherited, and respect for the workman, but they must
also arouse æsthetic feeling, they must be beautiful. This claim, of
course, excludes no kind of beauty. The tragic is absolutely beautiful.
Purification is one of the most powerful æsthetic influences. Truth
can be beautiful if essential and expressive. The socialist who would
prove himself an artist must possess the lucky gift to see and exhibit
beauty in the figures and actions of the class of society for which his
heart beats.
All these conditions no contemporary artist known to me fulfils in
the same degree as Constantin Meunier, the Belgian sculptor, painter,
and draughtsman. Meunier died an old man in 1905. He was born in the
‘thirties’ of the last century. The world was slow to recognise him,
not because he did not deserve recognition, but because he did not seek
it. He was big and unassuming. He lived quietly in a little Belgian
town as a teacher in an art school, and modestly avoided the roar of
fame’s mart. He had even refused to allow the reproduction of one of
his noble bronzes, for business purposes, by a first-rate Paris house
which was prepared to pay a munificent price for the right of sale. He
was loth that his piece should become a factory-cast and a shop-window
article. He belongs to the narrowest circle of the blessed, of the
chosen. He is one of the Prometheus-like artists; he informs and
inspires life. He feels like a Samaritan, he thinks like an apostle of
the submerged, who utters a great cry of wrath over the harshness and
unrighteousness of the social scheme, and he compels the bronze, like
a Benvenuto Cellini, translated from what was aristocratic and classic
into that which is modern and democratic.
In Meunier’s work there is a unity from which he seldom digresses. He
lived in a Belgian district of coal-pits and smelting furnaces, in the
very midst of rough labourers who passed their lives in the galleries
of mines, or in the fiery glow of furnace mouths. He found his models
among these figures. There the Labour movement in Belgium arose—one of
the most rapid in Europe; there Meunier’s art grew up—one of the most
intensive at the present time. The miner and the iron-smelter are his
heroes; he admires their strength, and from the bottom of his heart
he bewails their pains. And if he is unfaithful to his Cyclopses, it
is only, touched and enraptured, to look after his other darlings—the
country folk working in the fields, a subject which instils in him as
much reverence as the burrowing of the coal-miners underground, and the
powerful hammer-strokes of the iron-smiths.
One of his greatest creations, perhaps his greatest is a bronze a
span high, representing an old woman, the wife or, as I would rather
assume from the stormy intensity of her emotion, the mother of a miner,
who, after a driving storm, has gone to the mouth of the shaft of a
coal-pit, to which the corpse of some one belonging to her has been
brought.
The woman stands there, leaning slightly forward, her countenance
petrified with dumb despair, her arms limp, her one hand lying in the
other, yet without any convulsion, and powerless, her knees through
a very slight bend betraying her trembling, her feet instinctively
somewhat turned inwards, so as to give a broader support to the body,
and to protect the almost crippled figure from falling down. The whole
is such a frightfully expressive picture of a poor human creature
who has, as it were, received a blow on the head, and in her crushed
condition is not strong enough even for sobbing and wringing her hands,
that it strikes the spectator with a cold shudder. Observe, the old
woman wears the garments of the poor Walloons, heavy, stiff gowns and
neckerchiefs, the hard angles and folds of which can express only very
roughly and indistinctly the soft play of the weakly-quivering muscles.
What penetrating keenness of observation does it need to recognise in
an entirely self-contained form shrouded in uncouth, shapeless clothes,
without gestures or play of features, and to imitate, without the
slightest exaggeration, yet overpoweringly, the tenderest lines which,
even in such unfavourable conditions of material, express clearly and
dramatically all that is passing in this almost impenetrably veiled
human soul. This little figure, no larger than the decoration of a
clock, is a great monument, and, like every real work of art, it points
far beyond the limits of itself. It reveals much more to the power of
imagination than it manifests to the eye. This is actually proved in
this very case; for Meunier has a group which supplements the work
described: the same old woman, and before her, lying outstretched on
the ground, the corpse of him whom she is bewailing. We might think
that this more complete work would be more deeply affecting than the
fragmentary one. The contrary, however, is the case. The corpse,
although modelled so exquisitely, leaves us cold; it does not realise
the conception we have formed of it. We had expected to feel a horror
at the sight of it, at which the blood would congeal in our veins. We
are astonished and disappointed at seeing lying there only an unknown
man who does not concern us. When we look at the old woman petrified by
grief we think of the corpse which is not exhibited to us; we see it
with our spiritual eyes in the horror of the old woman, we share the
feelings of the old woman, the unseen corpse is that of a relation of
our own, the dead man himself is dear to us, we ourselves have suffered
the loss of him. On the other hand, the completed group makes any
co-operative exertion of our imaginative powers superfluous.
The corpse lies there visible; it distracts our attention from the
old woman; we feel less keenly her emotion; the incident no longer
occurs in the Holy of Holies of our soul, but in a forecourt, in a
place of inspection. We could, in imagination, endow the corpse with
the features of a dear relative, and feel sorrow for the dead man:
inspection teaches us that the corpse is a stranger to us, and we
have no grounds for shedding tears over it. The two works, placed in
juxta-position, fully bear out the old dictum, that a work of art is
more powerfully effective in proportion as it more strongly excites our
imaginative faculties to creative co-operation.
A series of works brings before us the life of the coal-miners.
Some of them come to daylight after their shift is ended. They are
tired, but cheerful. About their wearied countenances there seems to
quiver a reflection of the hearth-fire which awaits them familiarly
in their poor homes. Here is a miner at his work. In a painful,
half-recumbent position he handles the mattock in the narrow gallery
under the seam from which he is dislodging the coal. Here another
is sitting inactive, with his spade and lamp, with only a pair of
trousers on, the upper part of his body naked, without a particle
of fat on his muscles steeled by toil. Here a worker at a smelting
furnace, likewise sitting—a reminiscence of the famous “Les Foins”
of Bastien Lepage, which is at present in the Luxembourg. Like this
peasant lass, Meunier’s labourer is completely bestialised; he stares
vacantly before him, with a jaw open like that of an animal; his hand,
unused to inactivity, hangs down heavily. It is a shocking picture of
the degradation of man through a one-sided exertion of the muscles; a
forcible harangue in favour of the eight hours’ day, which would leave
more time for the human working machine, not only, as his opponents
assert, to visit the public-house, but also for spiritual life.
Meunier rises to the height of the Vedic hymns when he turns towards
the countryman and his heroic deeds in nourishing mankind. In the
relief, “The Harvest,” a band of reapers—four men and two women—are
grappling with the ripe corn. One seizes violently the stalks, the
second, bending forward, makes a wide stroke with his sickle, a woman
binds into sheaves the ears that have been mown. In the background, one
longing for rest looks at the position of the sun, and another, _rapido
fessus aestu_ (fatigued by the scorching summer heat), to use Vergil’s
words, wipes the sweat from his brow. There is the note of the Eclogues
about this work. Over it floats the consecration of the lofty act with
which the rooted son of the soil, the ploughman—the creator and bearer
of all civilisation—gains the bread of mankind out of the earth. A
single figure, “June,” is also created from this emotion. It is the
realisation in free sculpture of a _motif_ from the relief. A reaper,
stripped to the waist, emaciated by the heavy toil of harvesting,
exhausted by his day’s work, leans upon his scythe and glances, shading
his eyes with his hand, at the sun—“I would it were bedtime and all was
over.” One would like to press the hand of this brave, good fellow,
or at any rate that of the artist who has represented him to us so
faithfully and straightforwardly.
All Meunier’s works have not this delicacy; many are weak, some
absolute failures. As an instance of such I point to “The Puddlers,”
though it has been particularly admired by some critics. Three
iron-founders stand at the open stoke-hole of the puddle-furnace, and
feed it with mighty pieces for melting. From the opening issue steam
and smoke, which curl round the three men wielding rakes and tongs, and
eddy upwards. Meunier has tried to represent this steam in sculpture.
He has given it a concrete form, necessarily the same corporeality as
the bodies, tools, blocks of metal, the flaming furnace; for sculpture
possesses no means of differentiating the thickness of matter, when
it abandons the mere engraved line or the make-shift of various
perforations. The result is, that instead of smoke there is an amazing
image which partly reminds us of an untrimmed dab of plaster, partly
of a weather-beaten stalactite. Meunier was originally a painter, and
took to sculpture only late in life. His “Puddlers” are formed with
the technique of a painter, from which the artist did not immediately
emancipate himself. Another relief, “The Bricklayers,” is absolutely
a mistake. Two men are standing in the loam-pit and handing up the
bricks to their mates above. They do this with theatrical gestures,
as if a conquered king were handing over his crown to his conqueror.
The contrast between the bombastic movement and its vulgar purpose is
so grotesque that the picture has an irresistibly comic effect. Here
Meunier is, for the only occasion in all the works of his with which I
am acquainted, insincere and affected. I have looked for a long time
at this deplorable work, and it made me thoughtful. How heavy is the
responsibility of the critic! Supposing I knew nothing of Meunier and
only saw this work, I should find it hard to resist the impulse to
abuse him in the sharpest terms, for it unites the two worst faults
that can be found in a work of art: it is at the same time inanely
futile and obtrusively pretentious. So far I should be acting within
the scope of my perfect rights. But am I certain that I was not
allowing myself to be carried away by my own natural propensity to
generalise, and to condemn not only the work, but also its author, to
call him a bungler and a botcher? Such a verdict would, apparently,
be well-grounded and, in fact, revoltingly false. Works such as “The
Bricklayers” are a warning to the critic; they admonish him to be
conscientious. Their teaching is that every comprehensive verdict on an
artist must presuppose a knowledge of his whole life’s work, and that
no single work can offer sufficient basis for the general appreciation
of its author, especially of his depreciation.
In his figures of the miners and iron-founders, Meunier showed sympathy
with the lot of the proletariate; in his portrayals of the countryman’s
life, reverence for the civilising work of the man who ploughs the
soil. But he reveals in certain other works of similar subjects beauty
which prevents us from wishing for one moment for those Invalides of
Olympus, the unchangeable troop of academic sculpture. The “Blacksmith”
wielding his hammer, the “Harbour-Workers,” the more than life-sized
“Smith,” are discoveries which are tantamount to revelations.
Especially this smith in his working garb, with his stiff leather
apron, leggings, and the foot coverings that are intended to protect
him from the sparks. Leaning on the tongs that are almost the height
of a man, he rests his hand on his hips and waits until it is his turn
to attack the work. There is a proud tranquillity, and a reserve of
ready strength in him that carry us away. This artisan is every whit
as handsome in his way as an antique statue in a toga of ample fold,
or a noble nudity, or a knight in romantic armour. His body possesses
the elegance which perfect fitness confers, his movement the energetic
restraint that the workman, thrifty in exerting himself, acquires
through being in the habit of avoiding every prodigal expenditure of
his strength. Meunier trains our eyes to appreciate the æsthetic
charm of this phenomenon of our own days, which great art has hitherto
stupidly passed by.
Of what expressive poetry Meunier is capable we recognise with
admiration in a statue of an animal, the mine-horse—one of those
unfortunate nags which are brought to the mine as foals, in order to
draw the coal waggons to the galleries, and who are condemned to spend
the whole of their lives in the bowels of the earth, far from the
sun. The animal’s head droops, its lips are flabby, eyes half-closed,
ears sunken, flanks fallen in; the whole wretchedness of an innocent
creature condemned to night and woe is embodied in this shivering
beast. The mine-nag has certainly no sense of its disconsolate fate;
it does not miss the sun, or long for green pastures. It does not envy
its luckier brothers who can skip in the fresh grass beneath the blue
sky. Meunier has all these feelings for it; he infuses them into the
animal’s stupid soul; but doubly amazing is the power with which he
himself can express through a coarse animal body humanly lofty tragedy.
What had already become clear to me when I saw Meunier’s works
separately in the _salon_ at the Champs de Mars, deepened itself within
me, at the sight of the whole collection of them, into a certain
conviction that Meunier is, perhaps unconsciously, a pupil of Millet’s.
He learnt from him to look with reverence on the homely men who with
holy zeal, without gazing to the left or right, with body and soul
in their work, wrest the works of civilisation from the forces of
nature. He improves Millet’s peasants and artisans into the plastic
and monumental. It is the same simplicity, almost crudeness; the same
contempt of pose, the same extreme energy of activity, and the same
deep, inward life as in the master who painted the “Angelus.” And what
makes the most vivid impression on us in Meunier, as in Millet, is the
ardent piety with which the sight of true and earnestly working people
fills him—people who rise high in their apparently humble, yet fruitful
and, through its connection with the corporate life of mankind,
especially significant labour. An artist, however, who discloses to us
such outlooks on the path of civilisation, and such insight into the
human soul, has some claim to a place near the acknowledged masters.
III
THE QUESTION OF STYLE
A history of style—I mean of style in general, not of one particular
style—has, so far as I am aware, never been written. That I can
understand. It would be a gigantic task, even exceeding the power of an
encyclopædist. It would have to show from what spiritual peculiarities
of the artist; from what necessities and intuitions of the time; from
what requirements of the material, and from what compulsion on the part
of the technique, the style develops, and it would have to measure
the whole range of individual and national psychology, of customs, of
material and of technology. The individual, however, whose powers do
not suffice for an exhaustive and systematic exposition of the genesis
and mutation of styles, can constantly register partial observations,
and throw light on sections of this wide province.
Every human activity is excited by a need. We fabricate weapons,
implements, shelter, and clothing, because we need them. In the
earliest stages of human artistic skill, purpose and material alone
control the productions of the human hand; style, so far as we can
speak of such a thing, is purely constructive. It makes us recognise
the influence of a small number of bio-mechanical and psychological
laws—laws that have hardly varied during all the thousands of years in
the history of human morals. These laws are those of the least effort
and of selfishness. By virtue of the law of least effort we choose the
most promising material, _i.e._, at which we have most conveniently to
hand, which can be worked in the easiest way, or is most durable, and
for that reason, more especially saves us the too frequent repetition
of the effort. We choose the form to which the material employed
adapts itself most readily. The problem which the constructive element
in style has to solve is this: given a determined task which should
be performed by an artistic expedient, how will this object be most
readily, and yet most perfectly, attained with the material available?
The law of selfishness alters the natural course of the law of least
effort, and often operates quite in opposition to it. The possessor
of an object wishes to be remarked; he will distinguish himself from
others, be admired and envied by them, whereby he will gain influence
over their minds. He will therefore demand that for the object not the
most easily procured material, but the rarest, and that which can
be furnished only with the utmost difficulty, be employed, that the
form require not the least, but greatest possible amount of labour. He
will likewise wish the workmen to sacrifice the elegance of economy,
not to represent what is alone real and necessary with the smallest
expenditure of material, but, on the contrary, to lavish material, and
make it quite visible and quite striking; to add to the Useful and
Essential, also the Superfluous, so as to suggest the notion of wealth.
The idea of elegance will alter its meaning. It will no longer signify
the greatest suitability and perfect appropriateness, but, in the first
place, costliness of material, difficulty of work, wastefulness—in a
word, luxury.
The law of selfishness bursts the narrow frame of construction, and
adds to style its second element, decoration. This, too, is still
under the law of least expenditure of force; this, too, is still
primarily subordinate to construction, _i.e._, utility, but it strives
to render itself independent of the constructive element, and to
become its own object. The history of each particular style shows this
conflict between the constructive and decorative elements. At first
construction rules alone; next, decoration, called forth by the _amour
propre_ of the fabricator or possessor, joins it, but very timidly and
very modestly. It obsequiously gets out of the way of construction,
and contents itself with corners where the constructive element has
nothing to do. But gradually it gets bolder, steps from its holes and
corners, confronts construction, compels it to give way and take less
comfortable by-paths, and finally subjects the constructive element
entirely to its will and caprice, so that, in the decadent period of a
style, a useful object becomes wholly unserviceable for its original
purpose, and is only an excuse for decoration, which self-gloriously
gives itself airs.
There is another contrast between construction and decoration. The
constructive is the social element in the product of human labour;
the decorative the individual one. I do not think that this dictum
needs an elaborate explanation; it seems clear enough to me. In
construction expression is given to a need which is, at a given time
and in a given place, shared by many or all; it answers not only a
condition, but a demand of the community. Decoration is—at any rate
originally—the outcome of individual taste and individual imaginative
power. Construction is a thing necessitated, and therefore _banal_;
decoration is superfluous, and therefore charming. The former appeals
to the understanding; the latter is fantastic and sentimental. The
human consciousness is, however, so arranged that—for its gain? for its
loss? (I have treated this question so often and so thoroughly in other
places that I may here leave it undiscussed)—it derives its feelings of
pleasure and aversion incomparably more from its sensuous than from
its intellectual life. Wherefore, for practical purpose in style, only
those who are most highly developed intellectually have appreciation;
on the other hand, for what is pleasing, all whose nervous system is
susceptible to pleasurable feelings.
An individual decorative invention becomes style by the imitation
of others, which can be slavish or free. A single work, a single
artist, will never be felt as a phenomenon of style. There is the same
difference between originality and style as between the picture of
a certain person and the composite or average photograph of Galton.
The feature of family likeness that runs through the works of one
period and one place, however, like that which all members of a
blood-relationship exhibit, is explained most simply through descent
from a common ancestor.
Decoration is either organic or transferred. The former is the
outgrowth of construction, and gives it a new meaning, unites to
the idea of its purpose a simile that can be correct or false,
pleasant or silly; the latter is added externally, and only aims
at the beautification of the surface, without adopting living and
necessary relations to the structure and destination of the object.
Surface decoration may be pretty and rich, but it is always something
subordinate, and always speaks of poor imagination and slight inventive
power. Organic decoration is alone the outcome of a creative gift for
art.
The psychical mechanism, which produces organic decoration, is
always the same; it is the co-operation of association of ideas
and anthropomorphism. I know very well that this latter is only a
particular instance of the former; but I cite the really identical,
nevertheless, as two apparently different ideas, so as not to become
vague through too wide generalisation.
For the sake of clearness I will quote a concrete example. In
collections, one not infrequently meets with a mediæval plane having
the figure of a crouching lion with jaws open and a wild expression. It
is easy to reproduce the psychic process through which this form arose.
The joiner who uses the plane, and follows his own work reflectively,
sees how the mouth of the plane, when applied, strikes the iron into
the surface of the wood, and tears the splinters from it. What is more
obvious than to think at the same time of jaws pouncing on the wood to
flay and mangle it? The technical German expressions, _Hobelmaul_ and
_Hobelwangen_ (plane-mouth and plane-cheeks) for the aperture in which
the _Hobeleisen_ (plane-iron) is fixed, show that the association of
ideas at once presented itself when the tool assumed the form familiar
to us. The mediæval artist went further; he has logically developed
the image of a rending and devouring mouth suggested by association
of ideas. He has given it form; he has examined it with sufficient
artistic intensity to embody materially the picture presented by the
word, to raise it from the rhetorical to the plastic. But whilst the
artist advanced from the mouth of the plane to a lion’s jaws, and
from the latter to an entire lion crouching over the board as over a
victim that he has attacked and torn down, and mangling it with raging
delight, he has at the same time made use of anthropomorphism, has
imputed to the plane will, passion, gruesome enjoyment, and turned the
planing into the tool’s riotous satisfaction of bloodthirsty wild-beast
instincts.
This plane in the shape of a crouching lion is the model of a good
organic decoration. The construction is not injured; it does no damage
to the under-surface of the plane, that it is the smooth-lying belly of
the lion with drawn claws; it does not prejudice the working capacity
of the iron, that it is let into a mouth of a slightly waving lip
shape; it does not make it difficult to work, that the handle is shaped
like a round lion’s head. A sense is communicated to the tool which it
did not originally possess; it does not shave and smoothe, but lives,
tears, devours, and finds its joy therein. Organic decoration is thus
an infusing of soul into that which possessed no soul; and not only
this, but also in a higher and nobler way, a submerging of oneself in
the soul that the artist has inspired into that which was soulless.
He must live in the being which his anthropomorphising association of
ideas has excogitated. “What should I feel, how should I act, what
movements should I make, what expression should I have, if I were this
object, but thinking, willing, feeling—in short, living and conscious?
How should I, for instance, as a plane which was really a beast of
prey, dispose myself, if I had the board—my victim—under me, and began
devouring it?” The organically decorative artist is, therefore, really
the dramatiser of the inanimate, for he creates beings, bestows on
them character, and makes them act according to the latter and the
situation, and, if not speak, nevertheless imitate.
If an artist has, from some especially vivid intuition and active
association of ideas, found and embodied an anthropomorphic likeness
which is very strikingly clear, imitation seizes it and repeats it with
slight individual changes, which are, now and then, spirited and happy,
but, for the most part, make the original picture dull, nay, through
stupidity or misunderstanding may degrade it to nonsense. Such is
exactly the case with the material picture as with the word-picture. At
first it is the new and peculiar discovery of a poetic mind, then it is
repeated well or ill so often that it ends with being a characterless
commonplace. Every cultivated language is made up of such commonplaces,
and, in like manner, style is made up of repetitions and tones, which
are the plastic equivalent of rhetorical phrases.
The psychic sources of style—in contradistinction to those or
freely devised organic decoration, which style only repeats and
vulgarises—originate in very mean domains of mind. They are
thoughtlessness, or, to put it more clearly and briefly, stupidity and
mental inertia in their special forms as imitativeness and detestation
of novelty.
It is thoughtlessness when we imitate forms that are suited to a
particular material in a quite different material, simply because we
are used to the sight of them. The far-famed Greek temple architecture
is largely a result of this thoughtlessness: it slavishly imitates in
stone the wooden architecture, the place of which it has taken; it
retains the beams with projecting beam-heads and cross-braces that
have neither object nor meaning in stone. To the same category belong
the tablets, with manifold curled up and twisted edges, which the
Renaissance and the Rococo executed in stone and wood, although they
have no sense or justification except in sheet metal: the contemporary
Moscow silver-work, which imitate painfully enough damask linen with
Russo-Byzantine coloured embroidery, or cakes and black-bread in
precious metals or enamel: the marble veils, lace garments, and knitted
stockings of the North-Italian sculptors of the decadence, etc.
It is mental inertia when we mechanically persist in repeating forms
which either are unfitted for a given object, or have lost all meaning.
For two thousand years artists of all sorts have made a decorative
use of acanthus leaves in countries where no human eye has ever had
an acanthus leaf before it. The Middle Ages decorated with a whole
menagerie of beasts from Asia and Africa, which they knew only from
fables, foreign textures, and pictures. From imitation to imitation
the outlines, which no comparison with the actual model corrected and
restored to accuracy, became more inexact and grotesque. Thus arose
acanthus capitals which are more like rough logs than the elegantly
curled plant, and heraldic lions and leopards, in which no feature any
longer reminds us of the great cats. This is then called improving
upon the natural form, and people even discover a particular beauty
in it: a striking proof of the ability of mankind to make a virtue
out of necessity. For the so-called stylisation is conscious and
intentional only in late conservative imitation. It arises, however,
quite involuntarily through unintelligent imitation of a pattern that
is incorrectly felt and grasped, because one has never known its living
model. So, too, the whole mythology of the Greeks still haunts our
present-day decoration, which mythology was to the Greek artists a part
of their living feeling and religious conviction, whilst to-day it has
lost all thought and feeling. What can Neptune’s trident, Orpheus’
lyre, the Sirens and the Centaur, the Sphynx and the Gorgon, signify
to a son of this century? But whilst these bits of inherited form
wander from one imitator to another, until they become hopelessly
unrecognisable, they gain a beauty of another sort which they did not
originally possess: the venerable spell of antiquity surrounds them,
and this charm, in its turn, touches certain susceptibilities of the
soul, the inclination to mystic, twilight conceptions of what is remote
in time and place, the pleasurable feeling of comfortable persistance
in that to which we are accustomed, the connection of the familiar
and always known with the remembrance of all strong impressions, both
happy and unhappy, of childhood and youth. This mystico-archaic and
subjectively sentimental element, which occurs in every style handed
down traditionally, furnishes it with fanatical devotees whom its
original decorative value could never win. That is, if I may say so,
the religious side of the feeling for, and appreciation of, style.
From the oppressive mass of material, which I must, for the most
part, leave untouched, I am afraid I must deal with only one more
question:—Is there a new style? Is the so-called “Secessionism” a style
which characterises our time, or, perhaps, a fugitive moment of our
time? He who has attentively observed the later exhibitions on this
point will be bound to say “No” decisively. Household furniture and
room decoration of the “secessionist” order are tortured into appearing
new and original; but they are neither the one nor the other, but a
patient, methodical eclecticism which aims at the influence of what
is foreign and peculiar. We distinguish accurately that rooms built
and painted in the secession style are patched together of Chinese
motives, with an addition of Loie Fuller’s serpentine twistings, and
that secessionist furniture imitates, in good wood and metal, the
slenderness, knottiness, and pliancy of bamboos. The secession contains
a very minute percentage of independent invention and a great many
reminiscences of Eastern Asia. The West European style, which should
ostensibly be the expression of the latest high European tendencies,
is, in reality, Chinese and Japanese style, exaggerated by absurdity of
form and assumed or real delirium.
IV
THE OLD FRENCH MASTERS
We must once more change our method of study. That is the immediate
result of the Exhibition of Old French artists—painters, draughtsmen,
enamellers, sculptors—which, in 1904, in the Pavilion de Marsan at
the Louvre, brought together several hundred fascinating, and perhaps
half a dozen overpowering works. With the proofs furnished by these
masterpieces full of earnestness and beauty, a chapter in the history
of French and European art will have to be rewritten—not, to be sure,
altogether in the sense intended and proclaimed by those who prepared
this exceedingly important arrangement.
Comparatively few mediæval French works of art have been preserved to
us. The Hundred Years’ War, the devastations of the League, and the
Great Revolution made a clean sweep of them with fiendish thoroughness.
With the châteaux, abbeys, and monasteries, their contents so far as
works of art were concerned also perished. What survived has up to
now appeared to a pre-conceived idea scarcely native. One historian of
art wrote after another, that, up to the period of the Renaissance,
the plastic artists who worked in France came partly from the Low
Countries, partly from Italy, but were only quite exceptionally, if at
all, Frenchmen. From a geographical standpoint, we might speak of a
French mediæval art; but from the nature and form of the work, on the
other hand, we should admit only a Flemish or Italian, but no French
art.
This view is no longer defensible. France, too, had, in the Middle
Ages, her own artists and schools of art, and if she also offered
hospitality to foreign talent, she was not dependent on it. The strong,
creative genius that developed in Northern France from the prosaic
semi-circular arch of the Byzantine style the pointed-arch poetry of
the Gothic, knew also how to make use of the chisel and paint-brush
as means of expression, and to satisfy by painting and carving its
impulse for depicting form. The mediæval art of France is not inferior
to any other. It must no longer be treated as a mere appendage of art
development in the Low Countries and Lombardy.
To be sure, if the learned compilers of the Exhibition Catalogue—George
Lafenestre, Henri Bouchot, Leopold Delisle and other academicians
or directors of museums and libraries—claim to have discovered, in
the pictures and statues, a particular French national feature
which distinguishes them clearly from other contemporary works, they
are led astray by patriotic prejudice. The works bear the stamp of
a period, not of a people. Nothing is more like a fourteenth- or
fifteenth-century French work of art than a Flemish or Italian, and
_vice versâ_. It is noticeable that people have taken Bourdichon’s
masterpiece, one of the gems of the collection—the portrait of the
little Dauphin Charles Roland, to be a work of Memling; and of the most
beautiful paintings of one and the same painter—des Moulins—have long
ascribed one to Van der Goes, the other to Ghirlandajo.
No; the temperaments of the artists at this period were not
differentiated nationally. They are, moreover, not so at the present
day either, and if analogies are established between artists of the
same origin, they may, in all cases, be naturally explained otherwise
than by a common descent. The influence of strong personalities, who
influence as prototypes, external successes, which form a current of
fashion and incite to imitation, or simply a tenaciously held tradition
of a school, in which in a long series of artist generations has grown
up, suffice to impress on the art of a country through extensive
epochs, a certain family physiognomy, which only a mystically inclined
mind will be tempted to refer to race and blood.
Topographical and national classifications have in fact no inward
spiritual justification in art, but at most a value of convenience,
in so far as they render possible external groupings, which facilitate
a survey. The whole art of Europe is one. It has developed from
the Greek, the tradition of which has remained living through all
the centuries, and has crept, from country to country, connecting
inseparably all separate national developments with their common
origin. The Greeks were the teachers of the Romans, and their
inspirations and rules were carried down into the Christian catacombs,
and from them blossomed the art of the Middle Ages.
Byzantine artists from the Roman empire of the East itself or from
Italy, initiated, at the Court of Charlemagne, the barbarians of the
Frankish kingdom in the mysteries of their craft, and carried the
Promethean spark, however weakly it glimmered, from Attica to the banks
of the Seine and Scheldt, where it did not expire, but, later on, was
fanned again to bright flame by the fresh breeze of the Renaissance.
The Eastern branch of Greek art withered into actual Byzantism,
whose last off-shoots are the Russian icons of to-day. The Church
in the East, to suit the fetish-loving views of her superstitious
semi-barbarians, attributes to the picture the meaning and value of an
idol, and opposes mistrustfully every deviation from the canon which,
according to her conception, might weaken the power of the idol. In
the West less credence was given to the picture’s magical virtue, its
form obtained no dogmatic consecration, the Church allowed the artist
freer movement, and thus development was possible, which broke through
the stiff, lifeless rule of the school, and found its way back to the
inexhaustible primitive source of Greek art itself, namely, nature.
The emancipation from the Byzantine system is not the work of Cimabue
and Giotto, or of an individual at all, but an effort of almost all
the artists of Western Europe at the close of the thirteenth and the
beginning of the fourteenth century. The portrait of John II. (1310-64)
in the Exhibition, which was painted about 1359, of course _in tempera_
on a gold ground, by Girard of Orleans, is of a marvellous realism,
unchecked by the slightest restraint of any studied rule. The head in
profile, turned towards the left, of the melancholy-looking man in the
’fifties with the long, well-formed nose, the scanty moustache and
beard, and the long hair, gleams with warm life. Girard copied his
model modestly and truly, without troubling himself about a golden
profit, and he could put soul into the portrait of his king in the
measure in which he himself felt the latter’s inward life.
The awakening of a feeling for nature in art is generally ascribed
to the Flemings, particularly to the brothers Van Eyck. That, too,
is arbitrary, as a glance at the works of the old Frenchmen, who
flourished contemporaneously with the Van Eycks, or even before them,
teaches us. The feeling for nature was always active in the few with
bright eyes and joyous consciousness of life, who dedicated themselves
to art from inner impulse. The themes to which the plastic arts had for
many centuries to restrict themselves were certainly as unfavourable
as possible to a healthy naturalism. The only subjects the painter
dared to treat were illustrations of the Old and New Testament, legends
of the saints, and the symbols of faith. Scenes of heaven and hell,
Biblical miracles, and personification of the dogmas of the Church
could assuredly no more be painted from the model than the Holy Ghost,
or transubstantiation. And yet nature herself came to her rights in
this fundamental representation of the supernatural and what lay
outside of nature, for she does not allow herself now to be driven out,
even by the violent methods of the pitch-fork spoken of by Horace in
a famous verse. Without taking particular thought about it, or with a
cunning conscious of its purpose, the artists fashioned their works
most foreign to actual life out of elements of reality, and achieved
them by nature, truth, and life. For this reason even the earliest
miniatures of the manuscripts become a trustworthy source for the
history of manners. Because the art-workers of limited capacity, who
wrought servilely according to the tradition of their gild, reproduced
accurately all the accessories—clothes, weapons, furniture, buildings,
and scenery—as they actually saw them.
The little picture, “The Virgin and Child,” which is ascribed to Jean
Malouel, and was painted about 1395, and can therefore have owed
nothing to the Van Eycks, then in Dijon, and perhaps, too, elsewhere,
certainly still quite obscure young people, is of such charming realism
that one might rather class it as a _genre_ picture than as a sacred
picture. The Virgin is making the Child a frock, and is just drawing
the thread tight, with the needle turned in a correct horizontal
direction, and the child Jesus is amusing Himself by putting His rosy
little foot in His Mother’s red leather slipper, of enormous size
to Him, which she has taken off and placed before her. There is no
reason why we should not assume that Malouel—if it was he—gave his
patron—perhaps the Duke of Burgundy—his (the artist’s) own dear wife
and little son as a Holy Family.
In “The Death of the Virgin,” of the same school of Burgundy, but about
a century later, the apostle, kneeling at the foot of the death-bed
and reading his prayer-book devoutly, with a big pair of spectacles
on his nose, is, in spite of the pathos of the moment, so natural as
to be almost comic. “The Miracle of the Saint,” with his head in his
hands, who is walking barefoot, by a pupil of Nicolas Froment—perhaps
by the master himself—painted, about 1480, at Aix in Provence, attests
the painter’s most naïve indifference to probability. In the middle of
the street where the decapitated saint is walking, and the executioner,
leaning on his sword, stands dumbfounded, kneel, in measured symmetry,
to the right and left of the saint, the founder and his consort; he
with four little sons, she with four little daughters in a row, like so
many organ-pipes, behind them. The picture of the city is, however, so
realistic that even to-day an old corner of Aix is recognisable in it,
and the gazers running up or standing in knots and laying their heads
together, or hurrying to the windows, are of everlasting human verity.
Exactly the same holds good of the altar decoration, ascribed to John
of Orleans (circ. 1374), a wonderful sepia painting on white silk. The
sections which depict the Scourging of Christ by two brutal fellows
with hang-dog faces, the Carrying of the Cross, with the Mocking of
Jesus by the rabble of Jerusalem, and the Entombment, with the Blessed
Virgin kissing the corpse, show that striving after truth, which
has hitherto been pronounced to be a peculiarity of the Dutch. In
the “Martyrdom of a Holy Bishop”—most likely by Jean Malouel (circ.
1400)—the martyr, in mitre and pallium, gazes from a strongly barred
prison window, near which an angel kneels, and through the bars of
which the Saviour in person administers to him the viaticum. But the
castle in the Lombard style—stone rafters and corbels with red tiled
spaces—on to the ground-floor of which the oval window opens, may be
regarded as an architectural design.
Nicolas Froment’s famous “Burning Thornbush” from Aix Cathedral
(1475-6) is entirely fabulous in the middle. A soft, cloud-like, lumpy
hill of rock supports a dense group of thick-stemmed trees, the tops of
which unite in a kind of gigantic bird’s nest, wherein the Virgin and
Child sit enthroned. But this miracle, with no measure of reality to
gauge it, is framed in a deep landscape with great distances; in which
white towns lie by mirroring waters, and thickly-leaved trees rise up
from green hills to the bright sky, and in the foreground, beside an
angel of Annunciation, sits, surrounded by his drove of wethers and his
quaintly posed dog, the white-bearded shepherd with his legs crossed in
the most natural posture you could conceive.
In the case of almost all the paintings in the Exhibition, and chiefly
of the best of them, this proposition can be repeated. The painter
loyally carries out the subject commissioned, treating it faithfully
according to the traditional formula; but what is not covered by the
formula he shapes with sovereign freedom and an honest joyous realism
which is by no means the prerogative of the Dutch and Germans, as has
been so long believed, but is to be met with, according to the evidence
of this Exhibition, in the same measure in the French.
Sculpture might become crude in the earlier Middle Ages, but it did not
cease to be fostered. Sculpture in stone or wood was the complement of
building, that strongest expression of mediæval energy, ivory-carving,
or the jewel of precious metal, the adornment of the altar or the
state-rooms in the palace. Painting, on the other hand, after the
collapse of the old world, went back to the adornment of books, and
from this the great art of wall- and easel-painting was again developed
only after the age of the Crusades. This, in many details, betrays its
origin from miniature. For a long time it was nothing but an enlarged
miniature. The works in the Exhibition show, at any rate up to the
last third of the fifteenth century, all the features that distinguish
the pictorial ornamentation of the manuscripts: the gold ground, the
neat, nay, painful perfection, the gay, unqualified, almost glaring,
colours, the equal clearness of objects in the furthest background and
in the foreground, the puerile joy in innumerably repeated complicated
decorations of the surface, the framing, with richly figured wreaths,
ornamental borders, or picture margins. Even the standing formulæ of
manuscript miniatures are repeated for centuries in the paintings,
viz., the movements of all the personages at the Annunciation,
Crucifixion, Entombment, and Ascension. Only towards the end of the
fifteenth century does painting fully escape from the still clinging
egg-shell of the miniature, and grow accustomed to a large, bold line,
and a freedom of composition which finally reckons with considerations
of distance, and prevails upon itself to neglect comparatively the
subsidiary in favour of the essential. The glorious Master of Moulins
has, it is clear, no longer the old inherited habit of feeling himself
banished to a page in a book. He no longer shows the same somewhat
mechanical respect to all work, principal and accessory. In the “Virgin
and Child between the Founders,” and particularly in the “Nativity”
with the twilight landscape in the background, and the fat poodle in
front sitting on the kneeling cardinal’s mantle, the precedence of
values is observed, and the painter reserves his piety and devotion for
the noble parts.
The author of these pictures—one of the greatest painters that ever
lived—is only known as the Master of Moulins, or the Painter of the
Bourbons. His name was probably Jean Perréal, but there is no certainty
about it. Only a few definite names have come down to us from the
beginnings of modern art. We must search for them in the inventories
and account books of princely households or cathedral chapters. The
artists did not yet sign their works; they indulged in no dreams of
immortality. They did not yet feel they were the supermen, that the
Renaissance, later on, made of them, and that, in the estimation of
the upper class, especially of its feminine and effeminate portion,
they have remained till the present day. They were honest and genuine
artisans, just like other respectable artisans; and in France they,
for the most part, enrolled themselves in the Saddlers’ Guild, perhaps
because they, like the latter, had originally, as miniature painters,
to do with parchment, _i.e._, a species of leather. They regarded it as
a special distinction to be appointed servant,—_valet_ or _varlet_—of
a prince, on whose commissions for church and palace they lived. Jean
Malouel and his pupils, Jacques Cone and Jean Mignot, Jehan Fouquet,
his sons Jean and François, and his great pupil Jean Bourdichon,
Enguerrand Charonton and Nicolas Froment, perhaps also Perréal and
King René the Good (1409-80), are perhaps the only painters whose
personality stands out clearly outlined in the dawn of art history
before Clouet, and his contemporary Corneille of Lyons. Perhaps
a number of forgotten names may yet be dug up from archives. The
obscurity of the few who have either been handed down to us, or been
rescued from oblivion by industrious investigators in recent years is
a heavy injustice. They deserve to shine with the same glory as the
most illustrious that Vasari has preserved for us in a work of amusing
studio gossip.
Jehan Fouquet stands in a line with the greatest portrait painters of
all times. He may be named in the same breath with Holbein—nay, with
Velasquez. His portrait of a man in the Liechtenstein Gallery at
Vienna, which shone as one of the gems of the exhibition, is perhaps
the most powerful work that the great master created, and the “Man with
the Wine-glass,” in the Vienna collection of Count Wilczek, is hardly
inferior to it in significance.
Of the numerous suggestions of an artistic, moral, and psychological
nature that were the outcome of this unique exhibition, the deepest
and most abiding—at least for me—was that one felt the spiritual
condition of the artists who created these works on commission and,
for the most part, according to precise instructions from princes
and prelates, lords and governments of cities. In nearly every one
of them is played the great drama of the struggle of souls thirsting
for freedom with the fearful oppression of intellect of the darkest
Middle Ages. Secret corners and angles, easily overlooked backgrounds
of the pictures, suggest already the future art, untrammelled by the
world, which will overcome this art of the guilds, with its fixed,
dogmatic formula. A Fouquet, a Bourdichon, a Clouet who, in kings and
princes sees, and paints with horrible realism, poor, sick, ugly, dull
fools, stands no longer under the control of royalty. He is inwardly a
disrespectful rebel, and is, in his way, a prelude to the procession
of the market-women to Versailles, which, two or three centuries
later, was destined to overthrow the kingdom. A master of the “Mount
Calvary” (1460), who makes the holy women and disciples stare with
such unmoved, wooden countenances at the Body of Christ, not because
he is incapable of painting sorrow-stricken faces—all the details of
the painting witness to his artistic power—but because he contemplates
the incident with coldness of heart, and expresses his unbelief to the
initiate as plainly as the rack and stake of the period allowed. In
these early works there is a very soft and very weak rumble of thunder
of a very far-off storm. They are a first indistinct announcement of
the Revolutions that are slowly preparing.
V
A CENTURY OF FRENCH ART
Sincerity did not rule in all parts of the Paris Universal Exhibition
of 1900, but a quickening air of freedom was breathed in the great
palace of art. The temporary proprietors of this colossal building,
the French artists, did not pretend to any motive that they did not
possess. “Make room! Out of the way! Out!” we fancied we heard from all
the dusky corners of the vast halls in a voice of thunder. “Foreigners
from both worlds? To the south wing with them! In the corner! Under
the staircase! That’s quite too good for them. The dead? The famous of
yesterday? What do the disturbers want? Haven’t they had their share
of ribbons, titles, commissions from the State, and other forms of the
artist’s ideals? Back with you! To the furthermost building in the
rear! If any one wants to make journeys of discovery, he can steer
away. The chief buildings, the foregrounds, the splendid halls for us,
the _chers maîtres_ of to-day. We are the strongest, therefore we need
do no violence to our feelings. We are alive, therefore we are right.”
Certainly, certainly. I do not contradict this; but it suits my
inclination to wander past the conquerors of the day to the shadows
in the back premises, into the remote and also, as to equipment,
significantly neglected halls of the Century Exhibition, to the
great vault in which is collected that which was to make plain
the development of French art from the Revolution to Carnot, the
grandson. What remains when the human being who gives dinners, haunts
antechambers, has cousins in the Ministry of the Fine Arts, whispers
malice in one’s ear, ceases to acknowledge greetings, and writes
flattering letters, has fallen to dust; when rivals and parasites have
disappeared; when the puffs of toadies, and the no less valuable ones
of envious men and poison-boilers, are hushed and forgotten?
Not much, and there lies the melancholy humour of such wanderings
through the realm of shadows. The only feature that always wounded
me somewhat in the “Divine Comedy,” is that Dante awards his curses
and execrations on the departed according to the rank they occupied
among the living. The invectives on the poor soul of a pope have
three stripes, those on a prince, two, and on a lord, one. That is an
inartistic forgetfulness of the frame chosen by Dante for his poem.
If he remained always mindful of his programme of death and hell, he
would not be able to distinguish crowns or purple mantles in the red
illumination of the under-world. The laughing and sighing philosophy of
Hamlet—alas, poor Yorick!—stands higher than the resentful fury of the
passionate Italian, who makes the hierarchy overstep the threshold of
the grave. It is perhaps the most profound usage of the French language
that they deprive the dead of the “Monsieur,” to which every living
man, with the exception of those criminally prosecuted and condemned,
has a claim. The dead has no longer a title—so much more sorry a fate
for him, if, when he was alive, he was nothing more than a title.
The practice is even here somewhat different from the pure theory. The
deceased is no longer “Excellency,” “Professor,” not even “Mr.” But
the usage of contemporaries to give him a title is still expressed in
the respectful tone in which they pronounce his now naked name, and
in which one possessed with a delicate sense of hearing perceives the
rustle of all the tinsel that surrounded him when alive. In this tone,
however, the name becomes familiar to the younger ones, who, without
thinking, continue this veneration, unconscious that their accent
expresses respect because the bearer of the name so pronounced was
once a Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour and an Academician. Thus,
my dear Schiller, are your confident words to be understood, you who
would never perceive the weft of vulgarity in the ways of man: “He
who has satisfied the best men of his time has lived for all time.”
Certainly, if by “best” we would understand the best placed, best paid,
invested with the best office, or the best decorated. He who during
his lifetime has belonged to those favoured by the grace of official
newspapers, who has been gauged by them and provided with a “full”
mark, will be recognised for all time as full without further test.
The Pantheon is the continuation of the minister’s official rooms, the
golden book of spiritual history an anthology from the Official Gazette
and the Army List, for the use of the children of later centuries. If
I must emphasise the essential: the appraisement even of the artist,
therefore of the most individual man that exists, is the outcome of
social, not individual, factors, or of the latter only when they are
socially successful, and, therefore, themselves become social factors.
There are, I admit, always proud—perhaps only haughty—natures with an
anarchistic, anti-social trait, who will not recognise any arrangement
or fixing of the community, not even its hierarchy of fame, and clench
their fists against laurel crowns just as they do against crowns.
Their rebellion, however, is seldom successful. I know of no case of a
bomb-thrower having destroyed a Pantheon.
But as we do not take ourselves tragically, do not begin our own
verdict with the threatening formula, “In the name of the Law,” and do
not exact any submission from others, we are always entitled to be of
our own opinion, and to let the dead influence us without prejudice,
untroubled by the distinctions of rank which were bestowed on them
in life, and were buried with them. Such a method of observation is
unhistorical, but subjectively fruitful; it leads to self-emancipation
from many superstitions.
The Century Exhibition of French painting was far from being complete;
it was incomparably more fragmentary than the Louvre Museum, which
is also not without gaps. But it afforded a general view of the art
development of the period represented, and it gave the independent man
the chance of correcting numerous opinions which had taken hold of him
from study and reading.
It began with the masters who created and flourished before the deluge
of 1789—Watteau, Greuze, Fragonard, Vigée-Lebrun. The three first
had, for two generations, sunk deeply in general estimation. Then the
force of fashion raised them up again to dizzy heights of fame. I do
not believe that they will maintain themselves there. It pleases the
reactionaries to glorify the _ancien régime_ at the expense of the
Revolution, and to this planned and deliberate toil belongs also the
unmeasured overestimate of eighteenth century art and artistic work.
But it is politics, not æsthetics—no taste for art, but a tendency. In
reality, the darlings of the age of the Pompadour and Louis XVI. were
petty masters, mere fillings of a particular frame, and, lifted out of
this, they lose their best qualities.
Watteau still holds his ground most easily, for he is an amiable teller
of stories that are agreeable if nothing of a more serious character
occupies one’s mind. He draws elegantly, although without pedantry; his
colouring is cheerful, and suits admirably his hushed, silken carpets,
coquettish Gobelins, and light lacquered furniture. He is the painter
of joyous days wherein life seems an eternal feast. Gracious spring
bedecks the earth, his men and women are all young and handsome, his
ladies wear entrancing toilettes and _coiffures_, and his gentlemen
silk doublets and lace shirt-frills. Even if they dress as shepherds,
they are laughingly addressed thus: “I know you, fair masque; you are
a marquis in disguise with your charming friend, the duchess.” Rosy
angels hover about them, and mingle familiarly in their pastimes. They
have nothing on earth to do except pay each other witty compliments
and play at love. I understand why American multi-millionaires pay any
price to be surrounded by Watteaus. It is really honourable to the
artists of our time that the Trust magnates have not yet succeeded in
finding or rearing painters who would flatter their egotism through
servile suggestions of a Watteau aspect of the world.
Fragonard appears in a secondary position besides Watteau. He is
drier, and with less “swing.” He is not really present in his heart at
the pastimes he paints. Watteau is himself a guest at his festivals;
Fragonard takes part in the _soirées_ only under a sealed order. The
former amuses himself, the latter amuses the person who gives him the
commission.
Greuze lives on the fame bestowed on him by the grateful Diderot. He
was enthusiastic for Diderot’s tearful _bourgeois_ tragedy, and Diderot
repaid him with enthusiasm for his painting; but we have no longer
any grounds, I suppose, for regarding him with Diderot’s eyes. When
he paints his eternal model of the “Broken Pitcher” in the Louvre,
and of his sundry counterparts of it in the Century Exhibition, he is
pitilessly pretty. When he sets great dramatic scenes in the Diderot
style on the stage—the “Village Betrothal,” the “Father’s Curse,”
etc.—he is depressingly melodramatic. His young maiden is marvellously
pretty and tame, and will always delight childlike spectators with the
charm of her blooming girlhood. He suffered himself to be infected
in Italy by Guido Reni’s sweetness, and only transplanted his soft
beauties, rolling their eyes, from paradise to the middle-class earth.
He is simply the Bouguereau of his age. That name comprises all
that can be said of him in praise or blame. Greuze is Bouguereau’s
superior in so far as he paints more vigorously, and forms his pretty
_ingénues_ of real flesh—not, like Bouguereau, of alabaster and
sugar-candy.
Beside the softness of Greuze, Madame Vigée-Lebrun seems a man and
a fighter. In a century of gallantry she alone was not gallant. She
painted women’s likenesses, and did not pay court to her models; but
she elevated them, and gave them meaning. Where the male painters of
the period saw only beauty-patches, she suspected she saw a soul. If
we look at these women with curiously poised heads, gazing boldly out
of their frames, they say proudly and calmly: “I am no trying-on hand;
I am no creature of luxury; I am no flesh for lust; I am a personage.”
At a distance of a hundred years Vigée-Lebrun is a forerunner of the
now innumerable American painters of emancipated womanhood. This brave
woman, who was beautiful, and did not overprize, nay, hardly prized her
beauty, was an asserter of women’s rights long before the word or the
thing was invented.
Prudhon was represented by a “Zephyr,” which has the same peculiarities
as his “Crucifixion” and “Crime and Punishment” in the Louvre. He
models a human body so that one must take one’s hat off to it. He has
the infallible feeling of the great Spaniards for the value of light
and shade; but what will always stand in the way of his being loved
and not merely respected is his hatred of colour. He confines himself
to a strict black and white style, which banishes all gladness and
discourages the most willing admiration.
And now the great deluge breaks in, and, like a sea-god David emerges
over the raging waves. It is really with him that the century begins,
for what preceded him was the art of the _ancien régime_ and of the
Trianon. He had at the Exhibition a “Distribution of the Colours,” an
“Ugolino,” some portraits; all of the most genuine David in choice
of subject as well as treatment. Everywhere the capricious “seeing
yellow” which seems to have been a peculiarity of his eye; everywhere
the grandly imposing, professorial infallibility of drawing which knows
no first trying, no anxious searching, no hot struggle with the never
quite attainable Nature. David compels with an imperious Medusa-glance
the ever-stirring, the ever-flowing, so that it becomes fixed, and
he can shackle the now immovable vision in brazen outlines. So his
human beings appear statues, or mimes, which maintain a pose, and his
most blameless anatomies acquire a tendency towards the artificial.
David’s mood is always uniformly high-pitched. Good-humoured people,
who would like to see the majestic man in shirt sleeves for once, lurk
in vain for him to unbutton himself. He never forsakes the decoration
and costume of high tragedy. At first he sought the drama in ancient
history or world-famed poetry. Afterwards, he found it in his immediate
surroundings. Fate vouchsafed him the favour of living in a time, the
pathos of which was mightier than that of Athens, Sparta, or Rome.
He satisfied his deepest longings when, in the “Sabine Women,” he
preached to the murderous factions among his people reconciliation
and brotherly love, and, in “The Distribution of the Colours” and the
“Coronation,” he made Napoleon the equal of the heroes of mythology. He
is, therefore, always genuine, even when he may seem to the superficial
gaze theatrical. It is the difference between a tone naturally
sustained during moments of life at high pressure, and declamation
learnt from a teacher of rhetoric.
His pupils, imitators, and rivals have, on the contrary, not succeeded
in avoiding declamation. Gérard, Gros, Riesener, and Drolling were,
consciously or unconsciously, the greatest flatterers that ever painted
portraits. Because David represented Napoleon in the character of an
Alexander of Macedon, or an ancient god of war, the others, the smaller
painters, in their portraits gave to even the ordinary men of the
period the deportment of Olympian gods. Only Gérard’s “Letitia,” who,
too, bore apotheosis most easily, is a good modest human being. All the
other women are Juno or Pallas Athene; all the men Mars or Achilles.
The contrast between the commonplace physiognomies and the magnificence
of their appearance is now and then so violent that one is led to
surmise that the painter wanted to make fun of his models. “Charles X.
in his Coronation Robes,” by Ingres, seems, for example, virtually a
parody of David’s “Coronation of Napoleon.”
Géricault stands an examination of his title to fame badly. He has
not so correct an eye for the figures of horses as was believed
before instantaneous photographs. His portraits of soldiers are
really more crude than powerful. Even the sketch for the “Raft of the
Medusa,” reveals evidence of straining after effect which our pious
admiration refused to notice in the colossal work in the Louvre. On
the other hand, the figure of Louis Leopold Boilly gained strangely
in the Century Exhibition. Up till then I knew only his “Arrival of
a Diligence at a Posting-house,” in the Louvre, and I did not rate
him very highly on account of the affected _atelier_ light of this
otherwise prettily studied little picture. Here he disclosed himself
as a great philosopher and satirist. One picture represents a popular
merry-making with wine _gratis_, another a free performance at the
Ambigu-Comique Theatre. There the crowd is fighting murderously over
a drink that can be had for nothing; half-grown hobbledehoys throttle
bestial greybeards; bullies claw hold of furies; dreadful feet trample
on faces and necks in the mad storming of the wine supplies, and the
victors in this struggle have their reward: they lie on the ground
bestially drunk. The scenes at the entrance of the theatre are not
quite so vulgar. There is a less dogged scramble for intellectual
enjoyment than for that of the palate. Yet here, too, the most brutal
lack of consideration and greedy selfishness triumph; here, too, the
strong man overmasters the weak; here, too, among beings who seem
to belie their human form, the law of the jungle holds good; and
here, too, poor people pay for a little doubtful pleasure with the
sufferings, dangers, and exertions of a storming of the Malakoff.
In the foreground of both pictures stands a group of well-dressed
persons who, half in pity, half in disgust, look at the disorderly
pushing of the rabble from a respectful distance. These rich people
have the _rôle_ of teaching the moral of the fable. They express
the sociological thought of the painter. Boilly deplores the low
moral condition of the masses, and reproaches the dominant class
with having degraded them to beasts, when it pretends to give them
a feast. He rejects with utter disdain the dogma of equality, yet
without haughtiness, for he has for the disinherited the somewhat
condescending, yet warm pity of a genuine patrician. These are
extremely modern—I might call them Toynbee-feelings—and they are
expressed with an exact, judicious brush that can conjure forth the
confused turmoil of a great, raging multitude, and, nevertheless,
remain faithful in all details. Boilly was decidedly a master.
The Century Exhibition also gave the opportunity for a discovery,
not only to me, but also to all who brought to it an open mind.
There is a painter, Trutat, of whom no one had ever heard anything.
Seekers who investigated the provincial newspaper of 1840-60 succeeded
in discovering one or two articles about him. That is all. He once
or twice exhibited in the “Salon,” but the “Salon” reports of the
time make no mention of him. He lived in the first half of the last
century, and died at the age of twenty-four. Before his picture—one
single picture—men were amazed, and women stood with moist eyes. It
is a double picture; in the foreground, a fair young man, pale with
sickness, with deep blue eyes and a proud, wild mane; his firm forehead
full of impatient dreams of joyous creations, fame, and happiness, yet,
in his hollow cheeks, faint shadows of death. Behind him, half obscured
in dusk, a woman’s profile, his mother’s head; a good Samaritan with
tender gaze, and lips closed in sadness, which once sang cradle-songs,
but have learnt silence in the sick-room. In its composition there
is a reminiscence of Ary Scheffer’s “St Augustin and St Monica,” in
the Louvre. But it is incomparably more profound, for Trutat depicts
himself, not saints whom the power of imagination has first to bring
before him. The painting is wonderful, firm and full as that of
Franz Hals—I deliberately utter this strong statement—so surely and
organically matured that one traces beneath the skin all the most
delicate muscles and bones. And add to this technique, of which one
does not discern how he could have acquired it in a fleeting morning of
life, the intensity of feeling which has raised the work to the rank
of those high creations in which a soul is revealed. The picture is
full as a swan’s song, of foreboding and love. The great youth does not
understand himself alone, without his mother—the dear mother must be
with him, if he goes out to the market among people. Shall she nurse
him? Shall she protect him? Can he dispense with her for a moment as
he must be taken away from her so soon? All this is in that mysterious
picture, and it was in it when Trutat, though he did not know it,
painted his own requiem. Only nobody then understood the riddle;
Trutat as little as the rest. He is another Regnault, only a still
more genuine one. And no one has made lamentation about him, although
his tragedy is more painful than Regnault’s. For the latter attained
immortality in the apotheosis of death in battle, whilst miserable
consumption slew Trutat ingloriously.
The Romantic fever begins to seize the century. The painters hasten to
hang round them the botanical box, and seek the blue flower. The first
to go forth into the moon-illumined, witching night was Chassériau!
Poor Chassériau! It would have better suited his bent to paint _salons_
with rich Empire-furniture, wherein respectably dressed citizens sit
with their wives and daughters, and pleasantly tell each other the
anecdotes of the day. His portrait of the two sisters in red shawls
and yellow plaited dresses shows this—a neat, pretty, _bourgeois_
painting, which denies itself all enthusiasm, and all soaring. But now
the tarantula stings him, and he occupies himself only with obsolete
subjects such as Orpheus, _châtelaines_, fairy-tale princesses with
black slaves, Macbeth and the three witches. The last picture is
particularly characteristic of him. The three witches have their white
beards and pointed noses, as prescribed by the romantic code; but
they are merely grotesque, but not in the least weird. We have the
impression that they have met in a peaceful country in order to gossip
about their neighbours, and make coffee. They publicly proffer the
knight, who should be Macbeth, a small bowl. The heath by night lacks
every trace of mood; the ugly old women every touch of the demoniac.
Chassériau painted, just as J. Fr. Kind—the [“Freischütz”] Kind—wrote
poetry.
I am afraid I must likewise be guilty of heresy in respect of another
great man; but Delacroix, too, fails to justify the idolatry people
have displayed and, to some extent, still display towards him. I do
not misjudge his joyous coloriture, although his harmonies are rather
loud than grand. I am not blind to the characteristic mobility of his
composition, although it is generally far more a stagey flourish than
assertion of strength in the service of a will conscious of what it is
aiming at. What excites in me, however, unconquerable opposition is
his phrasing. If any art demands intuition it is painting. Delacroix,
however, usually has not exercised intuition, but has clothed with the
cool work of his brain abstract thoughts in conventional forms. For
this, look at “Greece expiring on the Ruins of Missalonghi”—a picture
which was once of enormous influence and highly praised. On some
disordered masonry stands a young lady in the _bal masqué_ dress of a
Greek, who has no thought of giving up the ghost, but is playing a part
in robust health, and will change her dress, and have supper later. At
some distance behind her we catch sight of a young negro in the uniform
of a Janissary, climbing a rubbish heap, brandishing a flag with a
crescent on it, and a curved sabre. This slightly painted Turkish
warrior appears not to see the young Greek girl; at all events he does
nothing to her, and does not even threaten her. There is no association
between the two figures; the action is disconnected. At most the
Turk is interesting as an acrobat or banner-swinger. No murderous
propensities are noticeable in him. The countenance of the Greek lady
is pale and weary; but a rest in bed seems the only thing she needs.
It says much for the keenness of their Philhellenism that this picture
could move the people of the period. Delacroix had, however, no
intuition at all when he painted it; he only illustrated an unplastic,
insipid phrase.
His other paintings are mostly illustrations of a text. “Comedians and
Buffoons” were unmistakably suggested by Victor Hugo. Confused ideas
occur to him. Thus “The Good Samaritan” was not painted to the passage
in the Gospel, but to a story of chivalry; for the gentle benefactor
takes the sick man on his charger—he is a mounted Samaritan!—just as a
knight takes the noble lady he is carrying off.
Delacroix was a literary painter; we know that from his correspondence;
but without that, his pictures would betray it. He read much more in
books than in nature, and he supplied paintings that gave evidence
of education and much reading, in which the art-hating, blind-souled
Philistines of education delight royally. It may be that the confusion
of his portrayal and the loudness of his palette was felt by his
contemporaries as a deliverance from the coldness and precision of
David’s school. I suspect, however, his earliest admirers valued him
chiefly because he fed on the same books, plays, and newspapers as
themselves.
Ary Scheffer stands in the same spiritual plane as Delacroix, but lacks
the keenly joyous colour and the theatricality of his stage-setting.
Schubert’s songs and Schumann’s are music even without the lyric text,
and what music! I cannot imagine what Ary Scheffer’s pictures from
Shakespeare, Goethe, and Byron would be without the poets and their
poems. His picture in the Century Exhibition, “The Dead ride fast,” is,
if I exclude from my conception my remembrance of Bürger’s ballad, an
almost touching example of tastelessness. Leonora’s dishevelled hair,
blown by the wind into a stiff, horizontal position, is supposed, for
instance, to illustrate the swiftness of the ride—a notion which may
have seemed to Scheffer terrible, but is comic.
Horace Vernet had a “Mazeppa,” of course a big modern battle, and
several likenesses. He is as popular as on the first day, and will
always remain so as long as children play with tin soldiers and the
picture sheets of Epinal—the French Neu-Ruppin—find a ready sale. How
he dazzles! He does so to a degree which deserves admiration. From a
distance his pictures appear to be something; one must look at them
quite closely to see that they are nothing, absolutely nothing. The
colossal canvas is apparently full of men: thousands of soldiers march,
encamp, storm, fight; but, as a matter of fact, not a single figure
is painted; the whole pomp of war and victory is composed of little
stencilled gingerbread men, without any bones in their bodies, and with
scarcely the remotest resemblance to human beings. Could Horace Vernet
draw? Had he really any other conception of the human form than that
of an inflated india-rubber figure? In Paris and Versailles I have seen
many paintings by him, but I cannot yet answer these questions. Horace
Vernet is the fourth of a dynasty of painters: the first, Antoine, was
great at little figures on sedan-chair panels; the second, Joseph,
painted the well-known series of French harbours; the third, Carle, is
a master in depicting horses; Horace, the fourth, is the weakest of
them all, incomparably inferior in ability to his father, grandfather,
and great-grandfather. He alone, however, has attained fame, and his
renown throws his ancestors into the shade. The wheel of fortune now
and then plays immoral jokes of this sort, perhaps in order to teach
its own futility.
Daumier was known to me and, I suppose, most people, only as a
draughtsman. We learnt now to prize him as a painter of high rank.
His numerous paintings are illustrations to “Don Quixote,” romantic
merry-Andrews, street-singers, Molière’s _Malade Imaginaire_, and a
crowded group of lawyers in cap and gown. His manner is the same in oil
as in lead-pencil and crayon-drawing: his lines of movement broad and
firm, the outlines blunted, and now and again rubbed; all his figures
mysteriously surrounded in mist, yet all so clearly and faultlessly
represented that one is never led to suspect that their mysteriousness
is a trick to hide carelessness or lack of skill. Even his oil-painting
is really caricature, but discreet caricature. The nobler method
instils into him self-respect, and preserves him from caricature; he
just marks roguishly the burlesque features, but does not diverge from
reality. Thus his lawyers are portraits, but they look so maliciously
intelligent, so inexorably penetrating, that we can doubt of this or
that head whether it is a likeness or a caricature. Let us say this:
the model will take it for a caricature, but his friends will regard
it as a portrait. Daumier is a solitary; he is akin to none of his
contemporaries, yet an example of the migration of souls; for in him
Hogarth comes to life again, but a Hogarth who for his part would be
animated by a spark of Rembrandt’s spirit.
Suddenly another solitary appears in the ranks of the allied men of
school and tradition, viz., Millet. Precipitation would infer: the
romantic is overcome; a new generation with new modes of feeling
arises; the nerves of the century begin to vibrate according to a
new rhythm. That is sheer nonsense; nothing has been overcome. The
romantic masters still form romantic pupils, the crowd still feels in
the traditional way; the range of themes and the fashion of treating
them remain what they have been for a generation, but amidst the
dependent, the docile ones, the imitator forms for himself, by the law
of elective affinity, a divergent group—the group of the forest-folk
of Barbizon—and amidst this group steps forth an individual man who
forgets the master’s _atelier_, who, in painting, thinks of neither the
_salon_ nor the art-dealers, who looks not into books and newspapers
nor on prototypes, but out into the world, and on that account falls
completely out of the century.
If we follow up the development of art in the Exhibition, we may easily
fall into the error of thinking that with Millet one epoch closes and
another begins. Such was not the case in reality. The contemporaries
who appreciated Millet were a diminishing few. Official art despised
him. There were no distinctions for him on the part of the State. The
critical phrase-makers knew nothing of him or mocked him horribly.
The rich connoisseurs passed him by. A very small congregation of
moderately well-off admirers, whose valuation appraised their most
honest admiration at 1,000 francs at most, bought his pictures at
prices which just made it possible for him to live in Barbizon in
wooden shoes and a blouse, and to bring up his numerous family on
potatoes and bacon. But as he was a personality he succeeded—though
only after his death. He made a school, like every one who has
something to teach. He gained influence on the views of the creators,
the critics, and the public. People began to understand his speech,
nay, to feel that what he said was beautiful. But to this day there
is no Millet epoch in French art, and his fame is really an optical
delusion. His works did not bring him into the mouth of the masses,
but the caprice of a millionaire. On the day when it occurred to M.
Chauchard to pay 600,000 francs for Millet’s “Angelus,” snobs of
both worlds took off their hats and murmured in a voice hushed with
reverence: “That must be a great painter.” As we see, the world’s fame
is but a question of money. Many more men are able to reckon than are
able to feel the beauty of art, and, to the vast majority, its price is
the infallible, the one key to the understanding of a work.
I must say that the millionaire who acted as Millet’s herald of fame,
had no sense of proportion. If the work of an artist is to be measured
by a gauge, the figures of which represent gold coins, Millet does
not reach the altitude of 600,000 francs, unless we estimate at least
thirty of his contemporaries equally high. In technique, Millet follows
the Dutch; a David Teniers without humour and without aim at humour.
His landscape, never the essential with him, is poorer than that of
Rousseau and François, not to speak of Corot. His greatness lies in
his personality, in his simplicity, in his avoidance of pose, in the
pious earnestness with which he follows the daily toil of the field
labourer. That is no new note in art, but it is the manifestation of an
individuality. Many are his superiors purely as painters. But souls
cannot be compared and measured: they are incommensurable.
Courbet follows on Millet. Those mad on systematising have classed
the two together as pioneers of Naturalism. What blindness to the
essential! If anything does connect them—according to the Hegelian
method—it is their very antithesis. Millet—let us think of the “Man
with the Mattock,” “The Gleaners,” even “The Pig-Killing,” and the two
pictures in the Century Exhibition: the field-labourer, who, his day’s
work ended, is putting on his coat, and the mother feeding her little
child with pap, as well as “The Angelus”—Millet indicates, in heavy
painting and little-pleasing colours, in people whose coarse externals
do not attract a spirituality that ennobles them and makes us forget
their soil-stained smock-frocks and their hard features. Courbet, on
the other hand, draws faultlessly, and is master of every knack of the
trade; but, with his rich means, he never gets above the spiritual
stage of photography, and he knows not how to open to us the smallest
corner of the moral and spiritual being of his men and women.
But, strangely enough, this same Courbet, who never conceives human
beings except as soulless forms, can put a soul into nature and her
lower-conditioned life. His justly famed “Sea-Waves” breathes a
dramatic will-power. His “Roes in the Wood” are spirited. Ancient,
mysterious wisdom appears to possess even his trees. Animals and
plants, sea and land, speak in Courbet; man alone is dumb. He is a
pantheist who excludes only man from the All-Divine. That is pessimism
rooted in the most profound unconsciousness, which hints at serious
organic disturbance.
Rosa Bonheur, represented by a wonderful “Team of Oxen before a Hay
Waggon,” is in this respect akin to Courbet. She, too, is an eloquent
advocate of the beauty and profound feeling of the brute; but, more
logical than Courbet, she confines herself to representing animals, and
does not meddle with human beings. Man fails to interest her; she takes
no heed of his indifferent appearance. The animal alone attracts her
attention. A Rudyard Kipling of the brush, she has painted all her life
the “Jungle-Book,” that tells of the wise and good and honest beasts,
and the cunning men. Sir Edwin Landseer was also an animal-painter, but
of quite another sort than Rosa Bonheur. When Landseer wanted to Batter
the beasts, he gave them human qualities. Rosa Bonheur would have
felt she was insulting her dear animals, if she had painted a picture
like the “Diogenes” in the National Gallery in London. The humanising
of animals seems to her like degrading their special animal beauty.
Her love of animals was morbid; it was, however, a deep and powerful
emotion that made of her a great artist.
Our wandering through the Century Exhibition led us finally past
the great landscape-men, the founders of modern landscape-painting,
to Manet and Monet, Renoir and Degas, with whom a new century of art
begins. In a later section on the Caillebotte room in the Luxembourg
Museum, I shall study closely the authors of the Open Air Movement. The
fight against the children of classicism and romance was furious, and
“free-light” was victorious in the degree in which it deserved victory.
But even in those days of turmoil there were idyllists who remained
undisturbed by the tumult, and did not notice it. Gustave Moreau
painted his colour stories from a palette of gold and precious stones,
from a palette of Limosin and the glass-painters of Gothic cathedrals,
as if there had never existed an “Olympia” of Manet or a “Funeral
Procession of Ornans,” of Courbet. The high importance of Moreau, to
whom I return in a special study, lies in the fact that he teaches us
the feebleness of all classification of art development into epochs.
True artists are not subject to time, and move side by side without
influencing reciprocally their orbits. They are not subject to Newton’s
law of gravitation.
The Century Exhibition taught us something more. It sharpened our sight
for distinguishing between the literary painters and the painters
proper. The former, as a rule, find fame quicker than the latter, but
their fame affects posterity as a bad jest. They are illustrators of
the time, and what it brings, that is the worthless, art-destroying
“actuality.” Every attempt to put painting at the service of
contemporary thought, to demand of it philosophical collaboration in
the development of political, moral, and social doctrines, is a sin
against an art whose essence directs it to the eternal aspects of the
phenomenal world. Only those are genuine painter temperaments which
can follow reflectively the play of light on surfaces in motion, and
tell us what feelings this play awakens in them. All symbolism, all
allegory, all graphic accompaniment of poetry, is weak. Only what has
been really seen has permanence, even if it is reproduced with little
skill. You cannot paint from hearsay, only from the impressions which
the eye takes in, and the soul delivers. It is astonishing that so
primitive a biological truth should be so difficult to grasp.
VI
THE SCHOOL OF 1830
Thomy Thiéry was a rich man of the formerly French, but afterwards
English, island of Mauritius, who lived and died in Paris, and left
his art collection, consisting of paintings, Barye bronzes, and some
Gobelins, to the Louvre. Thomy Thiéry was a man of a single passion
and a single thought; he loved only the Barbizon School and some of
its artistic contemporaries who, in his opinion, stood in an elective
affinity to it; but he loved them with unshaken fidelity and constant
self-sacrifice. And in contrast to other more eclectic amateurs, he
did not perform his heroic deeds of an undaunted purchaser in auction
rooms and art-shops, but carried his money to the studios of the living
and struggling as long as he was able, and appeared on the market as
an ordinary collector only when the brush had slipped from the hand of
the creators. In this way his gallery got the warmth and unity of an
organic being, and besides its beauty, gave joy through the idea that
it was not the result of _parvenu_ vanity, or of that cruel fancy that
takes satisfaction in a work without troubling about the originator,
but that a grateful patronage, which not only wishes to purchase art
treasures, but also to lighten and beautify the artist’s earthly
pilgrimage, had created it. As a legacy to the Louvre, the collection
has from a fraction become an integral section that methodically
dovetails into its place in the frame of this incomparable museum, in
which the history of art is made to live before our gaze in select
examples. The management has added the pictures which it formerly
possessed of Thomy Thiéry’s favourites, so that the three halls of the
collection now afford a good survey of the fruitful movement, which,
about 1830, took place in French painting, and diverted it from the
degraded classicism then dominant into the path pursued at present.
The School of Barbizon! A convenient, but, for that very reason,
a meaningless, expression. The men comprised in this commonplace
designation have not much in common. In age not far apart, they were
bound to each other by personal friendship, and partly inhabitants of
that Fontainebleau wood, in which some of them experienced Nature’s
revelation. They were, however, very different in temperament, genius,
and impulse, and they strove for personal ideals with dissimilar modes
of expression. Only one peculiarity belongs in like degree to all,
viz., the burning longing with which they yearned to get out of the
stupid hole-in-the-wall of the academic studio that had become to them
a goal into freedom and life.
Without punning, the free air and freedom meant to them the same thing.
Landscape furnished them with the means of renewing their acquaintance
with Nature. Under a completely Faust-like impulse, they struggled out
of the _atelier_, where, “in reek and decay, only the skeletons of
brutes and dead men’s bones” surrounded them, “into the far country.”
Their appearance about the time of the July Revolution was the
Easter-morning walk after brooding in the Gothic studio.
The David tradition held painting in thrall. The master’s greatest
pupil, Baron Gros, and, with him, the gifted Géricault, sought to
overcome the stiff mummifiedness and dryness of forms, the staginess of
subject of this art, which found its triumph in the “Rape of the Sabine
Women” and the “Coronation at Notre Dame.” But Géricault, misjudged
and undervalued, died early a conquered man, and Gros, going astray in
uncertain sounding of himself, returned, after his short revolt, to the
tin and paste formulary of his first epoch, recognised in alarm its
hollowness, and, by voluntary death in the Seine, got rid of the pains
of the sceptic who has lost his faith and his ideal. The then young
generation, warned and shaken by the tragedy of this seeker who found
nothing, broke with the dominant rule, and sat down at the feet of
Nature, to learn from her.
The country is the great master-workshop. There Nature speaks her most
eloquent language of form. There she finds the tones that awaken the
loudest echo in the soul of the genuine born painter. The creation of
a pictorial artist is, like each of the higher mental activities, very
complicated; the most opposed organs of the brain have a variously
graded and mixed share in it. The vivid reception and rendition of
a phenomenon at rest, of the expressive line of one in motion, is
an exercise of the motor centres. In the representation of man, or
what pertains to man, which is, directly or indirectly, through the
awakening of anthropomorphic ideas, to seize on our minds, trains of
thought, reason, and judgment play a part by the side of the emotions
growing out of the unconscious. But the real and essential element
in painting is neither the motorial production of the drawing, nor
the travail of thought in the composition, but is ever the giving
of light and colour. Now what counts in landscape is the effect of
light and colour. Here the painter stands before the magic changes
of lights and the alluring colour-mysteries of Nature, which excite
him most keenly; for they stimulate his optical centre, of which the
extraordinary development and particular susceptibility of light is
the psycho-physical basis and preliminary condition of the primitive,
impulsive gift of painting. Ever when men of talent feel the stiffened
traditions of the schools to be intolerable, and want to follow their
own inward impulse, they flee to the country in order, in its free
light, to wash themselves clean from the dust of the schools, and bathe
into health their limbs, aching from constrained positions. There
is profound instruction in the fact that to Giotto, in his effort
completely to burst the fetters of Byzantinism, which his master,
Cimabue, had already strongly shaken, it first occurred to introduce
into his work the elements of landscape. His picture in the Louvre of
St Francis of Assisi is a touchingly _naïve_ example of this.
It was Corot who first uttered in the French painting of the nineteenth
century the creative words, “Let there be light.” Of course, he did
not discover day, for there were masters before him in whose pictures
the sun shone. We find in Ruysdael the keen, chilly clearness of a
northern sky. Claude Lorrain gives warm, tender evening tones of the
south, which have the effect of luxurious warm baths. From him, Turner
directly traces his descent, who overheats Claude’s pleasant tepidity
to a glow, and raises his gentle clearness to a blinding splendour
of radiancy. But no one before Corot has understood, like him, how
to fill pictures with such discreet yet penetrating, delicate yet
glowing light. It is no melodramatic, no Bengal or concocted light,
no light of strange, exceptional occasions, of confusing colours, no
vulgar, pompous, excessively brilliant light, but a restfully even,
inexhaustibly rich, cheerful light that fills the soul with joy and
hope.
Corot’s light sheds its rays from a hopeful soul. It is luminous
optimism in visible form. Some years ago, a Corot Exhibition took
place in the Galliera Museum, and those who arranged it contrived
to collect about the whole of the master’s life-work. I looked
attentively at one point: it contained hardly a single evening, not
a single autumn note or muttering of a storm, but only morning and
spring and blue sky. That is characteristic of this child of the sun.
In Corot the elements of beauty are nearly always the same: pleasant
hill-countries, winding paths that lead to weird distances and invite
our yearning to fare thither; at a curve of the road gleaming water
mirroring silver cloudlets; in the foreground delicately-leaved trees;
around and over everything the wondrous air thrilling with light,
animated with a thin haze of mist, in which, bewitched by the feeling
of spring, by an association of ideas, we fancy we can hear the soft
bell-notes of invisible church towers, the twitter of pairing birds
engaged in building their nests, and the buzz of early beetles. Some
of the Corots in the Thiéry rooms, _e.g._, the view of the Coliseum,
are youthful productions, and do not yet show the dreamily soft, as it
were, inspired style and silver glow of his maturity. They are still
somewhat dry and hard, yet, even in these more prosaic pictures, the
heart-quickening light falls from heaven—Corot’s incomparable strength.
Corot did not belong to the forestmen of Barbizon, but he was the
founder of their religion of light. Th. Rousseau shares with him the
silkiness, and approaches him in the down-like delicacy of his young
foliage. Daubigny has more temperament; he is sturdier, more manly,
perhaps I should say: more like a peasant. What raises him to the
rank of master is the depth of his pictures, and his gift of working
out his subjects in almost stereoscopic relief, in all planes—in the
fore-, middle-, and background. His “Skiff” is, therefore, an excellent
example. The mast of the vessel stands absolutely free. We see how
air is encompassing it on all sides. Dupré shares in equal degree the
praise of his two friends. That is not quite just, for he has by no
means so much personality as they. He does not feel originally, but
imitatively. Nature moves him first through the eyes of his companions
in art. He imitates alternately the softness of Corot’s foliage and his
silvery mistiness, Rousseau’s smoothness and insinuating harmony of
colour, and Daubigny’s tree-poetry, but I look in vain for the feature
that distinguishes him from the others.
The delicate, and at the same time reverential love with which the
Barbizon-men treat the individual tree, Troyon expends on domestic
animals. As to the former the tree, so long as it does not melt in the
haze of distance, is never merely part of the scheme, but a distinct,
living being, possessing a physiognomy of its own, of which they render
a strongly individualised likeness; so the latter regards animals with
the understanding of a shepherd, who is known to recognise by their
countenances all the sheep of a numerous flock. He will correctly
depict the physiognomy of animals, without any propensity to giving
them the look of human beings, through which animal painters only too
easily become, without intending it, comic.
Millet is the continuation and consummation of the great landscape
painters of 1830. We are not conscious of this if we regard him only
by himself; but it is at once forced on us if we see him in the
Thiéry Collection in connection with his comrades. Millet is also,
fundamentally, a landscape painter, only his landscapes are animated
by men; but not by men who are accessories, as is the case with
Corot, but by men who are a part of the landscape, its most important
and essential part, precisely as the trees and clouds are, but more
dignified and spiritual than trees or clouds. With him man grows
together with his rural environment, is himself a bit of nature in the
midst of nature, and it is not easy to decide whether he is degrading
man, or is elevating the earth with all that on it creeps and flies,
when he puts them on the same level. Millet discerns in nature an
all-living element that can take manifold bodily forms and be expressed
in a variety of ways, but is one and the same in all different forms.
This grand pantheistic feature uplifts his pictures from _genre_ to
high, spiritual art. And since nature is never comic, so Millet’s
peasants—themselves a bit of nature—never affect us comically, but
always pathetically, even when they are as sturdy, clumsy, and simple
as David Teniers’s boors. In one picture in the collection, “Maternal
Foresight,” Millet has apparently a humorous intention: a peasant woman
is assisting her very small youngster at the doorstep of her house in a
little necessity. Even here I cannot find anything to laugh at, unless
from kindly sympathy for the hop-o’-my-thumb and his tender mother. It
is just a glance at life, and at such no one who feels a reverence for
the sanctity of life ever laughs.
The devotees of the great Pan—Corot, Rousseau, Daubigny, Millet, and
their followers of the second rank, gain in significance side by side.
Their contemporary, Delacroix, loses beside them. What I felt at the
Century Exhibition of French art, I feel even more strongly in the
Thiéry rooms at the Louvre. I am afraid Delacroix is one whose trial
must be revised. Perhaps we shall then be obliged to confirm the
unfavourable verdict that the adherents of the Classical movement
passed on him at his appearance, although on quite different grounds.
Delacroix was not in love with life; he did not seek and find nature;
he followed in her footsteps only in books. He was essentially an
illustrator; apart from Victor Hugo he is not to be thought of. The
Romantics performed a duty of gratitude when, with fanatical violence,
they carried him triumphantly through his detractors. He is their
henchman with the brush; he fights with them and for them. They only
act according to the rules of chivalry when they protect him. His
magic colouring is not to be contested, although it is often gaudy and
theatrical. But out of his “Hamlet with the Gravediggers,” his “Medea,”
his “Bride of Abydos,” his “Abduction of Rebecca” (“Ivanhoe”), a dreary
waste stares us in the face, which would be hardly bearable if we did
not happen to know the poems from which Delacroix drew his subjects.
We must put life into his dead pictures by what we remember of our
reading. Delacroix stops at the externals. We have to add soul and
passion.
After the men of 1830 came, on the one side, the neat painters of
the Empire, of whom Meissonier is the best type; on the other, the
naturalists with Courbet, the impressionists with Manet and Monet; and
so the development went on to the confused struggles of this moment.
That period of the July Revolution was felt by its contemporaries as
an age of storm and stress in art. On us later-born children it has
the effect of halcyon days, the full, rapturous life and sunny joys of
which the present generation longs for in vain.
VII
THE TRIUMPH OF A REVOLUTION
THE REALISTS
In the last years of the Empire and the first of the Republic, great
things occurred on the sacred hill of Montmartre, on the summit of
which the Church of the Sacred Heart had not yet supplanted the Muses
and Graces. A group of painters, diminishing in number, yet brave
as lions, and pugnacious, arose in defence and attack against the
official art of the _Académie_, the _École des Beaux Arts_, and the
_Salon_, which was still an institution of the State. Their palette
was a battle-shield, their brush a lethal weapon for cutting and
thrusting, their easel a barricade. Uproar was what they painted, and
plunder and carnage were the subjects of their conversation in endless
beer and tobacco sessions. They wanted to massacre the old idols in
oil-painting, and the tyrants of the plastic arts now become twaddlers.
No more painting by tinker, plumber, or chimney-sweep! No soot in
place of air! No Dutch dolls in tin armour, with volunteer firemen’s
brass helmets on their gingerbread heads! On the contrary, an honest
rendering of phenomena of light and colour from actual observation,
sincerity, open air, and impression.
The first to gather with fury and wild gesticulation around the daring
preachers of the new gospel were literary men and journalists. They
did not understand anything about painting, and would not have been
capable of distinguishing a varnished oleograph for a cab-drivers’
public house from a real Leonardo; whether a picture was blackened or
saturated by sunlight, whether a human figure was clumsily conventional
or felt and understood with truth to nature, that was to them quite as
indifferent as the colour of the Empress of China’s dressing-gown. They
had, however, the feeling that this movement in art was, in some way
or other, connected with thought of general subversion, and attacked
the government. They thought they heard the naked women in Eduard
Manet’s “Down with Napoleon” shriek. The gleaming, noonday lights of
Claude Monet seemed to them a cry for vengeance for the _coup d’état_.
They understood Pissarro’s landscapes as illustrating Victor Hugo’s
_Châtiments_, and Renoir’s dancing _grisettes_ clearly pronounced a
crushing verdict on the Mexican Expedition. All the enemies of the
Empire regarded open air as an item of their political programme.
To be a true republican one must swear allegiance to realism. Thus
Gambetta and Zola became fanatics of the new movement, not on æsthetic
principles—such did not exist for either—but from a tendency to
opposition.
We should be wrong to laugh at a Radical mob orator and an anarchist
novelist being fervent advocates of a school of painting from party
interests. It arises out of a quite correct feeling. “All is in all.”
A close relationship unites all the phenomena of one time, and the
most opposed forms may express a single fundamental mood. About 1868
realism meant quite as much a revolt against a bit of authority as
republicanism did. Were not a luxuriant beard and a soft hat in 1848
proof positive of revolutionary sentiments? And about 1895 were not a
tail-coat and a flowing neck-tie the acknowledgment of belief in blank
verse and Maeterlinck?
From the first moment, then, realism had the honours of the opposition
press and the support of those politicians, the majority of whom, later
on, were to play the principal parts in the revolt of the Commune.
The artists, to be sure, despised it at first, as long as it gained
no _Salon_ distinctions and had no market. For a long time—for some
decades—it had none. The public regarded the works of the new movement
only as expressions of unconscious or intentional artistic humour.
It laughed at them as it did at the saucy caricatures in the comic
papers. There was perhaps only one individual who, a generation ago,
took the Manets and Monets, the Renoirs and Pissarros seriously, and
was prepared to manifest his belief in them by ready money—the only
genuine martyrdom in our days—and this seer, prophet, and confessor was
Caillebotte. He bought their pictures; not at a big price, it is true,
for we must not expect the superhuman from mere mortals, but he bought
them; he poured out his red gold for them, and this sacrifice probably
preserved the life of realism, or, at any rate, of its teachers.
Caillebotte himself painted, but only for himself, and that was
praiseworthy; but what was more important, he had acquired a handsome
fortune by commerce, and spent the major portion of his fine income on
open-air pictures. He did not exhaust his enthusiasm by that. When he
died, he bequeathed the most striking pieces—“the pearls,” he called
them—of his collection to the French State, on the condition that it
left them together and accommodated them with a room in a Paris museum.
The Department of Fine Arts at first made difficulties; but finally,
it resolved to accept the bequest. The Luxembourg Museum was enlarged
by an additional building, and a small room in the new wing now
accommodates the pictures left by Caillebotte, amongst which he also
smuggled in two from his own brush. Thus the Revolutionaries attained
the honours of a State museum. This triumph crowns an adventurous
campaign which, after apparently fatal defeats at first, led from
victory to victory, and from conquest to conquest. For a decade and a
half the art of the Manets and Monets has dominated painting. Only in
the works of a few obstinate old fogies is their spirit untraceable,
at any rate on the Continent; for in England, to be sure, they have
not succeeded in gaining the slightest influence on the Præ-Raphaelite
movement. On the other hand, in countries without old and uninterrupted
art traditions of their own, for which the history of painting begins
at the moment in which they themselves first co-operate actively in it,
therefore especially in North America and Scandinavia, there is, as a
rule, no other art. When the painters in these countries awoke to art,
that was the newest thing, _le dernier cri_ of realism, and they took
to this latest fashion, just as, in new colonies, negro ladies, who
yesterday knew no other aid to their dusky loveliness than an apron of
plaited grass and a few glass beads, insist that their toilet, or, at
any rate, portions of it, shall be quite up to date.
But the victory in lands barbaric so far as art is concerned, and
the apotheosis in the Luxembourg Museum, do not spell the end of the
battle or the conclusion of peace. Realism had even recently to
fight hard battles of persecution. Whilst the crowd pressed into the
Caillebotte room, which was opened in 1897, and, it must be admitted,
gave expression to very mixed feelings, certain masters of the Art
School, the narrow Academician, Gérôme, at their head, sent to the
Minister concerned a fiercely angry warning against the desecration
of the Museum’s hallowed rooms by the admission of rubbish which
they characterised as “scandalous daubs,” the “offspring of utter
incompetency or lunacy.”
The warning was wrongly timed. In 1897 it came too early, or too late.
Too late, because Manet and Monet have apparently held their own
against Gérôme and Gustave Moreau, and protests are futile against
facts, or what are regarded as such at a given period. Too early, for
people then still stood—and probably they stand now—at an insufficient
distance from the movement now called impressionist to regard it from
the perspective of history, and to assign it its proper place in the
development of painting. That moment will come, most likely very soon.
Then the protest of the Academicians will be superfluous, for even the
æsthetic boors will repeat the verdict, then become a commonplace, that
realism had its justification; that, besides transient harm, it was the
author of permanent utility; and that, after a half-miraculous progress
not uncommon in the history of art, the new men, who themselves could
do little or nothing at all, taught more competent successors something
precious.
The Caillebotte room will help to bring about a correct estimate of
the revolutionists of “the ’sixties.” Gérôme ought to have rejoiced
at the opening of that room, for it really, for the first time, sets
a legend in the light of history. For twenty years everybody has
thought he had a right to chatter about realism, though few have really
seen the documentary monuments of it, because up to now they were
never conveniently accessible as a whole. The prototypical works of
the Naturalist School were mostly shown cursorily in rare and little
noticed exhibitions. Then they hung in their authors’ studios, or in
some private collections. He who had not lived in Paris for thirty
years, and observed with close attention all the details of the art
movement, or did not undertake troublesome journeys of exploration and
discovery, could speak of them only from untrustworthy imitations, or
from absolutely worthless hearsay. Now, at last, the material can be
seen by all. Whoever is capable of receiving his own impressions can
procure them.
Extravagant enthusiasm for the pioneers of the “Open Air” movement will
now be quite as little excusable as its condemnation without mitigating
circumstances. The former will, in face of the Caillebotte room, be
recognised at the first glance as sheer weak-mindedness, the latter as
lack of understanding. That is the great service of this room in the
Museum: it adduces all that can be said on behalf of realism, and shows
at the same time, inexorably, its limitations.
I should like beforehand to exclude Raffaelli from the painters
that appear in this collection. He is not a labourer from the first
hour. Even later on, when he joined the movement, he was no orthodox
believer. People, from their superficial knowledge, jumbled him up
with the realists, because he was at first always, as the latter were
often, a pessimistic confessor of the truth. His peculiar temperament
decided his choice of sad subjects. In his outlook on life he was wont
to dwell, with self-torturing choice, on depressing sights: on the sick
in lazar-houses; on the homeless tramps in the moats about the Paris
forts; on poor, human wrecks that float through the street-current of
the great city. He told the story of these men with heart-breaking
accuracy. He depicted them in mean, miserable, mud-tints; in the
dust-grey of unswept, suburban streets; the sickly lime-white and
dung-brown of neglected house-walls; the washed-out greenish-blue of
worn-out cotton blouses. In this mood was painted his “Convalescents in
the Hospital Yard,” with its livid faces beneath the white skull-caps,
and emaciated bodies in blue dressing-gowns, on the dank, moss-covered
stone benches, in front of the sullen lazar-house. This picture, like
all of Raffaelli’s, makes up for the unpleasantness of its story by
the severe honesty of its drawing; and in the street picture, “Behind
Notre Dame,” the astonishingly effective employment of the gay red
kerchief of a workwoman in the foreground, amidst the subdued tones
of a murky Paris day in uncertain weather, shows what a clever and
faithful colourist this painter is, who so long painted obstinately
from a degraded palette. Nowadays, he has, in the main, overcome his
depression of spirits, and in his soul a bright sunshine laughs, the
rays of which are discernible in all his later works.
The real originator of the new tendency was Eduard Manet. Of his three
pictures in the Caillebotte room, one, the “Olympia,” is a masterpiece.
It had already long been the property of the Luxembourg collection,
and amongst the academic works of that Museum it seemed so strange
that it forced expressions of repugnance from most visitors. After
this comes an insipid brown lady in a mantilla, and the important
“Balcony.” “Olympia” is a faded, decayed lady of the class which
people in Paris are accustomed to describe as “the old guard.” The
person, whose hair is dressed for a _soirée_, but who is entirely
without clothing, lies outstretched on a bed, displaying her charms,
which might convert Don Juan himself to the monastic rule of chastity.
By the couch stands a pretty negress, busied with her mistress. The
“Balcony” shows two ladies with a gentleman friend, and a man-servant
in the background. The two pictures display Manet’s purpose and method.
There is nothing of impressionism and open air to be remarked in the
“Olympia.” The scene is a closed room filled with diffused rays of
chamber-light. The figures of the two women are accurately painted,
indeed in a painfully and curiously dry style. In vain would one
look for the smartness and bold dashing on of colour that are now
held to be the characteristics of impressionism. It is all painfully
and laboriously measured, without swing or freedom, without mastery
over the model or the tone. The picture is revolutionary only in its
straightforwardness. When it appeared, the academic masters painted
prettily. When they had to represent nudity, they painted a sort of
conventional rose-coloured jelly, without bones or physiognomy, smooth,
ordinary, and superficially pleasing as a china doll, inartistic, and
unspeakably tedious. In his “Olympia,” Manet rebelled against this
prettiness in painting that so falsifies nature. He chose the most
repulsive model he could find, and reproduced it with literal exactness
in all its repulsive truth. He showed that there is female flesh not
altogether too old that is not composed of snow and rose leaves. He
taught his truth brutally and unwisely, with churlish violation of good
taste and gallantry, but with ardour and conviction. The “Balcony”
already announces the joyous tidings of open air. The two women are
bathed in full daylight, which cruelly misuses their faces. Here, too,
Manet wears the blinkers that narrow his artistic horizon. He wishes to
oppose sunny brightness to the brown broth which was given out in the
masters’ studios as the only colour whereby one could find salvation.
He therefore lavishes his light, which overcomes and disperses the
darkness; but he forgets that sunshine influences local colours; that
it gives them various effects, according to their illuminative power;
that it envelops and blends them, however opposite they may be, in one
single underlying harmony of silver or gold tone, and with no more
misgiving than a saucy child, he lays on the canvas the true colours of
things unaltered and unbalanced. I do not doubt that the grey-green of
the window-shutters and the arsenical green of the obliquely crossed
iron bars of the balcony are painted with the very trade colours which
the house-painters actually use for these objects. Of course, this
truth in detail produces the greatest artistic untruth in the whole,
and the picture that was to be the Whitsun sermon of holy “Open Air,”
becomes, through Manet’s inadequacy, a speech for the prosecution of
the sun.
Claude Monet, the classic of impressionism, is not to be reproached
with any incapacity. His execution never betrays him. He says what he
wants to say to the last dot on the “i,” and if what he has said fails
to satisfy, it is not because he lacked words, but solely because he
had no more to say. Monet is a tippler, a drunkard so far as light is
concerned. He cannot pass by any lively brilliant illumination without
turning in for a painting-bout. Form, however, is to him a matter of
indifference; it has no physiognomy for him, nor does it arouse in him
any association of ideas. He neglects it absolutely. He does not draw
or compose. In his pictures everything is without form, as in nature
herself, unless we regard her with pre-existing thoughts of arrangement
and meaning—in short, under the optical and logical categories. But
he has not his peer in arresting the fugitive magic of sportive rays,
their motes, their refractions on surfaces of every kind, on fixed
bodies, liquids, and gases. His “Railway Station,” with its wide
opening towards the railway line, the bluish clouds of smoke and steam
from the puffing locomotive transfused with light, the shimmering
vapour under the framework of the iron roof, is unsurpassable as a
rendering of absolutely meaningless effects of light. Pictures of
this sort will become expressive only when the photography of natural
colours is so perfected as to admit of instantaneous copies. Equally
remarkable as painting, and more valuable as higher art, is his
“Interior of a Room,” with a shadowy boy and plants in the foreground,
and a shining floor flooded with blue from daylight pouring in like
a cataract through the window in the background. More valuable
artistically, because this interior of great elegance, this outline
of a child, and this blue, fairy-tale tone of the flood of light, are
capable of awakening mood, _i.e._, will have an effect not only on the
senses but also on the soul; will stimulate not only the optic centres
of perception, but also the higher centres of conception and judgment.
“Breakfast in the Open Air,” and two landscapes and marine pieces, are
painted after the same rule as the two panels I have described.
Gueuneutte’s “Morning Porridge” draws its inspiration from Raffaelli,
Degas’s “Dancers and their Mothers” from Manet. I put Degas, however,
above Manet, for he draws more lightly and smoothly than the latter,
and when he has to depose to ugly reality under the witness’s oath of
his naturalistic conscience, he does it, not in an angry and provoking
way like Manet, but with the divine gift of humour.
Monet’s joy in light becomes with P. M. Renoir an affectation. He has
not the simple love of truth of his comrade. He falls into exaggeration
which betrays conscious purpose and straining after originality. His
two “Young Girls” at a piano of the colour of cranberry syrup; his
nude figure of a woman, on whose skin lights and shadows play so
unfortunately that she looks as if beaten black and blue, in places
even as if studded with the corpse-stains of putrescence in the second
degree; the “Girl in the Swing,” and particularly the “Ball at the
Moulin de la Galette,” seek rather to disconcert than to convince us
by their unwonted tones. These pictures have historical importance
as ancestors. From their jests of colour are descended the jokes of
Besnard, from their rain of sunlight through shadowing foliage comes
the piebaldness of a Zorn and particularly of a Max Lieberman, who make
an eruption of yellow and reddish spots fall on their bodies. Renoir’s
“Girl Reading” finally is a simple aberration. He who tolerates such
stumps of hands in a picture that is not meant for a mere sketch is
either without capacity or without conscience—the one as bad as the
other.
Pissarro is the triumph of seeing without thought. He seizes all the
marvels of transformation which the light of various periods of the
year and hours of the day accomplishes on objects over which it skims,
with the same certainty as Monet, but he imagines even less over it
than does the latter. With him the impressions which he feels from
the outer world do not generally pierce beyond the back of his eyes.
He is a remarkable instance of the sharpest sight with the retina in
conjunction with absolute soul-blindness.
The panegyrists of impressionism assert that it was not well
represented in the Caillebotte collection. That is a pretext of
perplexed swaggerers who can now be nailed fast, and who should in
shame and confusion crowd here, where it is easy to test their
wild exaggerations. Impressionism has never produced confessed more
characteristic works than those gathered in the Caillebotte room. It
has never been more straightforward than in Manet’s “Olympia” and
Degas’s “Theatre Mothers,” never more bright than in Monet’s “Breakfast
in the Open Air” and Pissarro’s landscape, never was it in a higher
degree lightening-sight and instantaneous painting than in Monet’s
“Railway Station.” Every verdict on impressionism based on this room
is an adequately grounded verdict, against which the attempted higher
appeal to I know not what unknown works must be rejected.
The painters who entered on the new movement are interesting as men,
because they aimed at much, and at what was comparatively great. They
are, from an artistic standpoint, uninteresting, because they achieved
little. It is the old tragedy of the will, to which the strength
plays traitor; of the mind, which subjectively and _in posse_ brings
about the highest, but objectively produces nothing, because it fails
in realisation. The Manets and Monets, the Renoirs and Pissarros,
wanted to create a new art by returning to the old truth. It gives
them a right to reckon themselves as belonging to the family of the
illustrious heroes of the Renaissance, who emancipated themselves
from the traditions of the Byzantine School, as the former did from
the sham-classic rule of a Couture, a Cabanel, or a Baudry. The man
affected by a Cimabue and a Giotto will not be unmoved in the presence
of Manet and Monet, especially of Monet, for he performed a creative
act. He said: “Let there be light,” and “there was light” in painting.
The miracle of Genesis is still being wrought to-day, and only in
Gustave Moreau and the Præ-Raphaelites has the Logos proved itself
powerless.
After paying them this tribute of recognition we will also take leave
of them. They have pointed out paths, but they have not walked in
them. In place of intricate Chinese signs, they have invented a free,
brilliantly progressive alphabet, but in this script they had nothing
to say. Their art is merely optical—neither emotional nor ideal. They
were commonplace—nay, to some extent—unbeautiful souls. That is why,
despite their honest passion for truth, and despite their precious
medium of sunshine, they have not been able to produce genuine art-work.
They have meanwhile not lived in vain. Their influence has been
fruitful. At first it indeed generally did harm. All bunglers flew to
imitating them, and the impudent rabble of both worlds alleged they
understood their teaching thus: “Drawing is superstition, and the
more repulsive a hide looks, so much more beautiful and especially
more modern it is.” But after this scum of the artistic rabble those
who had a vocation came over to the new movement, and showed what it
could achieve in consecrated hands. With the open air Roll became the
master he is; impressionism brought a Brangwyn to maturity; truth—the
beautiful truth, not the repulsive, vulgar truth—found its triumphs
in a Whistler and a Sargent. The weaknesses and mistakes of the
forerunners have furnished despicable parasites with the transitory
reputation, among the weak-minded, for genius, which will quickly
disappear before the recognition of their wretchedness. Their lofty
views, and, to some extent, the means of expression suggested by them,
have, however, equipped men of illustrious talent, who permanently
enrich mankind’s property in works of beauty.
ALFRED SISLEY
Alfred Sisley was one of the most renowned amongst that group
of realists to which I alluded in my foregoing appreciation of
the Caillebotte room in the Luxembourg Museum. He, too, like his
companions—Manet and Monet, Pissarro and Renouard—was a rebel against
traditions, and a preacher of new gospels. He also denied old idols
with fine disdain, and preached doctrines that seemed to him to embrace
in themselves the whole truth. He managed, indeed, to collect a few
convinced disciples, but, on the other hand, hardly any congregation
about his altar or pulpit; and this was due simply to the sobriety and
uncongeniality of his dogmas, which failed to satisfy the cravings for
æsthetic devotion of the faithful.
Sisley was a landscape painter. He was purely this, to the exclusion of
every admixture. He never introduced a human figure, and, so far as I
remember, only one of an animal, into his paintings. The only life that
moved and stirred in them was that of atmosphere: the play of lights,
of their refractions, of their coloured dust, of their vanishing in
shadows and darkness of various depths. Even the vegetable world,
though one of the most important elements in academical landscape
painting, he treated slightingly. He had no respect for the attractive
individuality of a tree. It interested him at most as an object in
his field of view, which catches and diverts the beams of the sun in
a particular way. He saw nothing of the marvels of colour and form
of the minute life, that is displayed in a piece of turf, a bush, or
underwood, and reveals to the thoughtful and experienced eye the whole
nature-tragedy of the struggle for existence: the despairing striving
in the various plants for air and light, or moisture and shade; the
victorious domination of one or several species; the meek supplication
for mercy of single scattered flowers or plants; the defeat and
flight of families unable to maintain their position against superior
antagonists; the intrusion of bold strangers demanding for themselves a
place among the old settlers; the confederacies of friendly groups that
reside together and trust each other; the single combats of enemies
seeking to throttle and uproot one another. He who has never gazed
deeply into nature perhaps regards all these pictures of combat and
triumph as mere phrases, corresponding to nothing real. The biologist
of plants knows better, to be sure, and many a landscape painter too;
so did the first English Præ-Raphaelites especially. However unbearable
their vagaries and perversions may be—on these I will not enter
now—this one thing must be said in their praise: they understand and
love plant-life. For them every grass and herb, to say nothing of those
lords, the trees, has a physiognomy, a personal mystery, which they
know how to unriddle, and reveal, or, at any rate, indicate. Of all
this Sisley knows nothing. For him a grassy mead is a plain of colours
with gradations, starred with varied patches; always a mere study of
light and nothing else; never an expression of events of life.
Here lies the limitation of his capacity. In my book, “Paradoxes,” I
have tried to classify painters according to the rank of that segment
of the central nerve-system, in which their talent is rooted. By
this method I arrived at a distinction between painters who feel
joy only in colours and their harmonies, and others who, besides
delighting in colour, often even without this, have a developed sense
of the proportion of things in space, therefore, of forms, reciprocal
distances, movements so far as these latter can be indicated by means
of the painter’s fixed process: those, in short, who know how to elicit
from visible phenomena an invisible, emotional significance, and to
represent them so that they express, in a natural way, psychical
processes and feelings, without becoming falsified through the
intentional introduction of arbitrary features foreign to them. Now,
Sisley is an instructive instance of those painters who are painters
only through their retina and lowest centres of perception, viz., their
feeling for colour, and the vivid sensation of enjoyment it affords
them.
Sisley has the most delicate sense for the lightest gradations and
depths of colour. If I may use an image from an adjacent intellectual
domain, he does optically what an ear would do acoustically which
was capable of feeling purely all the tones of a chromatic divided,
perhaps, into sixty-fourths. This faculty gives him his rank as an
artist, but it was also the torturing demon of his life; for he wanted
to reproduce with equal clearness what he saw so distinctly. That is,
however, impossible by the medium of oil-painting. Let it never be
forgotten that the colours an artist uses are very different from
the natural appearances which they wish to recall. All painting is
a translation that falls short of the original text, and even the
most refined palette only permits a vulgar groping after the subtle
play of colour in the reality. It is sheer convention, to which our
eyes are artificially trained, that we recognise in definite play of
colours, human flesh, an evening sky, foliage, or mirroring water. In
all cases we have, at most, approximations before us, and even a man’s
countenance by Franz Hals reproduces the true coloration of the skin
on a human face, as little as perhaps the well-known _scherzo_ in the
second movement of the Pastoral reproduces the true note of the golden
oriole. Sisley, overlooked, like the majority indeed of impressionists,
and like many very juvenile stipplers and black and white artists,
this technical main condition—if you like, this main defect—of all
painting with media as at present known; and he obstinately insisted on
overcoming a difficulty that is, as a matter of fact, insuperable. The
whole labour of his life is a struggle with the resistance of matter,
intensely pathetic, but, nevertheless, finally only irritating, because
its utter hopelessness is admitted. He tries to square the circle,
which, as may be proved to him, is not feasible, and he aimlessly
dissipates his energies in this futile effort. He is bent on arresting
the most fugitive vanishing, the gentlest swaying of a ray of light,
and, as it were, the fourth decimal place of a fraction of colour, and
on fixing it on the canvas. And as he cannot conjure forth this feat
from his colour-tubes, in spite of the most learned and complicated
mixing, he tries to reach his goal by newly invented tricks of the
brush. Thus he gets to dotting and spotting. Innumerable minute touches
with the brush are to leave behind a chaos of colour-dots, from which
the eye may come to discern, or, at any rate, get an inkling of, the
play of colour in the actual object. This method is extremely laborious
and risky. It postulates great patience and ability to emphasise in
the minute work the firm lines of the drawing. For if one loses sight
of these lines, or cannot make them ring out clearly from the colour
gamut disseminated equally over the whole canvas, the picture dissolves
into a shapeless daub. Sisley himself is often wrecked on this rock. By
his method, however, in a few happy moments, he obtains, to be sure,
effects which would scarcely be deemed possible. Then we may enjoy in
his pictures a real dance of sun-motes in transfulgent air.
A single picture of Sisley’s even the connoisseur easily passes by.
It is insignificant. Even a whole row of pictures which represent
different themes will hardly make a great impression. At most, certain
delicacies of tone, a certain far-sighted clearness of atmosphere,
make an impression. If, on the other hand, you see near one another
panels which depict the same subjects at different hours of the day or
seasons of the year, under different lights and conditions of weather,
you grasp in astonishment the meaning of this artist. The subject is
the same, but so altered as to be hardly recognisable. People marvel
at the power with which Sisley can arrest strangely changing aspects,
and gain some faint idea of the difficulty which the exposition of
observations calls for, observations which are generally out of reach
of any but the most acute feeling and the most painful attention.
Sisley has openly admitted that his skill is unintelligible without
the key afforded by comparison. That was why he exhibited, as a rule,
at least two—usually many more—treatments of the same subject. Thus in
the _Salon_ in the Champs de Mars in 1898, he showed a beach, “Lady’s
Cove,” in two lights; and, in 1896, Moret Church, in transparent pale
lilac just before sunset, and also in softly-veiled slate-grey in rainy
weather. I remember a row of studies of the same village church, which
ran through all the divisions of the spectrum, one after another,
and, on each succeeding panel, was a revelation the more dazzling in
proportion as one already knew its form in all its details. Sisley has
hardly ever had his equal in transposing a piece into different keys.
Admiration for the almost morbidly exaggerated sensitiveness to the
slightest differences in tones of colour, and sympathetic feeling for
the artist’s despair at the inadequacy of a technique, gross, after
all, as the medium of the most delicate intentions—these are the
impressions which one feels at even the most friendly consideration
of Sisley’s most successful works. Dreaming and longing, reminiscence
and presentiment, on the other hand, they never inspire, for they are
absolutely lacking in all psychic, emotional, and imaginative sense.
From the example of Sisley, we recognise the accuracy of the maxim
which, when put nakedly, sounds almost provokingly paradoxical, and
yet is literally correct, viz., that landscape painting, or, at any
rate, a certain kind of landscape painting, is the most literary of
all species of plastic art, the one from which the least is received,
and into which the most is put. Landscape painting seems to reproduce
nature herself, and therefore necessarily to be as objective as a land
surveyor’s plan, or even as a photograph. It is, as a matter of fact,
incomparably more subjective than portrait, historical, or _genre_
painting, for there is throughout, not nature over again, but the
features of nature which have excited the attention of the painter,
and aroused in him a mood. It therefore discloses to us, more than
any other kind of painting, the soul of the painter, the peculiarity
of his mode of feeling, the bent of his dreams, and the object of
his longing. If every work of art is a confession on the part of the
artist, landscape painting is a particularly complete and honest
acknowledgment. It is a portrait of the artist, which he himself has
painted, transcribing all the wrinkles of his soul.
Nature in herself is absolutely expressionless. The feeling of the
person who contemplates her first adds expression, just as his senses
translate the movements of the atmosphere and matter, which are, in
themselves, devoid of colour and sound to the perceptible values
of colours and tones. The contemplation of nature awakens in us
associations of ideas, and these we project into nature. Therefore we
find, again, in this latter the whole range of emotion and thought of
our consciousness, and nature, therefore, influences every one who
contemplates her correspondingly to his education and mental habits.
Landscape painting is, then, also a continuous illustration of the
literature of its time. It is anti-classical in the Renaissance and
Late Renaissance up to Poussin; Ossianic and Rousseauesque in the
eighteenth century, and, in Corot, is Lamartinish. It would, of course,
be going too far to point out here what the relations are between
each individual great landscape painter and the writings of his
contemporaries; and how certain notable exceptions from the rule of
parallelism between landscape painting and the fashion of the day in
literature—Salvator Rosa, Ruysdael, and Turner (just to mention only
three)—are to be explained. It is, meanwhile, not to be disputed that
the landscape painter approaches nature with a soul filled with the
literary spirit of his time, and puts into her what he has retained
from his reading. A painting, then, awakens also in the mind of the
spectator an echo of all the poetic melodies that have enthralled him,
and it is the soft echo of these thousands of poetic voices in our
soul, to which we listen when we enjoy a landscape painting.
We listen, however, in vain before a picture of Sisley’s; all is still
in our soul. This is because the painter has regarded nature from a
wholly unliterary standpoint. She awakens in him no associations of
ideas, therefore his pictures awaken none in us. He has seen the play
of colour, found his delight in it, and has taken no further thought,
but has merely striven to reproduce it accurately. We follow his
efforts with curiosity, and approve the results if they are successful.
But in this appraisement, humour and imaginative power have no part.
Is such landscape painting art, or a clever trick? The question is
worth careful consideration.
CAMILLE PISSARRO
One of the most interesting artists in our times was this Pissarro,
born at St Thomas in the Danish Antilles, though of a Dutch Jewish
family of Spanish extraction settled in Curaçoa, who died in Paris in
1903 at the age of seventy-three. He was a born painter, of the class
whose sense of form hardly exceeds the average, whose remarkably fine
perception of colour, however, reacting very strongly on every optical
irritation, makes the excitement of the retina the source for them of
profound feelings of pleasure or the contrary, and fixes their idea and
thought, to a certain extent polarises it according to colour.
It is sufficient to say few words as to his outer life. Impelled
by his bent for painting, he came to Paris at the age of twenty,
and had the good fortune to be taken as a pupil by old Corot. He
saw Th. Rousseau and Millet working with his master, and he lived
during the most susceptible years of youth amongst such originals,
in the most glorious Barbizon period. His natural tendency directed
him imperiously to landscape painting. This, then, is the substance
of his whole life as an artist. Incited by Millet’s example, in his
young days he put peasants in his fields and meadows, but they were
always mere accessories in the landscape, and arrested the eye less
than the ground and plants. He had then also sufficient knowledge of
himself to abandon, at an early stage, human figures, for he realised
that there was more life in the tiniest sod of his turf than in his
conscientious but insignificant villagers. In the high school, in
which it was his privilege to learn, he acquired that certainty and
force which distinguished him up to his old age. When, however, he had
mastered Corot’s brilliant technique and Rousseau’s draughtsmanship
and composition, he ceased to be an imitative disciple, and with full
deliberation, went his own ways, which for a time lay far from Corot’s
goal, but at last, by a wonderfully circuitous route, brought him back
to it once more. Not long did he try modestly and laudably, with a good
young man’s carefully moderated works, in the _Salon_ for certificates
of industry and good marks from the academical masters. At once he
joined the hot-headed set; he exhibited, from 1864 onwards, only in the
“Salon of the Rejected” and with the “Independents,” and became one of
the most prominent men in the group of impressionists.
Nothing is funnier than to read the explanation of the terms
“Impressionists” and “Impressionism” of certain art-gossipers among
the critics in Germany. These transcendental phrasegrinders, who have
no notion how the word arose, believe it was invented by painters or
æsthetics with the set purpose of characterising an artistic tendency,
and of indicating elliptically a method of execution; and, with the
rapturous, prophet-mien common among this brotherhood, they treat us
to the deepest and most breath-ravishing explanations of the word. The
truth is that the expression owes its origin to the jest of a comic
paper that intended nothing special by it, least of all an æsthetic
theory. In 1874 the painters who for ten years had been known as the
“Open Air” artists or “Realists” exhibited a number of their works
in the reception-room of the writer and photographer, Nadar. Claude
Monet appeared, amongst others, with a sunset, which was quite in the
manner of Turner’s last years, and he entitled it “Impression.” It was
a remarkable and characteristic work, without form, consisting only of
streaks of red and orange, in the highest degree offensive to those who
will not have the contemplation of nature restricted to the observation
of colours, but look also for outline and modelling. A wanton scoffer,
making merry in the “Charivari” over this exhibition, seized on Monet’s
“Impression” as the pattern of the new style, sneered at it in the
tone of a genuine back-biter, and, with the object of belittling them,
called Monet’s fellow-combatants “Impressionists,” by which he meant
only that, according to his view, their pictures were daubs, just like
Claude Monet’s “Impression.” That is the simple origin of the word
into which the German commentators have read something exceedingly
mysterious and wonderful.
Pissarro belonged to Monet’s circle of friends, and fell under the
designation, which rapidly became current, of “Impressionist.” In his
case, it only means that he sought and found in nature only effects of
light, only the play of sunbeams on things and around things.
In the three or four centuries that landscape painting has been raised
to the rank of a branch of art—I leave out of consideration, in this
place, the ancient landscape, because the modern development is
unconnected with it—an enquiry, which enters into the motives and aims
of painters, can distinguish three different kinds of landscape, which
I would term respectively the literary, the lyric, and the optical.
I do not choose these new designations for old and well-known things
arbitrarily, but because, in my opinion, they mark what is essential
better than do the prescriptive ones.
Literary landscape, on which I have already briefly expressed my
views in treating of Sisley, is that which traditionally goes under
the names of historical, heroic, ideal, or artificial landscape. It
is not prompted by delight in nature, but is either the offspring of
imaginative power or a piece of intellectual know-all work, in both
cases, the result of reading. It is, to put it briefly, a continuous
illustration of the literature in vogue. Since the Renaissance, ancient
heroic materials have been specially favoured in poetry. The Spanish
theatre, Corneille, and Racine lived on them. Even if they placed the
lofty exploits of their heroes in a less remote past and on another
stage than the ancient world, still, they endowed them with hundreds
of reminiscences of the Græco-Roman mythology and history. Poussin,
and even Claude Lorrain, conceived their landscapes as the frames of
heroic romances and dramas. They were designed as stage decoration,
which the spectator might people from his memory with figures in Roman
mail-armour or Gothic plate-armour, familiar to him from contemporary
poetry. In order to facilitate this play of fancy, ancient temples
or ruins, perhaps even men in classical garb, helpfully stimulate
the association of ideas. J. J. Rousseau substituted the sentimental
for the heroic fashion; but the return to nature, which he and his
innumerable imitators preached, did not to landscape painters at
all mean the sinking into the contemplation of God’s actual world,
but only the substitution for the heroes and knights, the upright
or fallen marble pillars of their predecessors, of shepherds and
shepherdesses, rustic cottages and herdsmen’s fires. Thus landscape
painting illustrated in turn Orlando Furioso, Jerusalem Delivered,
the Æneid, the tragedies of Corneille and Racine, Rousseau, Gessner,
and Ossian; then, nearer to our time, Victor Hugo and the Romantics,
Zola and the Naturalists, down to the latest symbolists and mystics,
whose contemplation, so far as one can speak of such a thing in their
gassy heads, greets us from the pictures of Burne-Jones and his
continental imitators, and also from the landscape compositions of
Puvis de Chavannes and Henri Martin. It may be safely affirmed that,
of the pictures of literary landscape, not a single one would have
been painted unless a book or some species of literature had, to some
extent, commissioned them with an exact specification of all details.
Lyrical landscape is that which is perhaps also designated landscape
of mood. It is more consistent with nature than literary landscape. It
owes much less to reminiscence of books or plays; its only relation
to literature is that through this the painter is schooled to be more
susceptible of certain features of nature. Landscape pictures of this
species could be painted under some circumstances by artists who had
never read a book or heard a poem, if only their own disposition
were attuned to poetry. For this painting the landscape itself is
a poem—ballad, romance, or idyll, in many cases, perhaps, even a
melodrama. It tells some tale, or hints at one, the more delicately
so much the more expressively. The wrinkles of the ground, the
irregularity and abruptness of the lines of mountains, the gloom of the
woods, awaken presentiments; our yearning follows the paths which are
lost in the blue distance, or behind hills and bends; coolness rises
from the foaming rivulet; mystery broods over the motionless fish-pond.
Everything unspoken, or partly unspeakable, which a keenly perceptive
man of deep contemplation imports into nature, moves and reigns in and
over the lyric landscape painting. It expresses a complex, subjective
mood, embracing in itself many elements of sense, feeling, and
thought—the joy of spring, the melancholy of autumn, the cheerlessness
of winter, the shudder at the weird, the dread of eternity. It is
viewed anthropomorphically. It owes its strongest effects to traits
which do not exist in nature herself, but are added to her by human
imagination. Japanese art knows only lyric landscape. In Europe it was
first developed by the great Dutchmen, Ruysdael and Van Ostade, to
attain in Corot its zenith unsurpassed up to the present time. As it
lays expression into its forms, it must figure the latter distinctly.
It draws and composes, therefore, with deliberation. It proceeds from
the realistically rendered topographical anecdote, even if it achieves
this by the transcendental.
Optical landscape, finally, is that which seeks to reproduce only
the play of convergent or divergent, of reflected or broken light
in nature. It is neither book-illustration nor views of places. It
does not invite to the enjoyment of nature in the sense of the Sunday
excursionist from big towns, or the summer tripper. It offers no scene
with suggestion that we should live out our subjective moods there.
The outlines, the plastic of the bodies, are a matter of indifference
to it. Everything is merely a patch of colour to it; only an arena
of dancing sunbeams. It wants to reproduce, as truly and fully as
possible, the change and merging of lights and shades, the reciprocal
influence of neighbouring and overlapping colours, the _crescendo_ of
hues in the foreground and their fading away in the perspective. It
systematically rates the intellectual and moral relations as foreign to
its art. It is not enthusiastic for a particular season of the year or
a certain architecture of cliffs and mountains. It knows nothing of the
secret magic of water, heath, forest, or snow-plain. It gives light in
scales, and in harmonised and dissonant chords, and will give nothing
else. This landscape painting is an art of purely sensual preception,
which may call pre-existent feelings and thoughts over the threshold of
consciousness, but brings about no feelings and thoughts of itself. It
is to be compared with the effect of the Æolian harp, which stimulates
our hearing with melodious sound, but says nothing thematically
differentiated to it. Debussy, latterly, consciously strives back to
these origins of acoustic pleasure. The disciples of Turner in England
and on the Continent enter in landscape on the same way back to a style
of painting which, neglecting form, lays stress on the harmonies of
light and colour.
In practice, besides the three sharply outlined species of landscape
painting, manifold transitions and mixed forms are, of course, also
observable. If, perhaps, G. Poussin represents literary, Corot lyric,
Turner, at the time the formation of his cataract began, optical
landscape, in its theoretical purity, we see in Claude Lorrain a
revelling in light and a poetic mood penetrate the mytho-heroic
literary painting which he owes to his artistic training, and from
which, in spite of higher flights, he could never entirely free
himself; and Segantini is a good example of an originally lyrical
landscape that is always more strongly inclining to the optical;
for if at the beginning he loved to copy high mountains, at last he
busied himself only with fixing the wonder of light in thin air on the
mirroring ice and glacier snow.
Camille Pissarro was mainly, in separate periods of his artistic
development exclusively, an optical landscape painter. The attunement
with nature which is afforded by the meeting of mountain and wood,
water and reed, by the forms of trees and cliffs, the peculiarities of
plant-life, and the movements of open country, he evidently did not
feel and he cannot arouse. He was nothing, and he wanted to be nothing,
but a priest and poet of light. When light fell, what objects it
illumined and played on was a matter of such indifference to him that
this landscape painter painted city scenes just as often as those of
open country. Views of the Paris Boulevards, the Avenue de l’Opéra, the
Seine seen from the bridges, the streets and squares of Rouen, occupy
quite as large a space in his work as studies of the valley of the
Marne and the hills of Southern England. Thanks to the good school from
which he came, he never, like so many of his rivals, melts away into
formlessness. He could not refrain from drawing distinctly. It was the
movement of his bold and skilful hand that pervaded his will; but the
sole hero of his pictures, to whom he gave his love and attention, was
light.
After he had outgrown the formulæ of the Corot type of landscape, he
sought with persistent, hot endeavour to find a method that would
qualify him to draw into his picture as much light as possible, as
intense light as possible, even the whole sun. What he himself found
failed to satisfy him. When Seurat, who suffered undoubtedly from
eye troubles, came forward with his stippling, Pissarro at once took
possession of the new manner, and became a stippler even unconsciously.
Seurat, it is well known, taught that the painter, if he would give
truth and force to colour, must not mix the shade on his palette and
transfer it ready-made to the canvas, but must dissect it into its
primary colours, which are known from the spectrum, and insert them
in little dabs by one another, so as to leave it to the eye to put
them together again on the retina. This optical proceeding professes
to have been learnt by listening to nature, which also offers us only
as single colours what we feel as a synthesis of colour. The theory
is sheer nonsense. Nothing of the sort happens in nature. When we
see green grass we do not see yellow and blue grass which our eye
mixes into green, but we see a body proceed from the æther-vibrations
of the undulations, which call forth on the retina a sensation of
green; and to imitate this influence of the grass we have to employ
only one colour stuff from which atmospheric vibrations of similar
undulations proceed. Unscientific painters were, however, impressed by
the sham-scientific jabber of Seurat, who tried, in his wonted manner,
through a subsequently discovered theory, to convert a defect of sight
into an advantage; and they applied themselves the more zealously to
stippling as the innumerable specks really made bright a twinkling,
whirling impression, which superficially reminded one of the vibration
of hot air on a sunny plain at midsummer noon.
Only superficially. Pissarro soon discovered that stippling really
did not bring more light into his pictures, and he gave it up. He
resigned the Seurat method to rivals who rush after eccentricity
because they hope to astonish by it, and to whom a style of painting
was particularly suitable, which blurred the line with colour and
saved them that tedious drawing that always gave them the greatest
affliction. He himself, however, returned again to the honest style of
wielding the brush, which he had learnt of his great masters.
The stippling episode of his life, which he got over, throws light,
however, on the painful, fundamental mistake of Pissarro and his
companions. They wanted to paint light, and by that wanted something
impossible, for light is not to be represented by colours which do not
themselves emit light, and are neither phosphorescent nor fluorescent.
All that is attainable by colour is awakening the reminiscence of
light, and, by means of the memory-picture illuminating the brain,
to cheat our consciousness with the idea of a directly received
impression. The very great masters of optical landscape painting soon
acknowledge, or feel, that the brush can indeed conjure forth the
illusion of illumination, but is unable to paint light, and they turn
from a hopeless Sisyphus-task to create pictures of mist and dusk,
from which sunlight—a thing inimitable—is absolutely banished. The
most instructive example of this is James Whistler; but he who does
not possess the instinctive certainty of genius will not be conscious
of the limitations of human capacity, and ever rolls the round stone
unweariedly up the mountain.
Pissarro would have saved himself many hours of tragic quest, struggle,
and sense of powerlessness, had he known or recognised the primary fact
which Friedrich Hebbel seized in his theological but lucid epigram:
“He who the sun has created will ever remain quite another
Than the industrious wight who for us prospects shall paint.”
WHISTLER’S PSYCHOLOGY
“Do you think, prince, that Raphael would not have been the greatest
genius among painters if he had been unlucky enough to be born without
hands?” Lessing makes the painter Conti say to Prince Gonzaga. A
century and a half ago that seemed paradoxical, and was, probably on
that account, one of the most quoted maxims of Lessing’s. It has,
meanwhile, experienced the fate of many paradoxes, viz., become a
commonplace. Nowadays, every dabbler in psychology knows that not
arm and hand—_i.e._, execution—make the painter, but his optical
brain centres, _i.e._, his sensitiveness to impressions of sight, his
specific reactions on colour and form. One is a born painter—a painter
from organic necessity and natural bent preceding all education—only by
special development or susceptibility of this centre.
In painting, however, there are two elements to be kept
distinct—drawing and colour. Both these are traceable to the centres of
sight, but they correspond to different sensibilities. Optical centres,
which perceive with particular keenness and delicacy the distinctions
between intensities of light, are the real, organic hypothesis of the
talent for drawing; for what we perceive with the eye, without the
aid of the senses of touch and muscle, as outline or form, is purely
distinction of intensity in light. Optical centres, on the other hand,
which are particularly sensitive to the variations of undulations
of light, form the basis of the sense of colour and the talent for
colouring. As a rule the talents for drawing and colouring appear
coupled, even if one or the other preponderates, for highly developed
or particularly sensitive optical centres are naturally receptive
beyond the average of optical impression of every sort, of differences
both of intensity and of undulations of light. This is, however, not
always the case, and there are dry, sharp draughtsmen without sense of
colour, and some who revel in colour without the ability to grasp the
idea of form and render it plastically.
In a brain that is characterised by a special morphological or
functional development or sensitiveness of the optical centres, this
dominates all functions of the brain, especially memory and association
of ideas. The entire thinking faculty has an optical or visual
character; it stands in a dependent relation to sight. Memory clings
almost exclusively to reminiscent pictures of the sense of sight, and
association of ideas connects mainly pictures of this category. Every
perception of form calls up in the consciousness representations of
form. The fancy is “inwardly completely full of figures,” as Albert
Dürer quaintly and with wonderful intuition expresses it in his
“Diaries.” The world-picture of this brain, always disposed to intense
observation, is neither loud nor excited, but bright, flashing, and
radiant like a mosaic work of precious stones and enamel. All the inner
connections between the different domains of the brain are sharpened
towards the optic centres, and all the activities of the brain, all
emotions, all processes on the threshold of consciousness also release
central optical excitements.
Whistler’s life-work reveals more than that of any other artist
in our times the deep, organic primitiveness of his genius as a
painter. We can observe in him, as in a school text, the psychology
of the born painter. His signature is at once a fine example of the
association of ideas on the part of a visionary. It consists, as
everybody knows who has seen Whistler’s works, of a butterfly with
evenly outstretched wings. People have insisted on seeing heaven
knows what symbol in this, and have consequently sought the wildest
and remotest explanations of it. If any one asked the master for an
explanation, he laughed, and made a mysterious gesture of refusal. It
gave him vast entertainment to see his admirers tormenting themselves
with profound attempts at interpreting it. They just had no eyes;
they could not see. The butterfly is nothing but the first letter of
Whistler’s name—a big W. A Gothic, ornamental W with the two side
lines bellied out and a bar in the middle reminds one strikingly of a
soaring butterfly with its cylindrical body between its outstretched
wings. The definite association of ideas from similarity of form made
Whistler, as he painted the W of his signature, think of a butterfly,
and he henceforward formed this picture that was fuller in expression,
disregarding the original letter, which seemed to him balder and more
meaningless. The butterfly came to the front more and more as the W
went further and further back, and it is possible that at last Whistler
himself forgot the point from which he started.
Whistler was, when he liked, in the front rank as a designer of
forms. From the severe, painfully upright school of Gleyre he went
forth a master of drawing, as of the outline of corporeality of three
dimensions seen stereoscopically. One glance at his wonderfully plastic
portraits, especially of his first period, teaches this irrefutably;
but, on the whole, as his individuality made itself felt, he neglected
form and became more engrossed in colour. In the second half of his
life the outlines of subjects hardly any longer interested him at
all; he only dwelt on their appearances in colour, on the harmony
or discord of their tones. That means that his optical centres were
much more sensitive to the differences of undulations than to those
of the intensity of light. From this there necessarily resulted a
contradiction between him and the average individuals which was not
to be got over, since it originated in differences in the constitution
of the brain. He who has not Whistler’s special hyper-sensitiveness
to colour is simply unable to see things as the latter saw them. He
can just as little imagine the impressions that Whistler feels through
his sense of sight as perhaps those which are supplied to a hound by
his nose. When the blissfully but painfully supersensitive appreciator
of colour and the dull seer of outline, _i.e._, the perceiver of
light, sought to explain themselves to each other, inexplicable
misunderstandings were bound to arise, which make his celebrated
law-suit with Ruskin an excruciatingly comic jest. Ruskin appreciated
only draughtsmanship, his mind never went beyond contour. For him
a picture was a writing that should express thoughts and feelings
in the most concrete form. He demanded that it should be a definite
communication, reducible to plain words, as of a narrative, a record
of travel, or a treatise on natural science. A picture that differed
from an exact representation, just as music differs from articulate
speech—a picture that attempted to convey only a general, not a
concrete stimulation of the sight-centre sensitive to colour, and the
pleasurable feeling accompanying and emphasising it, not only was to
him necessarily incomprehensible, but, as he was a dogmatist of strong
feelings, seemed to him an impertinence—nay, a profligacy and personal
insult. Ruskin’s criticism of a “Nocturne in Black and Gold” was a new
version of the fable of the stork and the fox who invited each other
in turn to dinner, improved to the point of libel. It was childish of
Whistler to bring an action against the angry-minded art-inquisitor who
required, as the first duty of a painter, the accuracy of a geologist,
botanist, or engineer. He should not have expected justice from judges
who saw and felt, not like himself, but like Ruskin. Judge Huddleston
was of good faith when, in the immortal trial—which Whistler himself
has preserved for posterity in his charming book, “The Gentle Art
of Making Enemies”—he exchanged with the artist remarks like these:
“Which part of the picture, then, really represents the bridge? Do
you mean to say that this is the proper representation of a bridge?”
(The question referred to “Battersea Bridge by Moonlight.”) “I had no
intention of giving an exact copy of the bridge.” “Do these daubs of
colour on it represent human beings?” “They represent what you please.”
“Is that thing under there a boat?” “It is a consolation to me that you
recognise it. My whole object was only to produce a definite harmony
of colours.” He could hear this harmony of colours: Ruskin and Judge
Huddleston could not. It was utterly futile to try to make them feel it.
His peculiarity of giving his pictures fine and pretentious names,
such as “Black and Gold,” “Blue and Silver,” “Ivory and Gold,” “Purple
and Gold” is also generally misunderstood. People read “Silver and
Blue,” and saw indistinctly intricate brush-strokes of blue with
elevations in dead white, representing, by way of indication, the high
seas by night and in a mist. People hurried to the picture labelled
“Ivory and Gold,” expecting to gaze at something like an ancient
chryselephantine marvel, or a Florentine masterpiece of splendour
belonging to the days of the Medici, and what did they find? The
lightly executed sketch of a woman in a yellow and white harmony, in
which one looked in vain for the costly materials promised by the
title. Not Philistines alone have shaken their heads over this, and
evil-disposed critics have talked of hoaxing, foppery, and American
bluff. They have wronged the artist bitterly. He was absolutely honest;
his optical hyper-sensitiveness felt the colour with so heightened an
appreciation of tone that he really saw gold, silver, and purple, where
a less susceptible sense could only see dull yellow, deadened white,
undecided reddish-brown. In all probability, it was long before he
realised that others failed to observe, in the appearance of the actual
things and his pictures of them, the rare metals and precious stones,
the pearls and ivory, which gleamed from them to him. The common
phrase, which is a precipitate of the universal thought and feeling,
speaks of sun-gold and moon-silver. Sun and moon consequently make
such a strong optical impression on even the average man that he thinks
of gold and silver with the accompanying higher notes of ideas of
splendour and magnificence. In Whistler’s consciousness, however, these
ideas began to be felt with gentle excitations, as whitish foam on dark
waves in the night, or a woman’s pale complexion in cream-coloured
raiment yielded them. These delicate charms affected his sensitiveness
just as the force of the sun or moon affects others. In maniacal
excitation, of which the acutest form is madness, the brain of the
sick person becomes so supersensitive that it reacts on the ordinary
impressions of the senses just as on intolerably violent irritations.
Moreover, certain poisons, of which hashish is the best known, derange
the central nervous system into a condition of supersensitiveness,
in which the person poisoned feels himself inundated with floods of
light, and sees a blinding brightness everywhere. The sensitiveness to
which only illness or poison raises the average brain, was from nature
the peculiarity of Whistler’s sight-centres. He was conscious that
in certain respects he had more than others, and he felt as superior
to them as the Indian hunter does to a pale face of the towns on a
game-beast’s track, which the latter does not notice at all, whilst
it gives the former a thousand clear indications. As an artist he
was amiably modest, as a man amusingly arrogant. He did not flatter
himself on his work, but on his finer organisation, _i.e._, that he was
kneaded out of better dough than the majority.
His supersensitiveness is expressed not only in his revel of colour;
it is also curiously and graphically revealed in the impressions
which he feels of the appearance of women, and which he conveys in
his best portraits of women with an intensity no longer restrained
within physiological bounds, but positively touching on the morbid.
The intensity with which he feels young, high-bred, nervous women has
quite an uncanny effect on me. I think of his “Lady Meux,” and other
capricious femininities, which were exhibited, in the last fifteen
years, in the Paris _salons_ and in London. He plants his model before
us in some wonderful position. One stands with its back towards us,
but turns its head, as if in a sudden caprice, to us. Another shows
us its full face, and looks fascinatingly at us with pinched mouth
and impenetrable eyes that think troublous thoughts. These perverted,
whimsical beauties wear remarkable and personal toilettes which, except
the face and often the hands, reveal not a finger’s breadth of skin,
yet, in spite of the interposition of silk and lace, cry out for the
fig leaf. They are bundles of sick nerves that, from the crowns of
their heads to the tips of their fingers, seem to thrill with Sadic
excitement. It is as though they wanted to entice men to wild attempts,
and at the same time held their claws ready to tear, with a loud cry
of pleasure, the flesh of the daring ones. Everything madly Mænadic,
or inexorably Sphinx-like, that Ibsen was incapable of incarnating
convincingly in his Hedda Gabler speaks distinctly from Whistler’s
female portraits.
They have become typical—typical for copying painters who exaggerate
his neurotic women into the pornographic; typical for hysterical women,
to whom they suggest poses and psychological states. Félicien Rops
perhaps owes him nothing, although often enough his female demons seem
Whistler-portraits divested of clothing; he has, from analogous organic
hypotheses, independently attained to analogous conceptions of woman;
but Zorn’s, Boldini’s, Alexander’s women point to Whistler’s demoniacs.
The woman of a given epoch likes to form herself on the ideal which
the art and poetry of the time give of the “interesting” woman. Thus
Whistler, by means of his female portraits, became an educator of
the æsthetically superfine woman of the present day; but Whistler,
as an educator of woman, is to me incomparably less sympathetic than
Whistler, the delicate appreciator and symphonist of colour.
VIII
GUSTAVE MOREAU
The house in which Gustave Moreau spent the seventy-seven years of his
life (1826-98) has been turned into a museum which contains nearly all
his life’s work, according to the catalogue 1132 items, from the copies
and sketches of his youth, through the great finished paintings, down
to the promising sketches, unfulfilled promises, of his old age. This
collection falls little short of being complete. Perhaps, with the
sole exception of the incomparably less interesting Wierz, there is no
contemporary artist less often met with in public and private galleries
than Gustave Moreau. He never sold his pictures, for he was lucky
enough not to be obliged to do so; and, in the time of his maturity,
he did not exhibit, for he shunned contact with men who were strange
and unfamiliar to him. He who wishes to get to know him must, then, not
shirk a pilgrimage to his house, which he inherited from his parents,
inhabited by himself, and left as an unencumbered legacy to his native
town. And the journey will be found worth the trouble, for Gustave
Moreau is a curious phenomenon, affecting to melancholy and depressing,
at least for men enamoured with life and action, but nevertheless full
of mysterious, strangely pathetic allurement, even for those who prefer
to breathe in air and sunshine under a bright sky.
Gustave Moreau stands apart from the mighty procession of French
art in the nineteenth century, which was headed by the classic
cohort, continued by the powerful band of the knights and squires of
romanticism, and then unrolled itself before our eyes, in the legion of
the bourgeois National Guard of Philistine academic routine-art, in the
blouse-wearing troop of Realists, and, lastly, in the vacillating and
oscillating sun-flower groups of Symbolism. He is not to be classed in
this line of development. He went his way alone, deaf to the strains
of the world of which he heard only those with which he himself was
in harmony from the beginning. He had some few kindred spirits among
contemporary painters, but he did not know them, and they did not
know him either, and they exercised no influence on each other, but
grew up independently of one another from the same conditions of like
temperaments and peculiar moods that in the middle decades of the
nineteenth century dominated narrow, exclusive circles, without being
characteristic of this or any other time. For these temperaments
are purely subjective, and accord with the external only so far
as civilisation, when it has reached a certain grade of intensity
and artificiality, always produces men with widely preponderating
development of fancy, who are continually looking into their inner
selves, and cannot withdraw their eyes from the fascinating spectacle
of the wonderful events being enacted therein.
Moreau was just such a visionary. Remote from life, remote from
actuality, he ever remained engrossed in his dream, and his noble art
served him to retain his apparently multifarious, but, in reality,
little changing dream-pictures. His museum is, then, a world by itself,
with which the objective outer world has no more in common than have
dreams and ravings with pictures of the actual which serve them as
a stimulus, and furnish them with the elements of their subjective
combinations.
Since the earliest stages of development of the spiritual life there
have existed, side by side with men of observation and action, thinkers
and dreamers who turn away from actualities, and build up around them a
world of ideas which their excessively developed power of imagination
could fashion, and endow with romantic life according to their own
inclination and necessities. Thus arose all symbols, mythologies,
fables, and superstitions that were enshrined in folk-lore, traditions,
and, more especially, in all arts. Civilisation brings with it, by
this means, besides its recognition of nature, a world of shadows
invented by men freely—even if according to fixed psychological
laws—like a ghostly double, the astral body of the real world; and
our prescriptive education, which comprises in itself more æsthetic
than positively scientific ingredients, renders us all double citizens
of the real and the imaginary world. The majority of us chiefly live
in the former, and visit the latter only in rare moments, which to
some mean only recreation, but to others consecration and exaltation.
A small minority, however, renounce their citizenship of the actual
world and withdraw wholly to the world of imagination, which has been
conjured up by the artistic fancy of mankind in thousands of years of
creative activity.
Moreau was a citizen of the shadow-world, wherein he spent, an eternal
Phæacian Sunday, and he never grew weary of lingering over its
beauties. We learn by his representations to know it thoroughly in all
its parts. Its landscapes are curiously jagged rocks which seem to
be formed of corals; chalk plains with moon-glimmering reflections;
mountain steeps in cumulous clouds; lakes and seas of oil, opalescent
or charged with indigo. The animals that people this hypnotising
paradise are unicorns with silvery coats, amazing dragons that are
too curly to inspire fear, milk-white flying-horses, seven-headed
hydras standing bolt upright on the tips of their tails, Stymphalian
birds with women’s faces, sphinxes, chimæras, and phœnixes. Even the
flamingos, which come nearest to the terrestrial fauna, are here with
the tips of their wings dipped, as it were, in blood, immeasurably
more oddly pathetic than we know them. The flora exhibits (besides
monumental marvels of Peru, which remind one of the rose windows in
Gothic cathedrals) a “mystic blossom,” a somewhat calla-like creation
that sprouts forth from a luminous rock in the blue, mirroring mere,
and on its slender summit, between great high leaves, bears the Blessed
Virgin surrounded by a dazzling halo. The spiritual beings that move
amidst these marvellous animals and plants, are gods, heroes, and
poets: Tyrtæus, Orpheus, Hesiod, Sappho, Jason, Helena, Odysseus,
Penelope, Pasiphae, Hercules, Dejanira, Œdipus, Jupiter, Apollo, the
Muses, Semele, Leda, Europa, Prometheus, the Oceanides, Moses, Buddha,
Jesus Christ, the Good Samaritan; the acts or, more correctly, the
states in which these gods, demigods, and genii are represented are
taken from all mythologies and theogonies. Every mysticism that has
at any time or place arisen, like a silver haze, from the chaotic
brain of man, has found admittance into Moreau’s soul and flows up
and down in it in changing pictures. As to orthodoxy of any sort or
kind, he is quite unconcerned. His mind, when stirred, clings with the
same delicacy to the saint of every origin, and he kneels, like the
large-hearted heathen of antiquity, at the threshold of the most varied
realms of divinity. The Pallas Athene in the hall of the king’s palace
at Ithaca, who enjoys the massacre of the suitors, is formed after the
same type as the Blessed Virgin of the “mystic blossom”; hovering in
long, trailing, white garments, radiant with a halo, ecstatic in look
and mien and the clasping of her hands. The statues of the Chaldæan
gods in the triumph of Alexander the Great imitate hieratic repose,
and the Eastern posture of the Buddha-Amina statues. Prometheus on the
Caucasian peak, palpitating beneath the vulture’s beak, is allied by a
family likeness to Christ scourged at the pillar. Jason on the poop of
the _Argo_, and the fair man among the “Three Magi from the East,” are
cast in the same mould. Moses, looking down from the frontier hill on
the blue plains of Canaan, and the great Pan, gazing at the spectacle
of the procession of the spheres, seem brothers. Jupiter, with Semele
on his bosom melting away with its heat, has the unapproachable
sublimity of the canonical, the orthodox God the Father. For Moreau
there are no dead religions; with a humble shyness and feelings of awe,
he approaches all that has ever been reverenced by man.
Moreau’s transcendental imaginations necessarily reveal themselves to
the senses in other colours, as in other forms than those familiar
to us by experience. An eerie light fills his pictures with the
shimmering radiance of mother-of-pearl. The rarest, and, therefore, as
jewels, the most treasured exceptional forms of the planetary world
are the material of which everything in these pictures consists;
the buildings are of gold and precious stones; there is a twinkle
of rubies, sapphires, and emeralds everywhere. Moreau’s amazing art
produces from his palette of oil-colours effects that lie far outside
its technique; they are huge Limoges plates with rivers of transparent
enamel; paintings on glass with sun-illumined, jewel-like fragments
of colour; Byzantine mosaics of bits of _lapis lazuli_, jasper, and
cornelian. With this palette certain Quattrocentists such as Mantegna,
certain Flemish artists as Van Eyck and Roger van der Weyden, as
also Holbein, have in their pictures produced a small number of
beauty-spots. No one prior to Moreau has painted big pictures entirely
with it.
The first impression received from the Moreau Museum is that of
having entered an enchanted castle, which has about it something of
the treasure cave of the mountain sprites, something of the palace of
the Elf-queen, as we know them from the “Thousand and One Nights,”
and German folk-stories. And if we have tarried longer, and our eyes
have grown accustomed to the ripple of pearls and precious stones, of
enamel and gold, we are astonished at the strange, weird stiffness and
stillness of all these splendid creatures, and really feel we are
surrounded by ghosts and spectres that have assumed only in pretence
the guise of men.
Moreau formed his views on Baudelaire’s rules. In the rooms of his
museum we fancy we are looking at a series of book-illustrations for
the _Fleurs-du-mal_.
“Je hais le mouvement qui déplace les lignes,
Et jamais je ne pleure et jamais je ne ris.”
“I hate the movement which displaces the lines, and never do I weep
and never laugh” would, as an inscription above the entrance, most
fittingly convey in words the main feature of Moreau’s art. For nearly
all his pictures, but most of all for the “Triumph of Alexander the
Great,” “Penelope’s Suitors,” and the “Daughters of Thespius,” the
verses of the _Paris Dream_ would suit as a deliberate description.
“J’avais banni de ces spectacles
Le vègétal irregulier
. . . . .
Babel d’escaliers et d’arcades,
C’était un palais infini,
Plein de bassins et de cascades
Tombant dans l’or mat ou bruni.
. . . . .
C’étaient des pierres inouies
. . . . .
Et sur ces mouvantes merveilles
Planait....
Un silence d’éternité.”
This _silence d’éternité_ is the characteristic of Moreau’s art. Here
nothing moves; all is as stiff as Lot’s wife after she was turned into
a pillar of salt, as the men in the fairy-tale after the wizard has, by
a wave of his magic wand, made the warm life stagnate in their veins.
Moreau succeeds in reversing Pygmalion’s miracle. His brush takes the
life out of every human body he paints, and turns it into a statue.
In none of his figures do we feel that he painted from a model. They
all give the impression of being copies from statuary, and we are, for
instance, not surprised that his manifestly unfinished “Moses Looking
at the Promised Land” has a long bearded head as white as marble on
an almost flesh-coloured body. We assume that Moreau has here simply
reproduced the natural colour of his stone prototype. Among all his
thousand works, one alone has really struck me as having something like
a stir of passion traceable, viz., his “Messalina.” The abominable
empress, slave of her animal passions, is ascending the dirty couch
at a den in the Suburra. The young vulgarian whom she has beckoned to
her clasps her waist with both arms; the attendant torch-bearer of the
crowned slut turns her head away from the repulsive sight. One can
very well understand the movement of this slave who is ashamed of her
mistress, but has only to obey and hold her tongue. The eagerness,
too, with which the youth kneeling before the couch creeps up to
the body that is offered him, is true and warm. Here is real life,
even if in one of its lowest manifestations. But Messalina herself,
though the protagonist of this tragedy of Cæsarean madness, is again
entirely Moreau. With her stony repose in a situation with which it
is so inconsistent, with her Assyrian fish-bladder-eyed profile, she
resembles an idol in a Babylonian temple, and one wonders how the
passion of the favoured one can endure the icy coldness gleaming from
this idol.
His temperament indicated to him, from his earliest awakening to
artistic impulse, the course of his education, just as it did, later,
the choice of his material. As a youth in Italy he copied Pompeian
mural paintings with fervour, and later revelled at the sight of the
Quattrocentists. Here he recognised at first sight kindred souls; here,
as it were, his blood spoke. He tries, by imitating them piously, to
keep them for reminiscences later on. His mystic bent to the old, the
obsolete, the risen as from a grave, is a trait connecting him with
the Præ-Raphaelites, who were almost his contemporaries. With them
he has in common, too, the uncommonly exact and accurate technique.
He is a cold but unerring draughtsman. All his accessory work, his
architecture, ornaments, implements, and clothing, are marvels of
archæological learning or, when this fails, of invention and patiently,
painfully achieved execution. His conscientiousness went so far that
he painted perhaps twenty or more far advanced sketches of each detail
of his large compositions ere he proceeded to the main work, and this,
nevertheless, he often left unfinished, because he felt he had not done
enough to satisfy his conscience.
Those empty, or merely vaguely filled-in spots instead of faces in
big pictures, in which all besides—the patterns of the garment stuffs
and carpets, the decorations on the splendid vases, the finery,
weapons, capitals of the pillars—are precisely rendered as complete
productions, give suddenly to the sympathetic an idea of the pains of
this struggling spirit. Moreau shunned life, which was too stormy,
noisy, and bustling for his morbid need of repose and quiet, but it did
not cease to attract him as a mysterious riddle. He would gladly have
understood it, comprehended it, and held it fast, but he had to admit
to himself that he was powerless to reach it. A homunculus artificially
generated in the retort, he can live only in his glass vessel, and must
die if he ventures out of it; but through his prison walls he gazes at
the great, broad, free nature, replete with tempestuous life, and in
the cold of his glassy den he shudders with longing for this world, so
near and yet beyond his reach. His longing is, however, never to be
appeased; he will never feel the joys of the warm breath of life.
IX
EUGÈNE CARRIÈRE
How much better off are painters and art-lovers nowadays than in
earlier times! Formerly, if you wanted to enjoy a picture you had to
own it; if you wished to know a picture you were obliged to make a
journey to it. If you liked an artist sufficiently to wish to surround
yourself with his chief creations, or the whole of them, you had to
have unlimited wealth and set up a gallery of your own. Copies are
a mere aid to remembrance, and not a good one either. Executed by a
dauber, they are worse than nothing; by a gifted artist, they give the
copyist’s, not the original creator’s, personality. The older methods
of multiplication also either furnish clumsy attempts at transmitting
them, or they are peculiar, independent, artistic creations of another
order than painting, which have their special beauty, but are unable to
seize the most inward and subtle of the charms the painting possessed.
Since the latest developments of photography and the copying processes
dependent on it, the case has been altered. If you would convince
yourself of the almost marvellous perfection with which oil-paintings
are transferred to paper nowadays, so that every stroke of the brush,
however fine, every movement of the painter’s hand, every paste,
every unevenness in the colour plane, every effect of the canvas,
ground-coating, and varnish, is reproduced in a life-like way, and you
have actually before your eyes the whole personal work of the artist,
then look at the handsome folio entitled: _L’œuvre de E. Carrière,
Texte de Gustave Geffroy_, that has been published in Paris by H.
Piazza et Cie., and contains the copy of 150 paintings and sketches
by Carrière, 75 of which have been printed on Bristol paper, and
75 incorporated in the text. They lack colour, I admit. Only when
photography renders this too, will the last word of genuineness in
copying be pronounced. Meanwhile, we must be contented that we find
again in the photograph the tonality of the colours and the effects
of light and shade in the original relatively graded in respect
of each other. With Carrière, however, the absence of colour is
really of little importance, for he painted chiefly from a grey and
brown palette, which can be very accurately reproduced by means of
photography.
A hundred and fifty Carrières! Who could pride himself on possessing
such a treasure? One would have to be an American multi-millionaire
to enjoy such an æsthetic satisfaction as that. Now it is within
the reach of every well-to-do individual. The 150 reproductions
comprise about the whole of the great artist’s life-work up to now.
They disclose to every beholder, who is of good faith and possesses a
sensibility for the beauties of painting, the key to the law of art
which Carrière laid down for himself. They render it possible to follow
the course of his development, which, at the beginning, is hesitating,
then becomes decided and weighty, and carries the artist from the
school to mastership, from tradition to uncompromising individuality.
Eugène Carrière was born on 17th January 1849, in the village of
Gournay (Seine-et-Marne). His father was a Fleming from the north of
France; his mother an Alsatian. His appearance corresponds to this
probably pure Germanic origin. He is a big, broad man with strong
bones and portly stoutness; white-skinned, blue-eyed, and fair-haired;
slow of speech, thoughtful and reserved in his movements; dreamy when
listening, unintrusive when silent, raising his voice little when
saying modest, sensible words about things which he understands. He
was still a child when his parents settled in the mother’s home. He
grew up in Strassburg, and was intended for an artisan. When he was
eighteen he went to St Quentin, and had an opportunity of seeing the La
Tours in the museum there. His talent was kindled by this unsurpassed,
perhaps unequalled master. The beautiful crayon faces of La Tour
taught him to feel the velvety splendour of youthful human skin, and
meditate on the mystery of the artistic creation of plastic effects
through merely intensifying or subduing the play of light. He began to
draw and paint eagerly, and aroused sufficient belief in his vocation
to be sent to Paris to the Academy of Art. What it offered him was
practically nothing. Drawing copies of plaster models chilled him;
even the professional life-model in the prescribed studied attitudes
seemed to him futile and absurd. What meaning for him had this comedy
of gladiatorial positions, ostentatious muscular development, clownish
distortions expressive of no natural feeling or rational purpose, in
which no human being would, if left to himself, indulge, and which,
often enough, the body can assume and retain only by the artificial
help of rests and props? What he longed for was life, warm life, such
as pulsates in men of strong feelings, and is expressed by them in a
straightforward, convincing way by looks and gestures.
The depression produced in him in the pupil-rooms in the _École des
Beaux Arts_ made him doubt himself. Luckily for him, amidst his general
ill-luck, this spiritual crisis of his coincided with the great
crisis of his country. The war broke out, and Carrière hastened as a
volunteer to the front. He did his duty bravely in several battles
and engagements, was taken prisoner at Sedan, and, as such, reached
Dresden. The months of his imprisonment proved decidedly fruitful to
him, for he spent his days in the picture gallery, and was shown by
the Rubens pictures there, the ways which, up to that time, he had not
clearly seen.
After the war was over, he resumed his orthodox studies at the
Academy, and became a pupil of Cabanel. It exhibits a good testimony
of the power of resistance in his nature that this most inaccurate
portrait-painter of the Empire could not influence him, although
he had for five years his misleading example before his eyes. In
1876 Carrière competed for the _prix de Rome_. He did not get it.
That might have been predicted to him; the prize is the reward of
the meritorious industry of the pupil, which flatters the teacher’s
_amour propre_. Carrière had then, however, emancipated himself from
tutelage as an artist. He felt nowise humiliated or cast down by the
failure of his purpose. With brave heart he drew from the occurrence
the only true moral, viz., that not the approval of teachers, _i.e._,
of those who have succeeded, but the satisfaction of his artistic
conscience must henceforward be the goal of his efforts. He renounced
official recognition, and that was wise, for it preserved him from the
pain of disillusion. From 1877 he exhibited annually in the _Salon_,
but it was not before 1884 that the prize judges awarded him an
“honourable mention,” which can hardly, however, be called a reward.
A year afterwards, he received the medal of the third class, which
is “the last kindness,” but at the same time the Baschkirtsew prize
of 500 francs, which is awarded, not by the prize-committee, but by
the Society of Artists by universal suffrage. In 1887 the Jury rose
to the medal of the second class, and, at the Universal Exhibition
of 1889, to an insignificant silver medal. With this the series of
distinctions vouchsafed to him by the masters of his guild closes.
His later honours—the ribbon and rosette of the Legion of Honour,
the room reserved for his works at the Universal Exhibition of 1900,
the purchase of his “Maternal Love” for the Luxembourg Museum, the
commission to paint twelve bays in the Banqueting Hall of the Paris
Hotel de Ville—were forced for him from the public authorities by
independent opinion. They were the scanty revenue of fame, which the
lonely man found when he ceased to seek it. It is characteristic of
Carrière that of all the nonsense of medals and decorations there is
not a word to be found in the monumental work dedicated to him. They
were formerly regarded in France as the great events in the life of
an artist. Carrière’s proud independence does not admit that they
have any meaning at all, or deserve the most casual mention. The book
enumerates all his works, even rough drawings, unfinished sketches,
attempts at lithography. These are the deeds and events of his life.
There is no room in the book for official certificates of industry
and his elevation in the _Tchin_.[3] Moreover, Carrière was one of
the co-founders of the Salon of the Champ de Mars in 1890, which on
principle repudiated the system of rewarding meritorious youths by
testing and directing superior officers, and rebelled against turning
artists into an hierarchy by means of conventional marks of rank.
Carrière has formed a manner of his own, which he discovered by
himself, and asserted it victoriously despite of all kinds of
opposition. Every layman sees at the first glance that his pictures
are full of grey vapour. A sometimes transparent, at other times thick
mist envelops his figures, and makes their different parts stand out
with unequal distinctness. “A whim,” exclaims superficiality; “a
dodge to astonish,” grumbles the _blasé_ man-of-the-world, who thinks
himself cunning. It is neither the one nor the other. The origin of
the curious exhalation hovering about his figures is to be sought in
his own need for representing the æther in which all planetary life is
displayed. His sense of truth took umbrage at the painting in vogue,
even that of the masters, which sets beings and objects in space,
without giving any suggestion that it is not empty, but filled with
a gas possessing optical and kinetic qualities. It is all very well
trying, by established toning of the local colours, and blurring of
the contour lines, to make the fact perceptible that the figures are
surrounded by air; but these customary means of expression failed to
satisfy Carrière, and he is not the only one they left dissatisfied.
A whole generation of painters, about 1870, had the annoying feeling
that air did not get its rights in art, and made obstinate efforts to
find a formula for announcing the presence of air with an emphasis
that could not be neglected. Sisley, Monet, Pissarro, thought to solve
the problem by refraction and iridescent radiation which would render
apparent in the painting the visible motion of the air, its vibration
under definite relations of illumination and heat. The object is only
very imperfectly attained. The attempt is justified, and deserves
respect. Carrière sets about the matter differently, in a more direct
and _naïve_ way. The decomposition of white light into its spectrum,
as the dotters and stipplers practise it, proves, I admit, that the
rays of light move in a material medium, as they would otherwise have
no reason for resolving themselves into their component parts; but,
in order to infer air from the prismatic colours, a man must be a
physicist, and it requires a labour of thought that has nothing in
common with an immediate impression of the senses, such as must, first
and foremost, proceed from an optical work of art. Carrière, then,
found even the impressionist rule too learned. He preferred simply to
exaggerate, and, as it were, to make palpable, the properties of air,
which is neither absolutely colourless nor absolutely transparent. Thus
arose the thin grey air in which his figures are bathed, ranging from
the most delicate mist to the thickest smoke, but always transparent.
Directly he found his method or manner, it became alive in his hands.
In that his peculiarity consists, and in that he shows himself a great
artist by the grace of God. Smoke is to him a medium of expression
of amazing range. He employs it almost as the engraver on copper of
mezzotint does the “burr.” It is a layer of veils which he diminishes
or increases as the effect proposed demands. Here he withdraws the
covering. There he suffers it partly or entirely to remain, and by
such means obtains, by the most natural and, apparently, the least
troublesome way, a recession of the non-essential, an amazing relief
of the essential, a clearness in the expression of his thought, such
as not one of his contemporary painters possesses. At the first
glance at a picture of Carrière, one is very forcibly directed to
what was important to the painter. One positively cannot wander into
what is unimportant, or be diverted from the main thing. It sounds
paradoxical, but is literally true: Carrière understood how to make
vapour the medium of the highest clearness, to make mystery the gate of
an unreserved revelation. That, I admit, his imitators cannot discern
in him. It is easy to daub smoke in a picture, but that is not all.
Vapour must not be an excuse for bungling draughtsmanship; it must not
mercifully cover defects in form. In order not to favour any fraud, it
makes a masterly accuracy in modelling a primary condition. To permit
oneself such noble economies and condensations one must be as accurate
a draughtsman as Carrière. The veiling of the greater part is only,
then, admissible, when the lesser left unveiled is perfect.
The subject of Carrière’s portrayal is always life of deep
feeling—self-forgetting maternal love, childhood’s gracious innocence,
pathetic tenderness of father, brothers, or sisters. He has never
worked from the peddling model who can be hired at five francs an hour,
and who poses only with the body, not the soul. His model is his own
family, with the whole range of idiosyncrasies which their existence by
night and day comprises. What the tender husband and father observed
with delighted eyes at all hours, that the painter has uniquely fixed
on canvas: the mother resting in bed with her baby at her breast; that
sweet, shapeless little lump of human flesh which is a wee boy that
the elder sister fondles; the children eating or being fed at table;
the washing and dressing of the little one, which the mother and elder
sister carry out as a pleasant game with a doll; the mother’s anxiety
as she cradles the fever-stricken child in her arms, and tries to quiet
it; dressing the eldest girl for her confirmation—a prelude to that
affecting moment when the mother, with trembling hands and streaming
tears, will place the bridal wreath on her head; the pride of the
parents when marshalling all their five children in a row; the gloomy
seriousness of the tiny school-girl puzzling at the work-table over her
first task. Carrière, when painting his family life, painted the life
of mankind. His large, epic style of feeling preserved him from falling
into _genre_. He remained monumental even when painting details.
He is as little sentimental as Goethe in “Hermann und Dorothea”;
nevertheless, tears rise when we gaze on his pictures. The incident
disappears, and we stand before the Eternal, which it comprises; before
Love, which keeps the world together.
The same feature is distinguishable also in his portraits; they ennoble
the model by spiritualising it. He gives only just enough of the
anatomy to reveal the soul. And when he sets himself greater and more
highly differentiated tasks (“The Gallery of the Belleville Theatre,”
the “Holy Women at the Foot of the Cross”), he accomplishes them by
bringing forth the feelings and thoughts which have brought together
the persons concerned, and determine their bearings and movements.
What individual works scattered in exhibitions and museums have not
proved to every one is made indisputably clear by the 150 reproductions
in the Piazza book, viz., that Carrière is one of the noblest,
chastest, most deeply-feeling artists of to-day, who has created for
himself a peculiar technique, particularly dangerous for imitators, but
natural to himself, and, therefore, in his hand, justified.
SOME OF CARRIÈRE’S PICTURES
“The Belleville Theatre.”—The light, mystic vapour which fills and
exhales through Carrière’s pictures, like delicate bluish-white clouds
of incense, does not, as a rule, exert a disturbing influence. In
this picture, quite one of his most important ones, his brush seems
to have betrayed him. He has grown more material than is usual with
him. The “Belleville Theatre” is so densely enveloped in smoke that
hardly anything can be distinguished amidst the clouds. Yet what
splendid discoveries are to be made if you make a violent effort to
penetrate the darkness, into which a venture may only be made with
a diver’s helmet and an air-pipe! We see—or, rather, we surmise—the
third and a part of the fourth gallery of the People’s Theatre. The
suburban audience that fills these rows, gives itself unrestrainedly
up to the magic of the spectacle. It lives not its own life, but that
of the heroes in the piece. To this audience Hecuba is everything. The
wide-opened eyes lost in reverie, the cheeks sunk sorrowfully in their
hands, the shoulders contracted by fear, the bodies almost helplessly
leaning on one another, betray the intensity with which these poor
people have fled out of themselves into illusion. What is truth, what
is deception, if a poetical word, and that, too, most likely the word
of a wretched melodrama, can snatch away small trades-people and
artisans—probably sore oppressed by the needs of existence and more
than full of their own troubles—so far from all their griefs that
they forget their misery and think they are vividly experiencing a
new lot? That would be the Buddha philosophy of this amazing picture
if we could but distinguish all it contains. Carrière has painted the
profound doctrine of Maia and Nirvana. It is a pity he has covered it
with so thick a veil that it remains impenetrable even to the eyes of
the initiated.
“Christ on the Cross” will give to those capable of feeling the
impression of a great, artistic experience. The mystical tragedy,
from which a world-religion draws its emotion, is presented with the
simplicity and suppressed pain with which a father reports to his son
the tragic death of the mother. All subsidiary work that might prove
distracting is avoided. No thieves, no Captain Longinus, no Roman
legionaries, no fanatical spectators; not one of the aids in men or
things with which the classics of painting are wont to complicate
the event of Calvary, with the object of making it more impressive.
Nothing save the life-sized figure of the Saviour, who has ended His
sufferings, and Mary, who leans against the Cross so as not to break
down altogether. On the face of the corpse the peace of consummation
has sunk; unutterable grief wastes that of the Mother. The form floats
in a soft, unearthly light; on the latter expressive shadows strive.
The repose of the dead Christ, which would appear painless and almost
cheerful were it not that a slight trait of suffering was fixed around
the mouth, dawns like a consolation over the dark despair which fills
the soul of the living mother. If she suffers humanly, as a mother,
so that she would fain die of woe, still redemption and exaltation
also arise for her from the act of salvation. If one has ever heard
Palestrina’s “Stabat Mater,” it re-echoes in his soul at the sight
of Carrière’s picture. It has issued from the same deep emotion
as the tear-soaked _terzine_ of Jacopone da Todi and Palestrina’s
sobbing hymn. Carrière abandons himself to his feelings with the same
earnestness as the Franciscan friar and the choirmaster of St Peter’s.
It is hard for me to admit that he shares their pious belief. I assume
that the Mother’s grief has, in the main, inspired him. This strong
feeling has, doubtless, made him susceptible of the sacredness of the
symbolism in the death on the Cross; through the human he will have
raised himself to an inkling of the superhuman. Let us not forget
that Carrière is the painter of that “Motherhood,” the gem of the
Luxembourg Museum, which depicts a young mother with a child on her lap
and another beside her, revelling in the sight of her little ones—her
treasures—with adorable tenderness in look and mien, in the pose of
her body and the movement of her arms. Carrière has a wonderfully
deep feeling for maternal love, in joy as in sorrow. Unconsciously
and involuntarily, he has conceived his subject not with the spirit
of a believing Christian, but with the broken heart of Mary. He might
confidently have called his “Christ on the Cross,” too, “Maternity,”
like his masterpiece in the Luxembourg; the one is a companion-picture
of the other; the tragedy of maternal love, according to its idyl.[4]
There were cases in which the employment of Carrière’s plan of the
delicate grey veil of enveloping mist was not successful. I have,
for instance, been obliged to make reservations in respect of his
“Theatre in Belleville.” In the “Christ on the Cross” it is organically
developed from the subject. The veil of mist shrouds the incident in
the weird twilight which is the prescribed atmosphere of miracle and
the mysteries of faith. Beyond the figures in the foreground of the
Crucified and the Blessed Virgin we divine, in the semi-dark distance,
a great city, at the back of which, on the horizon, a twinkling white
light, like the still uncertain brightness of a young dawning day,
arises. Our powers of imagination may fill with life the whole of this
profound space wherein dawn is at odds with night—with the life of a
whole townsfolk enjoying their revenge or weeping for woe, oppressed
with foreboding or hopefully confident.
Here is symbolism in that high sense in which every true work of
art is symbolic. The picture is at the same time intellectual and
transcendental; the rationalistic beholder, who neither seeks nor
wishes to find a mystery, has before him the humanly affecting drama
of the mother who bewails her son who has died unmistakably in a
noble task. He sees sights he can understand—the peace of death and a
mother’s deepest pain—presented with unsurpassable truth. He enjoys
the charm of perfect form, marvellous warmth of colour, produced with
the simple means of _gouache_ toning and a very faint heightening by
touches of red, and an extremely interesting distribution of soft
light glimmering from the dark background. The mystically minded
beholder sees all this, and he sees, besides, the divine element in the
Crucifixion and the sorrow-stricken Mother, the terribly threatening
subversion of the natural order in the darkness brooding over the city
and fields, and the promise in the light arising in the distance.
What the rationalist sees in the work of art is sufficient to arouse
his feeling and admiration. The mystic’s wonder and feeling will be
powerfully strengthened by religious emotion.
“Portrait of my Wife.”—He who is guilty of the error of confounding
gaudiness with coloration might find a guide in this work. A few bright
tones in the spiritualised, almost transparent face; a fur collar of a
warm, rich brown; a gay, red flower in the girdle, comprise all that
Carrière employs as colour media, in order to conjure up a harmony of
lulling melody and, at the same time, of all but hypnotising intensity.
That is precisely the whole mystery; it is not a question of the noise,
but of the harmony. Three colour values, chosen with exquisite taste,
placed on the right spot in the floating white and pearl-grey cloud
which constitutes Carrière’s manner, and the impression of the colour
mystery is produced with greater success and depth than by a palette
on which all the seven colours of the rainbow are keeping a witch’s
festival.
“The Kiss before Going to Sleep.”—A painting of marvellous range of
feeling. A mother with her daughters, from the grown-up one to the
suckling infant at her breast. The big girl bends over her mother’s
shoulder, as the latter is sitting, and takes her good-night kiss
from the lips of the head turned to her. The baby has fallen asleep
whilst feeding at the maternal bosom. The third, half-grown-up, has
likewise been overcome by sleep, as she leans helplessly, with her
whole weight, on her mother. The last twines her fondling fingers in
her mother’s hand outstretched to her. The mother is the central point
of the picture. From her gushes the force that penetrates, encompasses,
attracts, and holds together the rest of the figures. Love it is which
collects these beings and unites them in a marvellous circle. Thus they
become a symbol of the force that has built up the universe itself, and
keeps it in its eternal order. And this self-same love, which knits
these hands in each other, bends these bodies to each other, brings
these lips together, which is visibly the motive and attractive force,
in all these simple but incomparably eloquent lines of movement, has
also guided the magic brush capable of expressing so great a theme.
He who at the sight of this lofty work does not feel all the hardness
in him melting in joy stands outside humanity. Moreover, there is not
a trace of declamation, or purpose, or _tremolo_ in its execution; no
prettily pietistic rhetoric. Not a single adjective, but only neuter
substantives, as in Roman inscriptions. That is precisely the receipt,
which holds good in all times and in all places, for monumental works:
eternal feelings expressed in eternal forms.
“The Engaged Couple,” like “Maternity,” like his portraits of a
married couple, a young maiden, etc., etc., are unapproachable works.
His grasp of the essential in phenomena, his economy of form, are
of supreme craftsmanship. It is in this direction, I think, that
the future development of painting lies. It will soon be over with
mere transcription of nature, however clever; certainly, on the not
very distant day when colour photography will be handed over from
the experimental laboratory of the physicist, to professional use.
Then the individual standpoints of observation will alone hold good.
People will want views, not as the mechanically reproducing, dead
object-glass, but as the inspired eye of the artist sees them. Pictures
will have to be a selection, an interpretation, an emotional excavation
of the optic phenomenon; every picture an anthology of vision; and
the personality of the artist revealing himself in it, will be the
fascination of his work, its value and its beauty. Let no one say:
“These are trivialities. It has always been so since plastic art
existed.” The plastic artist was hitherto always in the first place
a depictor. His soul revealed itself only discreetly in his works.
Carrière goes far beyond what he sees: he paints souls; he paints
feelings. In his representation the inexpressible becomes an incident.
A fugitive movement, a pose, a line of head, neck, shoulders, or hand
in which unconsciousness is manifested, when self-control is relaxed
for a moment; these treacherous means of expressing mood, which the
will is not always able to influence—these are the elements with which
he works. He discloses the impulses, up to their most delicate moods,
which are the causes of movements and deportment. To such a spiritual
art must painting be developed. And this is why I call Carrière’s
pictures the art of the future.
X
PUVIS DE CHAVANNES
Puvis de Chavannes is dead, and his influence is dying; his School is
desolate, and I see now hardly any stragglers worrying themselves to
paint with his palette of pale moonlight. So it is no longer necessary
to attack him. It is enough to explain his spiritual transformation and
his successes.
When he attained the maturity of his powers, that Naturalism was the
trump-card in painting, of which Bastian Lepage’s abominable “Reaper,”
whose brutalised grimace grins at the visitor to the Luxembourg Museum,
was admired as the highest achievement. The young critic had eyes only
for this art. The multitude dared not question the fulsome praise
squandered on the works of the naturalists; but their inner voice was
not mute. They had qualms of conscience about their culpable cowardice,
and were quite well aware that naturalism, which was lauded to them
as Progress and the Future, was in reality the negation of all art.
Then Puvis de Chavannes stepped forward with his big wall-paintings,
which put symbolism, sacred legend, and history on the stage, on a
literary background, and reunited them to tradition, which had been
disowned or scoffed at by naturalism, out of barbaric ignorance or
vulgar arrogance. The multitude, whose inward feelings partisan
criticism outraged, turned forthwith to the painter who seemed to them
a deliverer and an avenger. He was a living protest against the art
of the vulgar, the hideous, and the commonplace; against the art of
the mechanically dull copying of a soulless reality. He took pains to
serve beauty. He showed unmistakably the object of his spiritualising
his figures and actions. Before his pictures one could once more
dream. After prose, after vulgar, slangy prose, it was verse. People
did not even ask if the verses were good; people were satisfied with
mediocre verses, provided they were verses. To Puvis de Chavannes his
fundamental, academic instincts had given the direction; but whilst
he followed his bent, he became, without intending it, and without
previously knowing it, the file-leader of the right-about turn, which
began in “the ’eighties” and has now long ended.
In a period of idealism he would have been one of the many. People
would not have noticed him or would have found in him much to take
exception to: the banality of his symbols, the impersonality,
smoothness, and polish of his draughtsmanship, the intentional
incoherence of his compositions. During the predominance of naturalism,
his academic banality itself seemed a courageous act, and seekers
after the ideal even accounted his most obvious faults and weaknesses
as excellencies in him.
He got his faded, spectral colours by imitating the fresco painters
of the Quattrocentro. His ideal of picturesque beauty united in
inseparable association the stateliness of the old monumental
wall-paintings with their fadedness; and when he wished to paint in
their style and produce their æsthetic effects, he at once gave his
pictures the faint coloration which had never been intended by the
Quattrocentists, but which their works have suffered through the
devastating force of five centuries. The obliterated, remote, ghostly
qualities of this faded type of painting came to meet a morbid mood
of the time. This mystic coloration harmonised with the prevalent
mysticism. The decadents were thankful to him for his moon-stricken
colouring; those athirst for beauty for his conversion to classical
tradition; and so he became a great man through the sins of the
naturalists and their critical heralds.
Puvis was the first academical and recognised master in France who
began to paint the morbid. His whim is chalk-wash. He covers, on
principle, his pictures with a white, semi-transparent broth that
extinguishes all the colours. His eye detests colour. His glance has
a sort of chloridising effect; it takes the colour out of everything
it ranges over. With him, however, morbidity is natural and not
an affectation. He has that horror of all that is loud, full, and
impressive, which marks the nervous man, whom every rough touch
pains. It is well with him only when nature whispers, when her looks
are veiled in a fine mist, when all life in her is motionless. In his
soul reigns a melancholy absence of sound, and he likes to carry this
into the outer world also. Moreover, the multiplicity of living forms
confuses and repels him; it is too full of motion and gaudiness. He
simplifies, therefore, all lines which thus lose their distinctive
individuality. He retains only what is typical of the phenomenon; he
infuses his style into all that his brush and pencil touch, and this
cold stylisation is then called by people his “idealism.”
Has Puvis laid himself open to the reproach that all his figures are
awkwardly typical because he cannot draw? We might almost think so.
It is only as a reply to such a reproach that we can understand his
exhibiting in 1896 several hundred drawings, preliminary studies
for all his chief works. After a minute inspection of these smaller
and greater sheets of sketches scarcely indicated or industriously
executed, of figures scarcely outlined or carefully shaded in
lead-pencil, Indian ink, red and other coloured chalks, we are bound
to feel every respect for his industry and conscientiousness. For
the originality of his talent, too? That to me is questionable. If
I gaze on the studies of Leonardo and Albrecht Dürer, I am, in a
very short time, over-mastered by an inexpressible emotion. A holy
of holies is revealed: the most secret feelings of an artist’s soul
which would fain become conscious of itself whilst seeking to give
shape to the emotion that is urging it. You can see the struggle with
the resistance of the material, the mustering of all his forces, in
the majority of cases the artist’s victory, ofttimes his despairing
confession of impotence. A feature of the phenomenon—a fugitive yet
expressive movement has made its impression on the artist. He hastens
to fix his conception. At first in a few hasty strokes, which are then
strengthened, deepened, emphasised, and developed. Five times, ten
times, till the artist desists disheartened, or till the vision is
overcome and fixed by a spell in its whole force and verity, in its
distinctive character that is never to be repeated. In Puvis I observed
with astonishment the contrary process. The first sketch has always
the greatest individuality, every later state of the figure shows
it less differentiated, and more reduced to an average type lacking
expression. He never ascends, he goes down. The artist’s emotion in
face of the phenomenon—the impulse to produce in the rapture of an
intuition is never traceable in him. None of the sheets is the arena
of that awful fight waged by talent against the hostile demon of the
material, which reminds me of the night-long struggle of Jacob with the
spectre at the ford Jabbok. The starting-point of the work is correct,
ice-cold _métier_. It progresses to simplifications that are just so
many evasions of difficulties, and it finally arrives at insignificant
puppets. “That was intentional,” cry the painter’s eulogists. So much
the worse if it was intentional. But was it really intentional? That is
the question. Often enough, as an afterthought, a person imagines he is
exercising volition, whilst, as a matter of fact, he is constrained.
For him who has learnt to see in all works documents bearing on their
creator’s psychology, the drawings of Puvis are proof positive that
this highly famous man never glanced at the world with an artist’s eye,
but that he was originally a cold, academical technician, who, later
on, by pure reason and without attaining the slightest fervour, has
subtilised a peculiarity: the imitation of faded frescoes in colour,
archaic indifferentiation in drawing, abstract literary symbolism in
his subjects.
In fact, what is unreal and dream-like about his vision is not only
determinative in regard to his archaically simple, almost poor drawing
and his pallid colour, but also the choice of his subject. He likes
best to portray allegories, in which the figures are reduced to the
_rôle_ of symbols. When he cannot be allegorical, in his famous
wall-paintings at the Pantheon, for instance, which tell the legend
of St Géneviève, he satisfies his craving for spectre painting by
spiritualising the given historical figures into fleshless, bloodless
denizens of the ballad of the land of Thule. In individual and very
rare instances, he finds a material organically suitable for his
moon-struck style of painting. In such cases, of course, he strives
after extraordinary effects; for instance, with his “Poor Fisherman”
in the Luxembourg Museum. This dreadfully poor, emaciated man—more
a shadow than a human being—who, sorrowfully but resigned, stands
in his old patched boat, drops his wretched net into the sluggish,
greyish-yellow water, and is surrounded and, as it were, fixed by the
dead lines of a flat melancholy landscape, breathes a disconsolateness
and abandonment that, at the sight of him, “humanity’s whole sorrow”
seizes the beholder.
Once again, in his last period, Puvis lighted on one of those rare
subjects which not only bear, but demand his peculiar methods of
execution, and out of this lucky encounter came forth a masterpiece,
viz., the fresco which concludes his Géneviève cycle.
St Géneviève has stepped out of her cell on to the balcony of her
convent and lets her glance roam over Paris. At her feet lies the
slumbering city; in the foreground surge the red-tiled roofs, between
which soar a few tree-tops in the luxuriant verdure of midsummer; in
the distance stretch the soft hill lines of a cheerful landscape, the
green of whose meadows is interrupted, here and there, by the white
mass of a convent or abbey. Slender lilies and _gladioli_ bloom in
noble vessels on the balcony. In the bare cell, the door of which is
wide open behind the saint, the smoking flame of a lamp of antique
pattern smoulders. At the summit, in a deep blue sky, hangs the full
moon, which softly illumines city and landscape, and casts an eerie
gleam on the curled leafage of the tree-tops. Immersed and bathed
in its soft radiance, the saint stands there, unearthly with her
thin, ascetic countenance and her white nun’s habit, which from her
headcloth to the trailing hem of her garment flows down in unbroken,
perpendicular lines, and seems to lift up her soul in a quiet, ecstatic
prayer for the slumbering town, whose peaceful prosperity is a work
of her solicitous love. Here Puvis’s peculiar method triumphs in
every feature. Here his temperament needed only to give itself its
natural scope to attain the highest artistic result. What elsewhere
is intolerable affectation becomes here the honest revelation of a
mood. The subdued harmony of violet and blue in different gradations
of intensity that blend softly into one another is legitimate in the
picture of a summer night, which takes its sole spectral light from
the moon and an oil-lamp. The paleness of the flesh is understandable
in the aging nun who mortifies herself by prayer, vigils, and fasting.
The simplicity of the drawing, which is reduced to a few straight and
slightly though expressively curved lines, finds its defence in the
dusk of the semi-transparent night which suppresses all individualities
of forms; and leaves only for us general, essential features, and
these rather surmised than clearly seen. Thus here a special subject
finds its special and fully adequate means of expression, and the work
becomes a model of what is termed style in the highest sense.
A rejuvenation seemed to come over Puvis when he seized once more
on the Géneviève theme which had occupied him from the days of his
youth. This theme was to him what the theme of Faust was to Goethe:
while the octogenarian was engrossed in it, something of the flame
that glowed in the young man of twenty fired him, and the last cry of
_Una pænitentium_[5] is still an after-thrill of Gretchen’s passion.
Puvis, too, appears to have thought or felt “_Ihr naht euch wieder,
schwankende Gestalten!_” when he set about painting this concluding
picture of the Géneviève cycle; and for the last strophe of his ballad,
which dies away so sadly, he found again some of the power and unction
which secures to its predecessors their glorious place in the century’s
Art.
If the brazen foreheads of the babblers who have the chief say in the
art criticism of the time were at all capable of a decent blush, they
would turn red with shame at his series of frescoes in the Pantheon.
People had the audacity to claim Puvis for some “modernity” or other,
in which certain moods of our time were said to be incorporated.
The only time when one can wholly surrender oneself to him, he is
absolutely of no time. What, in that instance, fascinates in him is
nothing relating to the present, and still less to the future, but the
past and the remote past, the atavistic. His life’s great work is a
legend of a saint, which he has treated after the manner of a legend
with the feelings of a primitive who, in the manner natural to him—the
manner of about the fourteenth century—tells a story that is to him
a living verity, in which he believes, as those souls believe it for
whose edification he presents it, and which moves and touches him as
it does the beholders who will fold their hands devoutly before his
work. Puvis cannot reckon on such a reception from his contemporaries,
for whom he designs his creation. To us the legend is strange; it is
a bit of learned literature which we look at critically, and in which
we cannot be expected to plunge believingly. If Puvis, nevertheless,
overcomes our opposition, and can suggest to us for moments the
child-like faith and all the emotions of dead and gone times that are
connected with that faith, he has achieved something more difficult
than the primitives, for whom the spirit of their time was no opponent,
but a confederate.
Blessed are the ignorant. Their lack of suspicion secures them,
whenever they glance at the world, the enthusiasm of discovery
and invention, and every phenomenon delights them as something
unprecedented. During the lifetime of Puvis de Chavannes his peculiar
style was particularly extolled by his eulogists. They exhibited him
as a God-sent foundling; as a Moses of painting, without ancestors,
himself an ancestor; as a great solitary wandering apart from the
multitude through the history of contemporary art. Such phrases can be
uttered only by one who rejoices in the most refreshing ignorance of
the historical continuity of things. Puvis is of a family. The expert
can name his forefathers and relations; he finds their lineaments
repeated—often coarsened and disfigured—in him.
Puvis, this great, original genius of his admirers, is an impoverished
descendant of Cornelius. He represents the worst aberration in art
that this century has seen, viz., thought-painting. Nowadays it is
no longer necessary to prove that abstraction is the negation and
abrogation of plastic art. This maxim, fortunately, has become an
æsthetic commonplace. Painting has to do only with sensuous phenomena;
abstraction distils from the sensuous one quality, which, since it is
common to many phenomena, is reminiscent of many phenomena, yet is
itself not phenomenon. He who feels the impulse to paint not views but
thoughts, proves that in his innermost soul he is not a painter, but a
rhetorician, and that he has deceived himself marvellously as to the
method of expression natural and organic to him. Cornelius’s painting
presented thoughts, religious, philosophical, and historical dogmas, in
a picture-language considerably less clearly than might have been done
in well-ordered words. It pleased all those whose soul was seven times
sealed against understanding what really constitutes painting. As long
as the Cornelius tendency was dominant in Germany, that country was
depressingly behind in the art life of the period. As soon as Cornelius
and his school were overthrown, a sound development of German painting
began. And now, at the close of the nineteenth century in France,
in the France which has produced, in landscape, Corot, Rousseau,
Diaz, Harpignies: in figure-painting, Millet, Courbet, Bonnat, Roll:
from which has come the return to nature and the renaissance of art,
the allegorical thought-painting of a Puvis has been praised as the
greatest advance, as the latest step in development! The snake biting
its own tail still remains the truest symbol of human activity that the
self-knowledge of the race has as yet discovered.
And how far, in his special direction, Puvis lags behind his obsolete
predecessors! A Cornelius, Kaulbach, and Stilke, displayed, after
all, in the invention of their symbols, a rich power of imagination
which might have been worthy of better things. Their two-legged
abstractions were so honestly drawn that they deceived with regard to
their phantom-like nature, and could give themselves out to be real
creatures of flesh and blood. Puvis’s invention, on the other hand,
is so poor that it whines pitifully for alms. The representations
which kindle his imagination seem derived solely from an illustrated
handbook of mythology for girls’ schools. For an example of this, one
has only to look at the wall-paintings for the Boston Library, which
are among the most important work that Puvis has done, at least so
far as their range and claims are concerned. The first represents
the inspiring Muses “greeting with acclamations light carrying the
Genius.” From a schematic landscape with sickly pale meadows, a sea of
ultramarine blue, and spanned by a sky the colour of autumn foliage,
nine female figures are flying to meet a delightfully insignificant
naked youth striding on clouds of wadding. This youth holds in each
hand a powerfully brilliant electrical lamp, evidently the Teslasch
alternating current light, as wires are nowhere visible. The least
fault of this picture is that the Muses are not aspiring in voluntary,
independent flight, but hang motionless in the air in a passive
attitude, like Giotto’s angels and saints, who have not yet learnt
to fly. Its mortal sin is that it wishes to represent in painting a
vulgar, rhetorical arrangement composed of a number of abstractions.
Beside this allegory, Puvis opens five windows on his world of dreams.
Naked shepherds observe, in a southern night, the course of the stars,
and are themselves observed by a young woman who is creeping out of a
lowly leafy hut. A man in a sort of Roman dress looks thoughtfully at
some bee-hives, whilst peasants in the distance are busy working in the
fields. A greybeard is sitting by the sea, from which a steep cliff
emerges. On its summit a man is chained almost in the attitude of the
Crucified. The shadow of an approaching vulture falls on him. Maidens
emerging from the sea hover round him with disconsolate gestures. We
must necessarily recognise Prometheus and the Oceanides in the scene.
Another old man, who is blind, receives laurel branches from two young
beauties. A haughty dame stretches her arm with magic gestures over a
mysterious abyss that has engulfed mighty marble buildings, pillars,
and woodwork. Behind the woman stands a youth with a torch and book
in his hand. I have described in brief what one actually sees. Puvis
means the star-gazers for Chaldæan shepherds; the Roman for Vergil;
the greybeard in front of the Prometheus-rocks for Æschylus; the blind
man for Homer receiving the laurels from the hands of the Iliad and
Odyssey personified; the enchantress for history conjuring up the past.
We are to read still more into it. The Chaldæans signify astronomy;
Vergil bucolic poetry, Æschylus dramatic, Homer epic; the conjurer up
of the dead and ruined, Clio. Thus we have before us five polished
planes of the prism of man’s spiritual activity, five domains of the
Muses—a fitting decoration for a library. These abstractions are
painted in an abstract style. The human beings are schematic drawings
as if taken from statues for illustrating an academic canon. They live
psychically only through their artificial gestures—not through their
mask—visages without mien of glance. The landscapes are geometrical
combinations of rocks which a Cyclopean stone-mason has hewn in ancient
style; of mountains whose ridge stretches in architectural lines; of
evenly-coloured masses of deep-blue sea, pale-green sky, and sap-green
grass country. The land is called Utopia, and is inhabited by Outis:
in English, Nowhere and Nobody. The indigo, emerald, and turquoise
tone is pleasant to the eye, especially as Puvis has here, contrary
to his murderous habit, not massacred the living colours. But nothing
except the harmony of colours appeals to me in these pictures. It is
not painting: it is writing. It does not presuppose in me any feeling
for art, but only a decent, classical education. It taps on my school
satchel. Before these five Puvis de Chavannes pictures, I think of a
highly-educated Japanese, learned in all the wisdom of his country,
with the most delicate feelings for line and harmony of colours; an
appreciator of Hokusai and the other great masters of Japan: he will
receive no impression at all from Puvis’s works; he will look upon the
figures as phantoms, the scenes as so much childishness; he will not
have an inkling what these forms, remotely resembling human beings,
are doing, or what they mean. For he is not acquainted with the Greek
and Latin classics, and without this hypothesis the works of Puvis are
dead symbols, incomprehensible to any one unprovided with the special
key, and without the natural constraining power of plain human truth
and beauty. The provoking over-estimation of his work by corybantic
critics justified every severity against Puvis de Chavannes in his
lifetime. Now his appreciation no longer requires polemical pricks,
and we can say that his Géneviève cycle secures him a permanent place
in the history of art; that his great allegorical frescoes are cold,
dead, sprawling, pretentious subtleties; and that neither his drawing
nor his colour sanctify him as a master and model. His importance
consists in this, _i.e._, that in his time the longing for beauty took
him as a cloak for a passionate confession. The Puvis cult was, in the
main, a reaction against Realism. By the exaggeration with which he
was honoured may be measured the greatness of the disgust which his
contemporaries felt for naturalistic art.
XI
BRIGHT AND DARK PAINTING
CHARLES COTTET
A generation ago opposition arose against gloomy painting. Down with
the twilight cellar painting! Down with the studio sauce! Hurrah
for the open air! Long live free light! With this war-song a brave,
hot-blooded band stormed art academies and studios of masters, and,
shouting for joy, planted their silver and violet banner on the posts
they had taken. For two whole decades the art exhibitions presented a
cheerful, festive aspect. It was always Sunday. The glow of a southern
noon rested over whole walls. From the hundreds and thousands of
canvases, big and little, streamed the gleaming sunlight in its full
glory. Men, beasts, things, landscapes—all swam in luminous splendour
which, at most, patches of violet shadow subdued timidly. Nature seemed
to know no other conditions of light than those of Capri in July.
About the turn of the century this suddenly began to change. In some
pictures the light went out. Certain painters again discovered the
darkness of evening, of leaden-clouded winter’s day, of thickets, of
rooms. On some palettes the eternal white and violet was replaced by
the old brown, black, and olive-green of our fathers. The phenomenon
became, year by year, more marked. To-day the change is accomplished.
Free light is thrown away after the old moons. Painting has grown sick
of noonday. There is an atmosphere of twilight in all the pictures. The
young painters—the victors of the day—use as much asphalt, mummy, and
umber, as did the old ones thirty years ago. Whole ranges of walls in
the Paris _salons_ lie as in deep shadow, and we may go through several
rooms before finding a creature represented as “breathing in rosy
light.”
What satires these _salons_ are on the consequential, high-stepping,
deep-thinking drivel of professorial and other chatterers, who, to hide
their dearth of thoughts, turn out new words, discover in our days a
particular “charm” in painting as in other arts, and prove by _a_ + _b_
the necessary, logically offered expression of new spiritual needs of
the present generation.
Now what has become of the “charm” that calculatingly demanded “free
light” and nothing else? And how is it, then, with the spiritual
needs of the present generation, to which free light and nothing
else corresponded? And how does it stand with the new way, in which
favoured artists have taught us to contemplate and to feel nature?
Was the “charm” four or five years ago inclined to brilliancy, and
is it changed during the night to an insatiable longing for gloom?
Did white and violet correspond five years ago to the spiritual needs
of the present generation, and does this generation now need black,
brown, or olive-green tones? Have we just as quickly again unlearnt to
contemplate and feel nature in sun-gold and violet, as favoured artists
have taught us to do?
Living art goes her way according to her own laws and impulses, and
leaves in the lurch the babbling empty heads, with their pretentious
threshing of phrases, who tramp after her, expounding and talking
wisely interpretations and clever chatter. Not by a particular
“incentive” of the period, not from its alleged spiritual needs and
currents of thought, are the changes of art creation to be explained,
but solely by the psychology of the artists, by their very human, very
weakly prosaic needs, by the material and moral conditions under which
they are nowadays condemned to work.
The _salons_, the art exhibitions, are in our time the annual marts
of success for painters. In these they have to seek fame and its
train-bearer—payment in cash. In these they must strive amongst a
thousand or two thousand competitors to astonish at any price. By
special beauty or special nobility? This means will be chosen by the
very fewest. Firstly, not one in a thousand has it in his power. In
the second place, even an artist not in the front rank has enough
Philistine contempt to be convinced that nobility and beauty are the
last things for which the crowd has a taste. His hunger for success—a
fitting form of his instinct for self-preservation—gives the artist
sense and understanding of the psychology of the multitude, whose
elementary law is that it is obtuse to that which is common and reacts
on what is uncommon. The artist who works with an eye to exhibiting
where his work will be one of two thousand, has only one endeavour,
viz., to be as different as possible from these, and by this means
possibly to make a striking impression amongst them. The contrary is
the greatest difference possible. That is the polar line, the angle of
180 degrees. Logic, which unconsciously proceeds geometrically, brings
the artist to this. He also looks sharply at what the others are doing;
puts himself to trouble to find out what they have in common, and in
what respect they resemble each other; and when he has discovered this,
or thinks he has done so, he proceeds to do the exact reverse.
If he has properly recognised the predominating element and has hit the
exact opposite, the victory is gained with a weight that overthrows all
before it. Professional associates, critics, and public stand in front
of something new. The novelty-hating majority feels the disturbance in
their lazy mental habits as an insult and discomfort, and sets up a
yell. The minority of unsatisfied gainsayers, morbid bread-hunters,
vain coxcombs, and enthusiasts longing for the glorious Unknown and
Unprecedented, passionately take side for the novelty. This serves as
an excuse for a conflict of those eternal conservative and radical
tendencies, whose battle may be seen throughout the whole history of
human development; and the artist who unchains these tempests sees
himself honoured as one of the embodiments of contemporary thought, as
a power in civilisation. Only quite exceptionally is a cool analyst
found to say with smiling tranquillity amidst the bluster of the war
of minds: “Dear children, don’t excite yourselves like that; the word
‘new’ is no verdict. To be different does not necessarily mean to be
better. An old tendency may contain beauty in itself; a new one may,
of course, do so too, but not necessarily. He who grows excited on
behalf of the old, simply because it is old, is commonplace. He who
grows excited for the sake of something new, merely because it is
new, is commonplace with a negative prefix. Only wait a little while.
In a short space of time the new will have become old, and you will
recognise that there was no grounds for raising a noise about it. The
man of the new thing, whom you hail as the bringer of a new salvation,
is no better than the ancients; but he is right, for he wishes to be
noticed, to inherit from the ancients, and that is wholly justified
from his selfish standpoint.”
The would-be aristocrats of intelligence—the “intellectuals”—would
find a speech like this intolerably homely. It is not in the least
“deep.” It is not at all applicable to the mystic inclinations of
vaporous brains. It discovers no single unsurmised and astounding
relation between phenomena that have nothing in common with each other;
but I believe it is literally true.
The “Impressionists” of the Caillebotte room in the Luxembourg painted
brightly when the _salon_ was correspondingly dark. The one light
picture among the dark paintings acted like a window that opens in
the gloomy wall to the sunny air. When the other painters saw that
the multitude flew towards this bright point, like moths after the
flame of a taper, they hastened to paint also in bright colours. “Free
light” was discovered. It corresponded to no mood of the period. Free
light is joyous and satisfied. The spirit of the age was, during
its predominance in painting, pessimistic and sick with longing as
it had hardly ever been in the past. Nor was it a new way of seeing
and feeling nature. Turner, Corot, Claude Lorrain, Ostade, Salvator
Rosa himself had seen and felt nature quite as brightly as Manet and
Monet had done. The truth is that the “Impressionists” were turbulent
young people who got angry at vegetating in obscurity whilst Gudin
and Schnetz, Signol and Müller, Pils, Cabanel, Dubufe, and Robert
Fleury had all the honours and successes; and that impelled by envious
loathing of these celebrities of that day, they found, as it were, in
a negative chemo-tropical way, the exact reverse of their dark style.
Five years ago the same incident was played off exactly in the opposite
direction. Everybody was painting in a bright style. The Schnetz and
Cabanel, Delaunay and Cogniet of the day were called Puvis de Chavannes
and Roll, Besnard and Cazin. Then, again, some young people got angry
about their being unknown and unheeded, and they entered, consciously
and of set purpose, into opposition against the celebrities of the day.
Charles Cottet exhibited a black picture which, in the middle of a
blinding white exhibition wall, struck just as glaringly as did, thirty
years ago, the bright picture in the middle of the black wall. Cottet
had hit the bull’s eye. He instantly created a school, and to-day
the _salons_ look once more as they did thirty years ago, to be once
more flooded with free light, probably, some twenty or thirty years
hence. It is an orbit without beginning or end, an eternal beginning
over again, and only posing fools seek, in this monotonous, periodical
return of the same effects under the influence of the same causes, to
ferret out connections with definite phenomena of the times.
Charles Cottet is developing into the undisputed leader of the young
race of painters. He deserves the recognition accorded to him, yet it
is a serious matter that he provokes to imitation; for what in him
is uncouth, though justifiable, independence, will become with the
imitators a manner that may rapidly pass into intolerable aberration.
Cottet loves dark harmonies of colour. He paints night, closed rooms
illumined by artificial light, candle and fire effects; unlike
Rembrandt, whose glooms are delicate and transparent, whose men and
things are particularly self-luminous in sunless space; and unlike his
pupil, Schalcken, who treats flames and their reflections roughly after
the manner of a blacksmith, without mystery or harmony. Cottet paints
it apparently more from joy in darkness than joy in light, for with him
darkness is generally the principal thing, and the sources of light are
there chiefly to call attention to the sinister stir and movement in
the unillumined dusk. His imitators do not see the intense life of his
shadows. They only see his black, brown, and dark-green palette, and
dimly brush away at it again as in the worst days before the dawn of
“free light.”
Painting goes out into the night, and will remain there a while. Then
once more a cheerful and free artist will come, and discover light for
an astonished and enraptured world, and he will be deified or damned
as a revolutionist just as Monet was thirty-five years ago when he did
the same, and as Cottet was five years ago when he did the reverse.
And thus it will ever be so long as in the human apparatus of thought
a change of impression will relax conscious feeling, and art creation
will have to serve, not only the utterance of strong impulses of
emotion and the relaxation of the nervous system, but also the ambition
or vanity of the artist, which means, I suppose, to the end of time.
Cottet’s execution is somewhat brutal. He works in the style of Ribot,
who was himself a curious mixture of reminiscences of Franz Hals,
Ribera, and Velasquez, with an admixture of personal self-will. He
lays great, dark, almost dirty spots on the canvas, and treats human
skin with boorish coarseness—I might almost say, with the curry-comb.
But what truth and energy in all the movements! How economically and
yet how exhaustively he can reveal the thoughts and feelings of his
subject. There is little in the whole of modern painting so pathetic as
his three-panelled picture, “Sea Folk,” that now adorns the Luxembourg
Museum. In the middle, the parting meal of the Jack Tars before
starting, round the village table fifteen people, strapping young men
with their womenfolk—mothers, wives, and sweethearts. Through the
open window dark-green night looks in; from the petroleum lamp there
gleams a sharp streak of yellow light; the men sit close to each other
in silence; forebodings and the sadness of leave-taking exalt them
and raise the souls of these horny-handed toilers to the regions of
poetic thought and dreams. On the right, the boat that is conveying the
sailors to their ship; some are rowing or steering, the rest are in a
reverie. All go carelessly to meet their fate, which perhaps will mean
merely prosaic seaman’s work on a voyage without any adventures, but
perhaps even heroic tragedies of struggle and destruction. On the left,
the women remaining behind, who watch from the shore the departing men,
their lovers, their bread-winners, with sorrowful love and prayer in
their looks, their mien, their hands, and their attitudes.
Possibly this profound picture moves me so much only because it
illustrates completely what I meant when I described the social mission
of art in the future in these words: “In a work of art which is to
attract the people, the people must find themselves again, but just
as formerly the priest and king did: magnified and ennobled. The work
of art must show them their own likeness, though a beautified one.
It must raise the people in their own eyes, teach them to respect
themselves.... Works which can show the dignity and beauty of the
occupations of the multitude, which are a sanctification of labour,
an apotheosis of the tragedies and idyls, of all the sweet and bitter
stirrings of emotion in the common life—these works, I believe,
constitute the type of the art work of the future.”
Cottet’s triptych is one of these works. It renders my abstract
deductions concrete. He is a great painter who can extract with so
sure a hand from the stone of everyday life all the gold of beauty it
contains.
Cottet gets his suggestions for the most part from Brittany. Almost
all his works, in any case his most famous ones, tell of Breton
nature and the life of the Breton people. His “Midsummer Fire” is
very affecting. The holiday fire is kindled beneath the clear sky of
a midsummer night; around it assemble the Bretons, ever faithful to
their traditions. The smoke ascends vertically; the flames glow on the
countenances gazing on them. Old women and children they are, for the
most part, who celebrate the solstice according to ancient custom;
there are hardly one or two men among the devout multitude. The sterner
sex, the middle-aged, laugh at the superstition; but the grandmothers
foster the custom of their ancestors, and entwine it into the earliest
childhood of their grandchildren as a dear remembrance that grows up
with all the joys and sorrows of their infant years. Thus what is old
is retained and is handed down from generation to generation. Cottet
has expressively illustrated this rule of folk-lore, not because he
intended it, but because he was true. Far and wide, as far as the eye
can reach, other fires are burning, and mirroring themselves in the
sea, and you can guess that, even around the furthest, which are hardly
visible in the night, the villagers are making a circle, just as round
the flame in the foreground. One single note hovers over the whole
of this landscape; one single feeling dominates the soul of all this
population. Each one of these old women whose glances are submerged in
the holy flame feels herself at this instant a unit of the whole race
inhabiting the hereditary granite soil, and part and parcel of her
forefathers who have long rested beneath the sod. Thus a real work
of art, without straying into literature, points far beyond its own
boundaries.
The “National Fête at Camaret” is celebrated so earnestly by the
Breton peasants that, in spite of the bright paper lamps on the tree,
it has the effect of a church solemnity. In “The Old Breton Nag,”
Cottet has translated from bronze into less severe painting one of the
never-to-be-forgotten coal-mine horses of Constantin Meunier. “Mourning
by the Sea” is one of his masterpieces. Grandmother, mother, and
daughter are sitting together on a stone bench on the shore. They are
all three wearing widow’s weeds. They are speechless and motionless,
abandoned to their thoughts, which abide with their dead. The sea,
which has swallowed their husbands, and to which they turn their backs,
lurks behind them in insidious calm behind two storms that depopulate
the coast, and leave behind the granite cliffs only old and young
widows and children, who, in turn, also will be trained for the sea—the
merciless sea, on which the poor devoted fishermen and sailors seek
their living and find their death. The existence of a population, its
truceless fight with hostile nature, is comprised in the black figures
of these three modern Niobes. To-day, too, as in its beginnings, true
art is myth-making.
To this series of pictures from Breton peasant life belongs also
an “Early Mass in Winter,” which at present hangs in the “Little
Palace,” at Paris. In the early dawn, beneath heavy clouds, a few
Breton peasant women, of whom we get a back view, are proceeding
across the flat, damp heath to an insignificant village church. They
wear the round mantle with a hood, which is usual in that country.
On first glancing at these short, broad, black figures without human
form, which look like wobbling, tightly-filled coal-sacks, I could not
help laughing aloud. But I observed in the mien of other observers
composedness, piety, and admiration. These evidently saw in the picture
only the walk to church, not the clumsy sacks, always a proof how
powerfully Cottet can conjure up a mood.
Once or twice Cottet has in some measure proved faithless to his usual
dark style of painting, and allowed himself to revel in colour. Thus
in his portrayal of a family of Breton fisherfolk, when the corpse of
a baby is laid on its bier. The dead child lies in its little open
coffin, around which four tapers are burning. On both sides of the
bier the seven or eight relatives stand grouped: the parents, aunts,
little brothers and sisters express, each in his or her way, their
grief, which, in the case of the still unconscious children only,
sinks to the level of mere curiosity. From the coffin proceed two
vividly red ribbons which stream across the bier down to the ground.
Flowers of a similar furious red are strewn over the bier. These shrill
values do not produce exactly a fine and harmonious effect in the
dark-toned general atmosphere with the opposite warm yellow spots of
the taper-flames. Moreover, the composition here is also not a happy
one. It is an error to make the pale little corpse of the child the
centre of a large picture. Death does not attract the eyes, but repels
them. It does not endure the rivalry of life unless it can compel
attention perhaps by means of special melodramatic circumstances or
symbolical value. The glance turns naturally to the living, feeling,
acting human beings, and thus the centre of the picture, which should
be the keystone of the arch that holds the composition together, seems
to be a gap. Christ’s dead body may be made the centre of a picture.
This dead Saviour will always be, in the beholder’s imagination, the
most living, the only living thing in the picture. So, too, the dead
Lazarus and Jairus’s little daughter are suitable for the main figures
in a composition, because these dead persons are virtually living, and
what makes them interesting is not death, but returning life. But the
innumerable “Lessons in Anatomy,” which were a favourite subject with
the Dutch painters (Aart Pietersen, M. van Mirevelt, Rembrandt, Adrian
Backer, Van Neck, Cornelis Troost, etc.) show how unsuitable a corpse,
to which no suggestions beyond its visible condition are united, is for
arresting the attention. Even a master such as Rembrandt is unable, in
what is, I suppose, the most famous of all “Lessons in Anatomy,” to
direct attention to the dead body. In spite of the large space occupied
by the corpse, we do not see it, but only Dr Tulp and his audience.
Cottet’s picture is the most convincing proof of the impossibility,
in a composition containing living persons also, of laying the chief
stress on a dead one. The psychic element, _i.e._, the mourners’ pain,
Cottet has, however, expressed with gripping force and truth. It is his
strength and glory that the inward, emotional life preponderates with
him so far beyond all externals.
At the first glance his “Breton Festival” is even more repellent than
the “Dead Baby.” The line of hills on the horizon, the stern heath, the
church, the breakfast laid on the white tablecloth in the foreground,
are certainly masterly achievements; but the Breton women grouped in
the open air round this still life wound us with their silk bodices
of the crudest blue, green, and violet! It is said that Breton women
actually dress in such shrill colours. This may be so; but that does
not really justify the crude reproduction of such brutalities. It is
asserted that time will subdue the overloud tones of these violent
colours and effect a reconciliation of them. On this subject our
children or grandchildren will have an opinion. What we see now is,
anyhow, unpleasant. Has Cottet wished to show that he is able to deal
with something besides asphalt and umber? If so, let him be told that
his dark harmonies of brown, grey, and black are more agreeable than
all these shrill penny-trumpet tones.
Cottet stands at the zenith of his life and artistic capacity. It
would be rash to predict his further development. Whether he keeps
to the dark style of painting, to which he owes his reputation, or
lets himself be led away by the strong, bright, full colours; whether
he remains faithful to Brittany, which seems with the young race of
artists to take the place of the classic Italy of their predecessors,
or seeks another soil and another landscape to serve as frames for his
men and women of deep emotions—in any case, Cottet has already secured
himself a place in the History of Art; deservedly, too, but chiefly
because the change in the valuation of tones is bound up with his name.
It was day; it became night. Manet and Monet had denoted dawn; Cottet
introduced evening twilight.
XII
PHYSIOGNOMIES IN PAINTING
John W. Alexander, an American, possesses an enviable skill and
certainty. He is master of the means of expression belonging to his
art, and has a trustworthy feeling for the harmony of those light,
subdued colours called in Fiance “Liberty” shades, after the name of
an American tradesman in the Avenue de l’Opéra who first brought into
vogue clothing, furniture, and wall stuffs in such peculiarly anæmic
and almost chlorotic colours. With his dexterous draughtsmanship and
charming harmony of cool, diluted blue, soft green, faint pale yellow
and delicate rose, he might possibly have pleased connoisseurs, but
could hardly have attained world-wide fame. He, therefore, hit upon
painting women’s portraits in amazing positions. He was the inventor
of acrobatics in portraiture. His women lie about, in orgiastic
contortions, on the ground or on sofas, with their legs up and heads
hanging over the edge, or with forms twisted twice round, like a screw,
or curled round like a sleeping dog, astonishing the inoffensive
spectator, and suggesting to him of corrupt imagination certain
lustful ideas. The means were effectual. Alexander became a first-class
firm, and the _crétins_ of criticism did not fail to praise his special
knowledge of, and feeling for, the “modern women of high-strung
nerves and Satanic caprices.” Now Alexander seems to find that he has
acquired sufficient fame, and is abandoning his follies. Among his
later pictures there very rarely occurs one of which the model betrays
his earlier leaning to gymnastics. The ladies he now paints are quite
decent in their attitudes, and only, perhaps, a serpentine movement in
their long, flowing garments reminds us still of the old gutta-percha
or snakelike contortions of his bodies. Alexander has slipped through
the fingers of his modernistic critics. Whilst they still keep on
raving about his “modern women with high-strung nerves and Satanic
caprices,” he is painting prosperously, peacefully, and intelligently,
and can now be recommended to the most respectable _bourgeois_ families
to immortalise their matrons.
Aman-Jean is a melancholy painter, whose palette has been tuned in
a minor key. He is the guitarist of the falling leaf, twilight,
tapestry-hung ancestral halls, sombre Gobelins. His pictures result
from the mood in which a man catches himself humming the _King of
Thule_. I do not say that this tone of colour does not possess its
charm. He who does not live his life like a thoughtless, devouring,
and digesting animal has, I suppose, on every blessed day of his
existence, an hour in which he finds his own soul in the subdued
and faded palette of Aman-Jean. It is, however, morbid to see the
phenomena of the universe merely as old Gobelins in the hue of twilight
hours. And morbid, too, is the way in which Aman-Jean transforms his
impressions of poems into a painter’s view. I know, for instance, a
“Beatrice” of his which affords the maximum of involuntary comicality.
Before an artificial-looking orange-tree, which she overtowers in
height, Dante’s beloved, with the upper part of her body thrown back,
and her stomach pushed forward, performs a sort of _danse du ventre_.
To her girdle she has a golden laurel garland hanging, which, as a
note of illumination in the dull night-hues, has an excellent effect
as _valeur_ (as the French say), but as an object or requisite is very
comic. Aman-Jean himself, with that misappreciation of subordination in
his pictures, which is so common among artists, lays far greater value
on such ridiculous whims than on his portraits. And yet it is only in
these that he shows with what sureness and intensity he is able to
seize and lay bare the most inaccessible and most mysteriously elusive
thing that reality has to exhibit, viz., living man. His “Jules Caze”
and his “Dampt the Sculptor” belong to the most delicate portrayals of
men, just as his “Paul Verlaine” and “Madame Henri Martin” must also
remain unforgettable by every one who has beheld them.
His portraits, to be sure, are not by any means of the same value.
There is, for instance, a portrait by him of a “Cossack Colonel” that
must fully mislead in regard to him. Materiality is entirely lacking
in the full-length figure he has painted of the Russian officer; it is
clapped flat on the canvas like a pancake. A laurel bush climbs from
the bottom to the top of the picture—one cannot say in the background,
as the picture has no depth, but, apparently, behind the man. The
shrub seems painted on the wall to the height of the head. It suddenly
grows plastic before our eyes, and shoots its leaves in front of the
colonel’s nose and forehead. By this symbolism which scoffs at all the
laws of perspective, the painter evidently wants to suggest relations
between the warrior and fame. One can only shrug one’s shoulders at
such puerility.
He is more and more breaking himself of the habit of regarding living
models, and allows himself to be hypnotised by the Præ-Raphaelite magic
lantern. We might wish for an Orpheus to take this noble artist by the
hand and lead him back to the light from the shades in which he has
lost himself. Perhaps the adventure would be more successful than in
the case of Eurydice.
Albert Besnard.—Contemporary painting knows no more harsh contrasts
than Puvis de Chavannes and Albert Besnard. The former saw nothing in
the world except spectres; the latter sees only fireworks. Puvis’s eyes
perceived no living colour; Besnard’s eye is in a state as if it had
received a violent blow from a fist, in consequence of which it saw the
proverbial ten thousand candles. There is nothing objectionable about
his delight in colour; on the contrary, any one who is not suffering
from Daltonism would be delighted to be invited to his debauch of
colours. If only Besnard only satisfied his taste in a somewhat nobler
way! It pleases him to introduce his dazzling rockets into women’s
faces, and there no man of healthy taste will care to follow him.
Besnard has marvellously beautiful yellow, orange, green, blue, and
red on his palette. He can attune them, too, to a beautifully sounding
harmony; but why must he put yellow on the cheeks, green on the hair,
and blue and orange on the shoulders in his portraits? Why must he
so portray his model as if it were streaked with luminous paint or
bathed in a stream of light that has flowed through a coloured glass
window? His mastery of drawing and modelling certainly makes his
colouring-run-mad somewhat more endurable, but it does not justify his
not searching for the tumult of colour which he loves in actual life
(where, after all, he might with some effort find them), but chasing
them into actual life without any regard or thought.
In the _salons_ of late years, Albert Besnard pursues a curious
policy. Near one or more aggressively stupid works, he exhibits a
portrait or painting which is amazingly rational. In this there is
method, unmistakably. It is a sort of self-defence. Besnard seems,
from his canvasses, to address the visitors to the “Salon” in these
words: “You see that I am in private life quite a sane individual
and correct painter, who is as much the master of his art as anybody
in the world. The other rubbish is for the fools of modernism. For
those I am bound at times to play the Jack Pudding, but you need not,
however, worry yourself about that.” Once, for instance, this painted
plea was the life-sized portrait of Denys Cochin, the nationalist
deputy for Paris—an excellent work, laborious, powerfully drawn, and
irreproachable in colour, which reminds one of Herkomer’s best style.
His clownery, on the other hand, was a huge picture which Besnard calls
“The Isle of the Blessed.” A bushy shore in the foreground, then a wide
expanse of water which looks partly like sand, partly like wine-soup,
and only in the remotest degree like natural water. Finally, in the
background, a flat shore with the outlines of a white town that stick,
as if cut out of paper, on the blue horizon. Across the level sea where
it is reddest, glides a skiff in which stands, in the attitude of the
Saviour calming the tempest, an enigmatical figure in red, flowing
garments, and with the countenance of an Indian chief, surrounded by
a grass-green and wine-dreg-coloured woman and a monkey-like rower
of sulphur-yellow hue. On the bank young maidens tarry for the new
arrivals, their light raiment, blown bell-shaped by the breeze,
reproducing a _motif_ of Botticelli. Between the trees groups of
bright-coloured figures are camped, and on the steps of a hill sit
or lounge flute-playing fauns, one of whom has the typical head of a
retired French colonel. The women in the skiff are distinguished by
distorted, acrobatic attitudes, which no model could sustain for ten
minutes without supports and props. On principle, no two figures are
placed side by side without being clad in the most opposite colours in
the spectrum. This arrangement of colours suggests the thought that
none of the figures must move away from the side of the others, and
none could step into another group, as otherwise the harmonies intended
by Besnard would be destroyed. That seems boldly and freely fanciful,
but is soberly and painfully subtilised. It is a mechanical game with
contrasts of colours, devoid of purpose and even of the charm of any
sense of colour. Albert Besnard has, in his later days, evidently
discovered Böcklin, or even has only heard him extolled and wants now
to make his own Böcklin. The fauns—up to their heads—the maidens on
the shore, the blue sea, the white town in the distance, are descended
in the direct line from the pictures of the Bâle master. But Besnard
has imitated the details as any one may copy a writing which he cannot
read. “The link of the spirit is all that it lacks.”
Jean Boldini is one of the most remarkable painters of female
portraits in our time. In these he makes himself most solicitous to
unite together the screw lines of Alexander’s demoniacs twisting in
hysterical convulsions, and Zorn’s bold, sunbeam dances. The faculty
of tumult hardly any one among contemporaries possesses like this
uncommonly skilful Italian. His pictures seem to fly up as from a
bursting bomb. Every fibre in his women palpitates and throbs. One of
his women sits half naked, just as if she had torn, in a rage, the
clothes off her body, on a lion’s skin, and he has made the head and
skin of this common floor-rug bristle with such an expression of cruel
savageness, that you jump back in terror from the expected spring of
the bloodthirsty monster. Another woman wears on her arm and shoulders
a feather boa with wonderful convolutions, which seems to rustle
from her in excitement like an eagle. A third lady stands in a door
frame—she seems to be about to spring forward with the leap of a tiger.
She wears one of those very modern, low-cut evening dresses, which are
fastened over the shoulders only by a tiny chain; her bust looks as if
it were laid bare because her dress was torn from her body in a brutal
struggle with a satyr. There is an atmosphere about this woman of all
hysterical convulsions, St Vitus’s dance, or defence with teeth and
claws against lawless attempts. There is a story about sorcerers and
witches who through a touch give another shape to men. This changing of
skin is not practised only in fairy tales. Certain portrait painters
also have it in their power. Old Cabanel transformed the rich, fat
wives of wholesale merchants and owners of house property, whom he
painted for 30,000 francs, into goddesses of the old Greek mythology.
Boldini by a spell transforms the ladies who trust themselves to
him into mænads, mad women, evil witches that ride of a night on
broomsticks to their Sabbath. I do not believe that people pay him
30,000 francs for that; but if a lady even disburses a centime to be
represented by Boldini as a Bacchante or a Vampire, she must be as much
a victim to neurosity as Boldini makes her out to be.
William Bouguereau.—The contempt of Bouguereau is the beginning of
wisdom in art. That everybody knows who has occupied himself with
contemporary painting otherwise than as a picture-dealer. Among the
long-haired ones who dwell on the mountain land of Montmartre, no
name conveys a worse insult. He who wants to make an impression on
the Botticelli ladies when visiting the “Salon,” must make a grimace
of sudden, severe nausea when he comes across a painting by this
“manufacturer of perfumery labels.” On the other hand, Bouguereau
has managed to collect in his head in a coronet of all sorts all the
honours that blossom for an artist in France. He is Commander of the
Legion of Honour and Member of the Institute; he gained the _Prix de
Rome_, and has pocketed all the medals that the Salons and Universal
Exhibitions had to bestow. His works fetch the highest prices in the
market, and if no Parisian artist finds purchasers, the big pork
butcher of Chicago, that painters’ Providence, to whom in their
prayers they turn their countenances, always has gold for Bouguereau.
The deplorable Philistine, who would also very much like to have a
little share in the æsthetic enjoyments of this world, tears his hair
and groans: “Where is truth?” The _Chat Noir_ treats Bouguereau as
a buffoon, but the Academy erects altars to him. Criticism scoffs,
but America pays. And, however readily the Philistine yields to the
appearance of daring modernity, if he listens to the voice of his own
heart, he notices to his embarrassment that Bouguereau, as a matter
of fact, pleases him. He gazes with secret delight at his “Cupid and
Psyche,” his “Pearl,” and “Innocence,” his “Oblation to Cupid,” his
“Wasps’ Nest,” his “Cupid _mouillé_,” his “Holy Women at the Tomb.” It
is always the same: a sweet maiden, or even several, a well-built youth
of rosy body and slender limbs, laughing little mouths with pearly
teeth, blooming cheeks, snowy bosoms and rosy fingers—all lovely, all
a delight to the eye. The Philistine wriggles under the decree of
fashion, which forces him to find these charming things horrible, and
his troubled look frames the question that his mouth dares not utter:
“Why? Why?”
I think we are doing a good work when we answer him calmly and in
a friendly manner, without exaggeration or cheap witticisms which
neither explain nor prove anything, not even necessarily the sincerity
of the witling. Bouguereau pleases the insufficiently trained eye,
because he paints prettily; but in art prettiness is the direct
opposite of the beautiful, for it is untruth, since a conscience
originally delicate or happily trained only feels truth to be beautiful.
Prettiness is necessarily untruth, for it is that which is conceived
without trouble, which excites no opposition, which compels no strain
on the attention and no adaptation on the part of the spectator to the
peculiarity of the artist. Its effect is merely the effect of what
meets the spectator’s pre-existent thoughts or feelings completely.
This pre-existing element is not, however, the result of collective
observation and strong feeling, but the dissipated precipitate of the
most fugitive, indifferent perception, which is totally unfitted to
obtrude into the world of phenomena.
The artist whose goal is prettiness, does not glance at reality, but at
the soul of the crowd which he wishes to please. He does not portray
what he sees, and what makes an impression on him, but what suits the
feeble, inexact concepts which the average man forms of things. He is
a courtier of the crowd; he flatters their shallowness and incapacity.
He wants them to say, with a self-satisfied smile: “This man is a great
artist, for he has the same way of looking at things as ourselves.”
Prettiness is, in lyric poetry, rhyming “love” with “dove,” “heart”
and “part”; in drama, it is rewarding the good characters with
advantageous marriages and lucrative posts, and making the wicked fall
into the pit they have dug for others. For this is just what the public
expects; such is the world-picture which the world has arranged for
itself, and it is grateful to the poet that he does not force it to
rectify its comfortable way of thinking.
In the plastic arts prettiness is the average or typical. Bouguereau
paints a pattern, not a person. He has a canon to which he holds; and
if he would only go so far as to look at real human beings, and had
to admit that nature does not act according to his canon, he would
certainly say: “So much the worse for nature.”
Superficiality always confuses prettiness with the ideal. One cannot
fail to see that prettiness lacks exactness. This inexactness is,
however, praised as an improvement on reality: the master of prettiness
understands nature better than she understands herself. He guesses what
she would, but cannot always, do, and comes with his superior creative
power to help the poor incapable. The truth is that prettiness is the
exact reverse of the ideal; for the ideal is the presentiment of future
developments: prettiness the pompous repetition of what is commonplace.
The idealist is impelled by a restless longing after novelty to
represent; he seeks in invisible germs which the average soul does
not perceive to detect the later glory of blossom. The painter of
prettiness shows scant satisfaction in attainment, and his creation is
nothing but a sleepy reminiscence of impressions he is accustomed to.
The chief harm done by prettiness in art is that it confirms the
multitude in their dulness instead of arousing them from it. What
the “man in the street” feels in presence of a work of Bouguereau’s
is self-complacent pleasure at the artist agreeing with him. He
will expect the same feeling also from real works of art, and be
disappointed if he fails to find it. Pretty paintings deaden the mind
of the average man for powerful works, which teach men to see, educate
eyes, operate for cataract, and heal colour-blindness, are keys to the
hidden sense of lines of movement, interpret the symbolism of form,
and point the way to unknown beauty. The bloodthirsty backwoodsman
of Montmartre is, therefore, right to think little or nothing of
Bouguereau, and to scalp him; and the Philistine who expects to elevate
and enrich his mind by art must make the sacrifice of renouncing the
cheap pleasure which the engaging banality of prettiness procures him.
If Bouguereau has anything personal to say, he can say it no worse than
many another. His “Portrait of Himself” in the velvet painting-jacket
is sincere, and at any rate strives to be honest. It is true that here,
too, he has not been quite able to overcome his habit of embellishing,
and his cheeks are distressingly rosy. One could not expect from
him the almost terrifying inexorableness with which a David has
confessed the dreadful grimace of his face paralysed on one side, and
a Rembrandt, in his old age, the puffiness of his features and the
wateriness of his eyes. These men had such a pride in truthfulness
that, in their anxiety not to be partial, they felt almost hostile to
themselves, and tried, and judged themselves accordingly. Bouguereau
does not understand why he should treat himself more ill-temperedly
than his Cupids and nymphs, and smiles good-humouredly at himself.
Frank Brangwyn.—This young Englishman, born in Belgium, is a painter
of the great class from which the kings of art spring. In his delight
in colour, he reminds us of Delacroix in his _Sturm und Drang_ period;
in the dauntlessness with which he wields the brush, of Franz Hals
himself, the boldest lighter with this weapon that ever lived up to
now. His two first works exhibited in the Paris Salon, “A Sailor’s
Funeral” and “All Hands Aloft,” instantly called attention to him. His
“Buccaneers” was a veritable revelation. In a boat, floating on the
blue-black tide of the Carribean Sea, row some life-sized fellows clad
in variegated material, their heads bound with bright red cloths. In
the glowing, tropical sun that swelters down on them, everything is
a blinding, bright flame: the foam, wet oars, the ship’s planks, the
clothing and headgear of the people. The brown cut-throats get in
this noonday glory an almost superhuman relief, and in their savage
countenances a calm consciousness of their formidableness is revealed,
which even in the picture has the effect of a challenge to mortal
combat. A year later he exhibited “Goatherds,” likewise life-sized,
and likewise plunged in the noonday glow of a southern sky, and, in
addition, a reposefully coloured and marvellously deep night-piece,
“The Three Holy Kings offering the Infant Jesus Gold, Incense, and
Myrrh.” His ability was further enhanced by a “Market on the Shore” and
a “Miraculous Draught of Fishes.”
The “Market on the Shore” is held in a Barbary harbour. Little
bright-coloured carpets are spread on the yellow loamy sand, where
negroes in brown and green-lined _haiks_ and _burnooses_ lie squatting.
They are surrounded by poorer people in fantastic rags, with red
_tarboosh_ on long, clean-shaven Hamitic skulls. Beyond, three ships
extend their prows over the flat beach, and in the background, on the
further side of a strip of water, we get a glance, through a gateway
with three pointed arches, at the dim throng of a mysterious Mohammedan
town.
The “Miraculous Draught of Fishes” takes place in the evening. The
fishing-boat rocks softly on the almost oil-smooth, dark blue mirror
of the Lake of Genesareth, on the shallow valleys and crests of whose
waves the setting sun’s nearly horizontal beams strew leaves and
strips of thin gold. Four fishermen are busy hauling in with powerful
movements the net heavy with their catch. Behind their vessel, a
green, flat-bottomed boat with sails, steered by a disciple, carries
the Saviour, veiled in the gloaming, across the water.
Religious subjects have an especial attraction for Brangwyn. In his
great picture, “The Scoffers,” he shows a man with the bearded curly
head of an enthusiast, fastened to a pillory. The scene, as is usual
with Brangwyn, is an Eastern town. A crowd, which is amusing by its
negro and Moorish types and their charming garments and rags, presses
on the prisoner, who is wearing the strange garb of a Western artisan,
and reviles him with the words from their mouths opened in sneering
laughter; with the glances of their stupid, malicious eyes; with the
gesture of their forked and pointed fingers. Pity is mingled with
curiosity only in the case of a handsome, brown, young maiden in
the foreground, who, with a noble water-pot on her head, evidently
returning home from the spring, remains standing in order to gaze at
the scene. You may understand the story as you please. Perhaps it is
a foreign socialist or anarchist, who tried to preach his doctrines
there, and to whom the authorities are giving short shrift, and
whose only reward now is the mockery of the stupid crowd to whom he
intended to bring a message of salvation. Perhaps the incident has a
deeper and more solemn sense, and is the subjective, half-touched-up,
half-modernised representation of the mocking of Christ when He was
bound to the pillar in order to undergo flagellation. Whether the drama
is conceived from a sociological or theological standpoint, it is of
supreme power. The great pain of the altruist who sacrifices himself
for mankind, and sees his sacrifice despised; the great sin of the
populace that is thoughtlessly guilty of the most horrible ingratitude,
are strikingly expressed. And in what form is this rich spiritual and
moral purport clothed? Such repose and nobility in varied colour; such
witchery in the flat triad of dark yellow, reddish purple, and deep
blue; such amazing sureness in modelling by means of mere patches of
colour without outlines, it has not been my lot to meet with twice in
contemporary painting.
Neither must I leave his “St Simon Stylites” unnoticed. The saint is
sitting, with his back resting against a pole, on the platform of his
lofty pillar. On the other edge of the platform, ascending by a ladder,
appears a priest in mass vestments, accompanied by a deacon, in order
to administer Holy Communion to the Stylite, who is apparently dying.
The story, however, is a matter of indifference. It is the wonderful
harmony of colours that makes this picture so expressive. It is late in
the day; twilight is approaching; the last ray of sunlight is finely
sprinkled through the air around the figures above the roofs of the
Syrian town, from which arises a transparent cloud, so thin that it is
rather a breath, an exhalation, than a vapour, and is more surmised
than seen. A flight of swallows glides past the saint, and the birds,
with their arrow-swift and pleasing motions, observed in the precise
Japanese way, greatly help to produce an impression of height and
airiness, which Brangwyn attains chiefly by his art of distributing
light, and his eerie perspective.
Brangwyn fixes in his pictures all the magic of noon and midnight. He
shows his figures either flushed by the quivering heat of the full
burning sun, or covered with a veil of half-transparent darkness. Both
illuminations have the peculiarity of suppressing all subsidiary work
and letting only what is essential remain. The face or body of a man
steeped in sun rays becomes almost transparent. Behind the skin and the
connecting tissues which we perceive only as a covering, the muscles
and bones come forth. The intense brightness prepares a body almost
as the dissecting knife of anatomy. Darkness has a similar effect; it
blots out the connections and transitions, and only accentuates the
strong lines of construction. Only diffused light gives an equal value
to all the parts of a surface; it shows all and explains nothing.
Direct light, on the other hand, just like darkness, graduates
phenomena, makes us recognise at the first glance what is external
ornamentation and what are the supports and timber.
Brangwyn is an impressionist in the best sense of the word, a perfect
representative of what Impressionism contains that is justifiable. He
does not stop over trivialities and accessories. He sees only the
essential in phenomena, but this he sees with infallible certainty and
intensity. A feature which marks exhaustively the direction, purpose,
and force of a movement; a spot of colour that challenges and fixes the
eye, as a sudden stroke of a bell does the ear—these are the optical
elements which he grasps, and with delightful simplicity, weight, and
carelessness, and, as it were, in student fashion, throws on the canvas
“straight from the wrist.” The spectator finds once more in the picture
exactly the component parts of the phenomenon which in the actual thing
would alone excite and fix his attention, and, corresponding to his
psychological habit, he supplements the indications of the painting by
pictures from his own memory, till it becomes a perfect copy of the
real thing, which then includes also all the subsidiary matters either
merely hinted at, or quite passed over by the painter.
Brangwyn is one of those rare gifted _virtuosi_ who does not need to
draw. The line does not subsist for him, just as it does not subsist in
nature. He models with light and colour. He puts spots irregularly near
one another, little and big, long and short, angular and round, bright
and dark, white and coloured; and from these spots, from this mosaic of
correctly-felt effects of light, he builds up the phenomenon in space
with incomparably genuine and intense corporeality. Our judgment adds
the lines which the painter has never drawn, as it does when looking at
the actual thing. We have here the optical elements themselves, which
are perceived by the retina of the eye as mere gradations of light, but
are apprehended and interpreted by the higher centres as coloured and
plastic phenomena. Such a way of painting demands infallible certainty
of sight and trustworthy obedience of the hand, else it leads to
bankruptcy in art.
Paul Cézanne.—He was one of the protagonists and pioneers of
Naturalism. He was with Claude Monet, Caillebotte, and the other
Impressionists an interesting subverter; with Zola he was for a moment
a victor, and is now vanquished, although, probably, he will not
admit it. A barefooted Masaniello, whom a successful revolution of
the rabble carries to the top and lodges in the king’s palace, but
who has very soon to exchange his purple mantle for his hereditary
rags. Fortunately, the lot of overthrown art-revolutionaries is not so
horrible as Masaniello’s; they do not end under the executioner’s hand.
Cézanne has one thing in his favour which prepossesses us for him,
_i.e._, his uprightness. It is his nature that ugliness has for him an
attraction. He sees only what is abnormal, unpleasant, and repulsive
in actual life. If he paints a house, it must be warped, and threaten
to tumble down soon. If he portrays a human being, the latter has
a distorted face, apparently paralysed on one side, and a deeply
depressed or stupid expression. Every model that submits himself to
him is put in some sort of convict’s dress. Here is a female portrait.
A withered, dried-up face, mud-bedaubed clothes that look as if they
had been trailed through the gutter. Doubtless a “professional” who
at a raid was accommodated in “Black Maria,” and, after a night in
the cells of the police station, discharged? Nothing of the sort. She
is a respectable lady of the upper middle-class. This man with the
trouble-distorted countenance and the greasy felt hat and overcoat
is perhaps a starveling from Bohemia, a broken-down creature, ruined
artist or writer? Most certainly not. He is a well-to-do person of
independent means. It is curious to me how any one can allow himself
of his own accord to be painted by Cézanne, unless it were done in a
contrite, penitential mood as a penance. To be sure, one cannot be
angry with him, for he does not treat himself any better than his other
victims. He has painted portraits of himself which would be grossly
libellous if another had painted them. In truth he is not vain, for he
sees himself as he represents himself in these pictures. And his morose
eye disfigures not only faces, heads, and raiment, but also the rest.
Heine assures us that “A woman’s body is a poem.” He would not dare to
sustain this statement if he were to see Cézanne’s “Three Naked Women
before the Bath.” Such nudities are really immoral, and shriek, not for
a discreet fig-leaf, but for a nine-fold covering of cloth and fur.
Blaise Desgoffes.—This painter, who died in 1902, was an incomparable
copier of still life; for indeed there exists a still and secret life
in the productions of the artist’s hand, as an eye lovingly steeped
in form and beauty of colour sees them. Desgoffes was great in little
pictures, which rendered splendid things of gold and enamel, of rock
crystal, jasper and chalcedony, trinkets and precious stones, lace
and embroidery on velvet and silk, carved and polished ebony in
insurpassable perfection. There is a school which very contemptuously
calls these pictures _bodegones_. That is the disdainful Spanish
expression both for a cookshop and for daubed representations of vulgar
eatables such as sausages, smoked herrings, and cheese made from whey.
Copying the productions of human hands should be unworthy of an artist.
Only what is living, nay, only human life, should be justifiable. But
that is too narrow a conception. Certainly the highest mission of all
human art is the portrayal of men and women; and what is not itself
human becomes artistic in proportion as it gains relation to humanity
by means of secret anthropomorphic animation and spiritualisation. But
he who demands harshly and dogmatically that the human figure should be
treated to the exclusion of everything else, relegates a Hondekoeter,
a Landseer, a Rosa Bonheur to the second class, and denies a Desgoffes
the title of artist, which is sheer nonsense. I do not know if there is
a precedence in art, or any other precedence than that of the ability
to express and transmit the life of emotion. Anyhow, a man stands
very high who understood how to translate into painting the optical
peculiarities of choice woods, metals, stones, and textures better than
any painter before him.
Léon Frédéric amazes like an anachronism; in him lives the soul of a
primitive. Thus the Van Eycks, Roger van der Weydens, and Hans Memlings
regarded the world and man. That is, however, not a sort of affected,
antique skill, as in the English Præ-Raphaelites, and their Continental
imitators, but genuine, unconscious atavism, the purity of which is
evident from the fact that Frédéric paints no masquerades, but only
nude, human limbs, or contemporary types of the people in the miserable
working garb of our days. If they appear like figures out of mediæval
ballads or folk-stories, it is because Frédéric feels them so. He is an
out and out Fleming: mystical like his countrymen Ruysbroek, Suyskens,
etc.; and, besides, delighting in form, like the builders of the
Belgian cathedrals and guildhalls; in love with life, like the feasters
and dancers of the Flemish kermesses; honest and conscientious in his
work, like an old guild-master of the time of the Spanish Netherlands;
brooding and earnest, like a Beguine or a Lollard.
Frédéric does not actually copy, but he is curiously vivid in his
recollection of what he has seen. The old Low-German and Flemish
masters, whose outlook on the world he shares, hover before him. From
the Low-German artists he has his _naïve_, brick-red flesh tone and the
painfully conscientious kind of workmanship, which neglects no wrinkle
in the skin or curl in the hair; from Memling, his loving accuracy in
treating all accessory work—flowers, ground, clothes, and utensils.
Sprinkling the whole canvas with equally finished details, chiefly
luxuriant plants, is common to Frédéric and all the Præ-Raphaelites.
The pictures of this school, even if they take their subjects chiefly
from the fourth dimension, are optically of two dimensions. They are
only surfaces. They do not understand perspective, and, therefore,
cannot shade off a middle distance or background. Everything lies in
one and the same plane and is treated with the same clearness and
precision. In the accuracy with which they render every little stone,
every texture, and plant, the Præ-Raphaelites have no equals. If,
in addition to this, they could paint human beings also, they would
deserve unstinted praise, at any rate, as draughtsmen, if not as
colourists.
Frédéric feels the sacredness of his art profoundly, as do few other
painters of the present day. He seems to himself a priest. It is an
external, but a characteristic one: he paints hardly anything but
triptychs, which he regards, to a certain extent, as altar-pieces of
a philosophical religion; and what he portrays is always a sort of
pathetic symbol, from which there comes a sound like verses from the
Bible or Vedic hymns. His symbols are not always clear, but it is not
his fault that painting is not a fit expression of brief syntheses of
long trains of thought, or ethical and philosophical abstractions.
At most it is his fault that he does not feel this. His triptych,
the “Golden Age,” is, for instance, a view such as Ovid might have
described if he had lived in a Belgian district among Flemish people.
Frédéric relates the history of one day of his happy race: how human
creatures of all gradations of age sleep peacefully in the gleaming
night, clinging to one another; how they are awakened by rosy dawn and
refresh themselves in a crystal brook; how, beneath a noonday sun,
they play and dance and shout for joy, pluck blossoms and fruits, and
sit before dainty dishes. It is a profusion of magnificently modelled
nude women who are all very red of skin; a laughing exuberance of life
such as an old-time worshipper of the obscene god of fruitfulness might
have dreamt of amidst the reek of sacrifice. It is also a funnily
cannibalistic debauch of delicious children’s flesh and blooming,
well-nourished bodies. In other pictures Frédéric has occasionally
tortured us by quite as perfectly painted, but, on account of their
inexorable truth, fearfully painful representations of radiant nudities
torn by thorns, and whole heaps of children’s corpses. Here, however,
he is all joy and peace, and his picture is a delight to the eye.
In another of Frédéric’s triptychs, “The Ages of the Workman,” we
can measure the whole emptiness of such concepts as “Realism” and
“Idealism.” Compare Frédéric with the Bastien Lepage of the Luxembourg.
Bastien Lepage passes for the most perfect didactic type of realistic
painting. His brutalised, ape-like, feeble-minded, staring Reaper is
supposed to be genuine, unrouged nature. Possibly the painter has, on
some occasion, seen a disgusting idiot of this sort. I do not know,
but I will believe it, for I should like to assume that he had not
discovered in his own imagination so perversely distorted an image of
the human form. But as such repulsively bestial young women are, in
any case, rare exceptions among the white races, Bastien Lepage has
unmistakably taken the trouble to choose out of thousands the most
hideous model he could hunt up, out of a base, corrupt delight in
ugliness, with the malicious intention of defaming nature. Frédéric
tells a story in his triptych, “The Ages of the Workman.” Who can deny
that he, too, has held with absolute accuracy to reality? On the right,
early childhood: workmen’s wives, young and fair mothers are suckling
their babies, sweet, fat little creatures with firm little limbs and
skins like rose leaves; little maidens, who can hardly stand on their
feet, take in tow and act the mother to still smaller brothers and
sisters; old grandmothers, who can no longer take part in the labours
of the household, keep an eye on the children crawling and swarming
about. In the middle, youth: neglected yet happy scapegraces are
playing cards in the street, sitting or squatting on the curb-stone;
undisciplined lads are venturing the experiment of their first
cigarette; grown-up youths go out with young girls of their class on
their arm; what they whisper in the ears of their blushing sweethearts
would scarcely delight severe guardians of morals; but, at that period
of life, in that human environment, their feelings are so natural and
healthy that, in spite of all crabbed affectation, they are felt to be
pleasant and touching. Finally, on the left, men in their prime are
at work: they are erecting toilsomely, with heavy pieces, a scaffold,
and a little youngster looks at them; what he has before his eyes is
his own future lot, but in his careless, boyish curiosity he notices
only the amusing side of the growth of a skilful and intricate work
of man, not the hard seriousness of the ill-paid, dangerous, and
severe exertion. Thus the life of the poor artisan lies exposed to
our gaze. Frédéric does not conceal from us either its hardships or
the scantiness of its material condition. He shows us how poorly the
people are clad, how ugly their streets and houses are, how narrow is
the circle that includes their petty joys and sorrows, and how serious,
now and then, is their pastime. But he makes us see also the sunshine
resting golden over their years of childhood and youth, and feel the
satisfactions with which their families also animate and delight their
monotonous existence. He brings these poor, humble people humanly
near us, and gives us a great lesson in brotherhood. Every feature
in his picture is true; but from this truth a noble and consoling
thought proceeds, revealing to us its full extent of beauty and moral
motives. Frédéric is a Realist quite as much as Bastien Lepage, so
far as he deals with the painfully exact reproduction of sights he
has actually observed. But in Frédéric’s presentment the commonplace
appears ennobled, and that a superficial æstheticism dubs Idealism.
The fact of the matter is that the words Realism and Idealism mean
simply nothing. There is no art, there is no artistic tendency, which
could be so designated. There are only artists’ temperaments, which are
themselves bilious, and, for that reason, dwell with malicious joy on
the unpleasant sides of reality, and others which delight in all that
is bright, and have a presentiment of a deeper redeeming meaning even
behind the unpleasing external. The Realism of a Bastien Lepage is
calumny; that of a Frédéric, a speech for the defence.
Jean Paul Laurens has reached all the heights of artistic success. He
is a professor, an Academician, and he receives the most honourable
commissions from the State and great cities. He has been graciously
permitted to satisfy his ambition as a monumental painter with enormous
wall- and ceiling-paintings, like those of the Capitol of Toulouse.
He was often more happy, often less happy, always powerful, always
pathetic, now and then, I will admit, declamatory. But he has also once
forsaken his visions of history and turned a glance at the present; and
what he saw there, he fixed in a great painting which he calls “Mining
Folk,” which stands above all his far-famed frescoes.
It is evening. Between a high, steep-sloping heap of coal and slack
and a low line of distant hills closing the horizon, a big town is
painted in a wide trough of country. Over the crowded roofs of this
town numerous chimneys rise up. No church towers or palace gables, only
chimneys which belch aggressively, one might say, white vapour or dense
black smoke in the face of the twilight sky. From the middle distance
a procession of weary, toil-worn men, whose legs drag and heads hang
down, is moving forward along a causeway. From the depths on both sides
of the causeway ascend clouds of sulphurous yellow and blue smoke.
Any one engrossed in the details may see how the workmen wandering
homewards are clad in the garb of the modern proletariat, and how a
manufacturing town of the present day with typical factory buildings
lies stretched before us. But the first rapid, comprehensive glance
conveys quite a different impression. The town looks like a Sodom
and Gomorrha in rebellion against God, and is on the point of being
chastised by fire from heaven. The procession of men appears to be a
band of the damned which a hidden, mysterious abyss of hell, behind
the bend in the road, has vomited. Near the causeway, uncanny depths
seem to yawn, from which tongues of hell-flames leap up. It is a
prophet’s vision, and the atmosphere of a saga. You fancy you have
an illustration of the Inferno before you, but also a note from the
formula according to which the painters and sculptors of the Middle
Ages were wont to depict the Last Judgment.
And the most remarkable thing is that this epic extension and
enhancement of so banal an incident as the exodus of a shift of pitmen
knocking off their work is by no means intended. The painter nowhere
consciously works with a view to melodrama. He keeps, in all details,
strictly to facts. It is only his perception that has made a canto of
Dante out of a true copy of an everyday incident. At the sight of the
flaming forges, smoking chimneys, and exhausted slaves working for
hire, there came to him an inkling of the mighty forces of nature and
society which are at work in the man- and horse-powers of a modern
wholesale business, which fixed the choice and arrangement of elements
in his picture, imprinted on it the demoniac feature, and rendered it a
profound symbol of the history of a part of humanity.
Jef Leempoels is one of the most interesting of contemporary Flemings
in whom the exquisite artistic qualities of their mediæval forefathers
and masters live again. Leempoels has the sturdy, homely truthfulness
of these ancestors, their profound feeling, and speculative mind,
which easily goes astray into the fantastic. He has their masterly
draughtsmanship, and he only lacks their delight in colour and their
gift of free, clear composition to rise entirely to their greatness.
He does not rely on his capability or right to distinguish between the
essential and the non-essential. He does not dominate his subject with
sovereignly subjective perception, but makes himself the humble slave
of the phenomena and all their most capricious and lowest details. He
does not span the world with the eye of a creative artist, but glances
at it as though he were a photographic apparatus for taking authentic
negatives. To this intellectual dependence is joined an insufficient
development of the sense of what is picturesque. Leempoels is dry in
his accuracy and sober in his colouring. He does not seem to think
it is his vocation to harmonise tones and to please the eye by a
well-arranged palette. And in spite of all this I can never forget his
chief pictures. He revealed his nature in _naïve_ little features. For
instance, on the wall of the room where the father and mother, old
and worn out by life, are sitting together, hang faded photographs
representing them, as a young married couple, in a strikingly comic
dress according to the latest fashion of five-and-twenty years ago,
yet young and full of joyous hope. This discreet contrast, which must
be sought for to be noticed, contains the whole melancholy poetry of
their life from blooming youth to withered age. And the pictures of his
sisters. The good girls are not particularly favoured by nature; they
are true daughters of the homely Flemish race, in whom beauty is rare.
When Leempoels painted them, there was a struggle in him between the
conscientiousness of a sworn witness to reality and brotherly love; but
the former gained the victory, and the latter was allowed to reveal
itself only in the delicate, almost caressing, perfection of their
hands, necks, hair, and clothes.
His picture “Friendship”—an old and somewhat younger man are sitting
boldly before us, hand in hand, with their honest, ugly faces turned
full towards us. They are figures from the people, the one wearing
a green, the other a dark red knitted waistcoat. They are evidently
neither rich nor educated, and no particularly developed intellectual
life speaks from their clear, reposeful eyes, or their heavy, vulgar
features. And yet they are noble creatures. It is their feeling
which ennobles them. Only lofty souls are capable of such loyalty
and attachment as these two workmen, who so affectionately clasp
each other’s hands and lean shoulder to shoulder—let come what come
may!—and he who comprehends character without declamation says to
himself involuntarily before this picture: “It is well for him who in
his path through life meets with such friendship.” Here Leempoels has
performed the highest mission of the artist—he has recognised and
indicated convincingly what is grand and beautiful in the insignificant
and commonplace. That is healthy idealism, for which it is my pride to
fight—a consoling and uplifting moral purport in an exact and true form.
I am less agreed in respect of another picture. Leempoels calls it
“Fate and Humanity,” and in this he has gone beyond his natural vocal
register. From the lower rim of the picture there grows a marvellous
flora of hands stretched forth on high, either folded in supplication
or clenched in threatening fists, embracing many symbols of faith
of various kinds, such as crosses, communion chalices, fetishes and
offerings; over them appears, in violet light and filling two-thirds
of the picture, a huge, bearded face that, indifferent and unmoved,
gazes forward without noticing the hands of supplication and blasphemy
raised towards it. It is plain enough what Leempoels wants to express;
but it is not apparent what the effect will be of this violet face as
inexorable destiny. Its feeble, vacant gaze and stiff nimbus infuse
no particular horror, and nothing else which might be imposing is
discernible in it. On the other hand, Leempoels imparts to the hands
the full measure of his amazing capacity. These hundreds of hands,
which are painted with a patience that is almost painful, have all
their individual physiognomy. They are all individual hands of men
and women, young and old, industrious and idle, Caucasian, Nubian,
and Indian. The hands of all races, callings, ages and temperaments
are so perfect in their characterisation that error is impossible. If
among the hands were to be found those of a friend, I should certainly
recognise them at the first glance. As a study of human hands, the
piece is a museum-picture which has not its peer in all the collections
with which I am acquainted. As a work of art it saddens through want of
taste. Leempoels would sin against himself if he strayed into unlimited
symbolism. His talent points him in the direction of the clearly
circumscribed. He need not trouble himself about being implicated
with Philistinism through his devotion to actuality. His sincerity of
feeling, too, in the treatment of Philistine subjects, will always
raise him above Philistinism.
Henri Martin has always aimed at lofty ends, but the paths he has
followed to gain them were crooked and wrong. He was, when he began,
and still is, in moments of relapse, a dabbing stumper, _i.e._, he
laid on a thick dab of colour the size of a hazel-nut and extended
it somewhat. With this method, his famous “Vibrations” was, indeed,
successful, especially at a certain distance; but he broke up all
form, and this allowed him to draw quite superficially. If any one
reproached him with not rendering a single outline with exactness and
certainty, he could use the excuse: “One cannot at the same time flood
a picture with flickering light and model precisely.” Stumping was
with Martin as with his imitators the cloak to cover up artistically
dishonest forms. His idealism—the main feature in his physiognomy as
an artist—was revealed, in his first period chiefly, by his feeble
figures being dressed in the garb peculiar to no time or country, the
garb in which the Primitives were wont to make their angels appear,
and by their moving in an artificial stage, which one can call neither
earth, nor air, nor heaven; for, as a rule, it was painted a single
iridescent, mixed colour, mostly a sort of pale lilac, into which some
darker, smooth tree trunks, placed regularly like a lattice, were
introduced.
Typical of his first period are his symbolical pictures “Towards the
Abyss,” and “Every One has his own Chimæra.” We are almost ashamed to
linger over describing this confused rubbish.
“Towards the Abyss.”—A hussy unclad after the fashion in vogue at
a Paris artists’ pot-house—her cunning nudity is emphasised by
ball-shoes, long black gloves, and by a black veil, thrown back at the
right place, but transparent throughout—is hurrying down the gentle
slope of a hill. Bats’ wings wide outspread sprout from her shoulders.
A crowd of people, in which men and women of all ages and ranks are
mixed up, rush after her with the attitudes and gestures of epidemic
madness. Some run, others drag themselves along on their knees, others,
again, on all fours, after her, and scuffle for flowers which she
strews in her wake. Every meaning can be imported into this picture,
but nothing can be gleaned from it, or, at most, that the frenzied
attitudes of the slaves and victims of this creature, wallowing in the
dust, kissing and licking the hussy’s footsteps, betray an unconscious
masochistic trait in Henri Martin’s soul.
“Every One has his own Chimæra” is even more futile than this perverse
illustration of the pious admonition: “Keep from sin, for the lust of
the flesh leads to destruction.” A number of daubed, shadowy figures
crawl painfully along in a clay-coloured mass; each is bent under a
burden which represents in bodily form his ruling passion. Thus the
sensualist carries a naked strumpet; the miser a sack full of gold; the
ambitious man laurels and the spoils of war, etc.—a lamentable attempt
to represent a literary commonplace in an artist’s vision, in a living
and concrete form.
Luckily, Henri Martin showed development. After his first period of
crudely affected stippling and streaking, of bold neglect of drawing,
amidst the shapeless daubing of coloured _confetti_, serpentines, and
pomposities, with a would-be profound yet absolutely vacant symbolism,
he returned to nature and life, treated warmly human subjects from
an ideal standpoint, and toned down the crudeness of his execution
without, I admit, giving it up altogether.
Commissioned by a rich banker, he painted for the Marseilles Savings
Bank a monumental triptych which he called “Labour.” He assigns
views of Marseilles—certainly treated with great freedom—to the three
backgrounds. The manifest meaning of the three panels is morning,
noon, and evening. In the first panel, the children are on their way
to school, reading their books; the women are going to market, the
labourers to their place of work. In the second, dockers, under the
glowing sun of Provence, are unloading a ship’s cargo, which consists
of baskets full of golden oranges. In the third, the waterside is
almost deserted; an old couple, with a child carrying a doll in its arm
walking in front of them, stroll in the cool of the day; some artisan
families are also enjoying some fresh air after leaving off work, and
_Jam majores cadunt altis a montibus umbrae._
But the times of day are, as I have said, only the plain meaning of the
picture. Beside or behind it, it has also a deeper, veiled meaning.
It would illustrate also an actual state of things in the future.
Valiantly take full advantage of school in the morning of life, learn
and prepare yourself by that means for working and daring later on.
Labour in your prime until your ribs crack: you can do so, and it is
lucrative. In return, in the evening of life you will be at ease, and,
as a comfortable man of means, enjoy refreshing leisure.
We must be allowed to laugh at this optimistic aspect of industrial
life. If Henri Martin has known a docker—of Marseilles or any other
place—who was able to end his life as a man of independent means, I
should like to ask him for that man’s photograph. Nevertheless, a
painter need not be a political economist, and the picture is, you
know, intended for a Savings Bank, and the people who will see it
there may actually find themselves on the way to the independency that
makes blessed, though hardly after noonday unloading of orange boats.
We might be able to pass lightly over the poverty of thought in the
work, if its artistic qualities were satisfactory. But there’s the rub.
It was indeed a questionable thought to put in juxtaposition three
pictures separated only by slender pillars, which had to exhibit three
absolutely different lights; for either the lights of morning, noon,
and evening were properly kept apart, and we had a discord in three
notes, or the tones were pitched in one key in order not to shriek at
each other, in which case they were untrue. Such is indeed the case.
There is a somewhat more silvery breath about “Morning,” a somewhat
redder one about “Noon,” a paler violet about “Evening”; but the lights
and shadows are about equally powerful, whatever be the position of the
sun. The forest of masts in the middle panel is of such exaggerated
density that the eye is confused in the maze of shrouds and yards. And
the entire picture is executed in the crudest stippling, with dabs of
colour thickly plastered on, so that it looks almost scaly. If Henri
Martin could give up his vagaries and lack of good taste, he would
be a monumental artist of lofty vocation; for, though the fairies
have refused him sundry things, they have given him one precious gift
when he was in his cradle, viz., that of light. There is sun in his
pictures, and they brighten up the space they occupy.
His best work up to now is a huge wall-painting for the Capitol of
Toulouse.
A landscape of big, restful lines with a background of dark-shadowed
mountain forests, against which all I have to object is that they
wall in the whole horizon. From this range of darkening blue heights
the country sinks in undulating tiers of hills to the plain of the
foreground. Here the idyll of the seasons and men’s lives is developed
in three pictures. First, amidst the laughing spring, a strapping
maiden, intoxicated with love, on the breast of the young lad who
is embracing her. Next, a number of stalwart country folk in the
summer work of haymaking, on whom, beyond the cut grass, their wives
and children at play are gazing. Lastly, under melancholy autumn
trees, a lonely old woman preoccupied with recollections. The people
are homely, of course, without crude realism, poetic without the
shepherd-insipidity of Gessner. The parallelism between the aging
of the men and women and the progress of the year is unforced; the
symbolism clear and free from morbid, perverse mysticism. Turf, trees,
and bushes are decorative in form, delicate, and at the same time
sufficient in colour, and the whole is flooded by a wonderfully joyous
sunshine, which is more reminiscent of the glories of May in Provence
than even Montenard’s symphonies of light. Henri Martin has, I admit,
here, too, indulged in stippling, but he has given his people and trees
strong, free outlines, and scarred only the outer skin very lightly
with pock-marks. He has not abandoned that ill habit, but he seems to
practise it with remorse. Perhaps he thinks gradual transition is due
to his conversion to better insight. In any case, this picture was
conceived and executed in a happy moment.
Henri Martin’s career teaches a moral. Let him who would honour an
artist continually bear in mind an appropriately modified reading of
Solon’s warning to Crœsus: “Do not pronounce on any artist before his
death.”
Jean Raffaelli.—Like Henri Martin, Sisley, and the other stipplers who
painted with little dots, Jean François Raffaelli at first painted with
thin, slightly serpentine strokes. And we have had to get accustomed
to this manner. Raffaelli has been able to succeed, because he long
favoured subjects for which his ripple lines were the suitable
style. He painted poor people in poor landscapes, emaciated bodies
in slatternly clothes under trees as dry as brooms. Like a raindrop
on a window-pane, and like a tear on a furrowed cheek, the slender
traces of colour flowed down these pitiable figures, arousing twilight
imaginations of weeping, plaintive trickling, and dissolving. Later
on he caught cheerful, coloured views of Paris streets—The Invalides,
Notre Dame, and the Place St Michel. In these his streaky way of
painting was somewhat inadequate; but his amazing feeling for a crowd
in the hurried, nervous movement which is peculiar to the Parisian
lower orders, saved him. I know no painter who feels as Raffaelli the
bustle of the world’s metropolis. I think that any one who suffers from
dread of the market-place, must get a feeling of fear at seeing his
pictures.
In a third period of his production, Raffaelli gave a rare example of
complete change in his maturity. He who had grown famous as a painter
of the poor and miserable, of vices and sicknesses, turned, at the
zenith of his success, from the aspects that he had hitherto cherished,
and opened his heart to the joys of existence. In his mind a process
occurred, such as the ninth symphony describes in eternal strains. In
his despair a voice suddenly cries out: “Brothers, let us sing other
strains,” and roars out exultingly: “Joy, fair brightness of the gods.”
Formerly, he knew only abandoned tramps, tattered beggars and thieves,
broken-down hospital brothers. His plant-world consisted of the leprous
turf in front of the Paris forts, decayed flowers, the half-withered,
suburban street trees, broomlike and leafless as in autumn. And he
painted this misery in miserable colours and in his own peculiar,
streaky manner, especially appropriate to the subject. Now he caresses
with a broad, full brush bloomingly beautiful maidens in white raiment,
sunny, ornamental gardens with rich _parterres_, fresh nosegays or
living flowers. He has also changed his style with his subject. It is
all renovated—palette, execution, and story. I have a feeling of a
secret happiness having blossomed in this artist’s soul, and I rejoice
in the cheerful unconcern with which, by his altered work, he makes all
men privy to his _Vita Nuova_.
Odilon Redon is a completed artist. His development is ended. It came
from Gustave Moreau, and it never deviated from him. He is a delightful
harmonist of colours, who handles the sharp and flat notes with equal
mastery, and if he condescends to paint flowers, fruits, unpretentious
still life, and landscapes every one can understand, he displays
naturalness, taste, and winning homeliness. But when he strives for
higher expression he gets beyond his master’s range of vision, and
becomes purely hallucinatory. Fabulous creatures, at once Pegasus and
Centaur, stagger about amongst rare flowers, which gape like bleeding
wounds or grin like vampires’ mouths. Monsters without recognisable
organic shape, bastard combinations of parts of dragons, beetles,
birds and Ashes hover or swim in an uncertain medium, which may be
water, air, or ether. Dreadful human heads, bound in clusters, grow
bushlike out of the ground. All this is in colour pleasing; in form,
enigmatical. Gustave Moreau is always intelligible; we know the myths
he clothes in forms of extrahuman and superhuman splendour. No one can
make head or tail of Odilon Redon. He himself does not think at all in
his unearthly representations, and they awaken no definite thoughts
either, but affect us like wild faces in a fever.
Pierre Auguste Renoir is also counted among the Impressionists and
Naturalists. When we see that the same designation is applied to him
as, for example, to Cézanne, we can, as it were, clutch with our
hand the misuse of the words, and convince ourselves how senseless
classification in art is. Renoir is certainly no painter of prettiness.
He does not paint nature white and rosy, or stick beauty-patches on
her face. He does not go out of his way even for pronounced ugliness.
You have only to look at his two Megæras on the garden bench to be
convinced of this; but beside these witches he has so much refreshing,
individualised beauty, that one fails to understand how he could have
been classed with Cézanne and, what is more, the routine Naturalists.
His naked young woman with the mother-of-pearl flesh; his lady in a
cashmere dressing-gown on the tapestry sofa; his girl in blue with the
red cap, and the little sister in white; his two ladies with the roses,
are simply charming. And love speaks no less from his chrysanthemums
and his sunny meadows than from his men and women. He who has the same
feeling as Renoir for roses and children, is not only a great painter,
but also a good and noble man.
Alfred Roll is one of the most amiable figures in the art world of
to-day. No one has such feeling as he for the exquisitely delicate
silvery vapour of a May morning atmosphere, quivering with sunlight and
saturated with dew. No one knows how to model out with such creative
genius as he a human body from the daylight that flows around it in
gushing torrents. In his free-light painting one breathes free from all
oppression. Besides qualities which, in all ages, make a great artist,
he has the little trace of corruption which makes him a legitimate son
of our age. One of his masterpieces—the naked young woman who clings
caressingly to the bull—awakes Pasiphaistic ideas of old classic
aberration. To procure pardon for this picture, he had to do no less
than paint the splendidly healthy peasant girl with the brimming
milk-pail and the cow—certainly a worthy penance.
Roll is, to be sure, not always the charming, luminous painter of the
milk-maid and the girl with the bull. He very often strikes other
notes. Thus, for instance, in his picture inspired by socialism, which
he calls “The Martyr’s Road,” he shows an old tramp who, with his back
leaning against a tree, has collapsed by the wayside, has let his
wallet fall beside him, and appears to be about to give up the ghost.
The misery of his worn countenance already overshadowed by death, of
his emaciated figure and tattered clothes are convincing. On the other
hand, it is open to question whether it was good taste to paint the
dying man in front view, with bold foreshortening of the outstretched
legs, and with boot-soles of a terrific size, that rear up before
us, in the extreme foreground, like two præ-historic _menhirs_. Roll
intended to pay his homage to Maxim Gorki also. Was it from sincere
feeling, or to show that he is _dans le mouvement_, and is keeping step
with the most advanced of his time?
He has insisted on trying his hand at monumental decoration also. The
fruit of his effort is a gigantic picture which he entitles “Life’s
Joys.” He has evidently thought of Watteau, probably of the latter’s
“Embarcation to Cythera.” It is the same blissful landscape with roses,
trees, and water that seems, in the haze of the distance, to continue
interminably until it reaches Paradise. It is the same air which the
rain of blossom renders coloured and almost opaque. It is the same
spring sky which we might hail with shouts of joy. The men and women,
however, who give life to this Eden, are different to Watteau’s. In
Roll, everything is marvellously austere and hard. His women in the
foreground are naked, and partly lie in Michael Angelesque attitudes on
the grass, partly sit there overpoweringly monumental. Loving couples,
walking and dancing, behave as if they were possessed by wild, brutal
lust. Something like a tragic current is traceable amidst this idyll.
We exclaim in alarm: “Here, this very day, there will yet be murder or
manslaughter?” And with the object of destroying still more the ideal
note of May, Roll puts, in the midst of this fairy-tale splendour,
three realistic musicians, whose clothes were bought at _la Belle
Jardinière_, who will certainly, after every dance, go round with a
plate and collect from their audience. Where will the nude ladies take
money from to throw to them? How much more charmingly and wittily does
Watteau begin his theme! Only a marble statue of a woman renounces the
advantages of elegant toilettes. Winged Cupids flit about the young
couples, and translate, as it were, into lyrical, rhymed verses the
naturalistic prose of the gallantry exhibited. The men do not rage in
brutal eagerness, but pay delicate and discreet court to their ladies.
And above all things, Watteau’s infallible taste warns him against
telling his stories at excessive length. As brevity is the soul of wit,
so moderate compass is a great advantage in an Anacreontic scene. This
should be elegant and pleasant; but the monstrous excludes elegance
and pleasantness. Roll’s Titans and Cyclopses are not suitable for
masquerading as Arcadian shepherds.
Lucien Simon, a painter who has been an imitator of Cottet, puts
himself forward now, by an impetuous movement, into rank with him. “The
Evening Gossip” unites the family round the table lamp, which lights
up a number of richly animated faces with curious lights that play and
flicker. “Nuns Collecting”—one old and one young nun try by gentle
yet tenacious and irrefusable pressure to overcome the resistance
of a well-to-do and apparently somewhat niggardly country lady, and
to determine her to open her well-guarded purse. In a “Ball-room
in Brittany” peasant couples, in the dress of the Celtic province,
under smoking lamps emitting a yellow light, spin round, with heavy
stampings, to a bagpipe tune which drives the blood into the simple
dancers’ browned cheeks, and kindles sparks in their eyes. All this
is stumped in broadly and luxuriously without petty dwelling on the
less essential, yet with a sure feeling for what is characteristic in
appearance and movement, and in a harmony of dark colours, which is as
far remote from the bright tone of the style of painting in vogue the
day before yesterday as a Guido Reni is from a Franz Hals, but affirms
its own justification as self-consciously as the particular note struck
by a Hennar and Gustave Moreau among the moderns, of a Velasquez and
Rembrandt among the greatest ancients.
Up to now, his most important creation is his “Mass in Brittany,” a
work of an exquisite nature. The young and old peasants and seamen
who hear High Mass standing in the bare village church, are truly and
lovingly individualised head by head. Proudly renouncing pleasing
externals, L. Simon has made up his mind to produce his effects only
by the noblest means, viz., by characterising with accuracy these
manifold types, and by the depth and fulness of the spiritual life of
these pious folk here gathered together. Offence has been taken at the
broadness of his execution, which already bordered on superficiality,
and on the coarseness of his colour, which put one now and then in
mind of the bill-poster’s newer art. He has laboured conscientiously
on himself, and diminished the defects of his qualities without
weakening the latter. He still continues to paint with large strokes
in fresco style, but he pays attention to the solid building of his
figures. He is still pronounced and unaffected in his colouring, but
he avoids letting power degenerate into coarseness, and expressiveness
into shrillness. Thus Lucien Simon rises slowly and steadily, though
unerringly, to the lofty peaks of pre-eminence.
Jean Veber is quite a peculiar phenomenon which has not yet been
deservedly appreciated. On one characteristic ground: because he never
understood how to be solemn; because he seems not to take himself or
his art seriously. He began as a caricature draughtsman for Boulevard
papers, and only when his vocation for this peculiar province was well
established, did he exhibit oil-paintings. But he was already labelled,
and people continue to regard him merely as a comic draughtsman. The
public refuses to allow a double renown to a single talent. Its
admiration, you know, costs nothing, but it is, nevertheless, scanty
with it, as if it were bringing a sacrifice obtainable only with
difficulty. That is a royal trait in the sovereign mob. It is niggardly
with its distinctions in order to enhance their value. The splendid
Daumier also had to suffer from this coyness on the part of the public.
For a long time nothing was thought of his easel pictures, and it
was really the Universal Exhibition of 1900 that first revealed to
posterity the fact that Daumier of the “Charivari” was one of the most
important French painters of the nineteenth century. The caricaturist
of our days is, as it were, the journalist among plastic artists, and
we know that it is very hard for journalists to succeed with poetical
creations, however brilliant. The older humorists among the painters
fared better. The Dutch painters could make rough fun of the life of
the populace without injuring their reputation as artists by so doing.
Hogarth attained high recognition, although his clumsy, Philistine,
moralising painting ranks below the works of many caricaturists of
to-day. Cruikshank, however, whom I rank, without hesitation, above
Hogarth, occupies, in popular estimation, a lower rank, because he put
his pencil at the service of the Press.
Jean Veber is the descendant in the direct line of the younger David
Teniers, the Adriaen Brouwers, and the Höllen-Breughels. From them he
derives his full style of painting, his deep, rich colours, his great
sureness and luxuriance of execution, his clear composition and florid
imagination. He differs, however, from them in the quality of his
fancy which delights in symbols replete with philosophical references;
frequently in Saadic spectacles of cruelty and lust, and very often
in lubricities of the Félicien Rops kind. This is the effect of the
hundred and fifty to three hundred years which separate him from his
more innocent spiritual ancestors.
Of the pictures he has exhibited, some are unforgettable, when one
has seen them. The “Triumphal Procession” of a gigantic crowned
goose through the streets of a mighty city, amid the loud applause
of a populace raving mad with loyalty. The “Struggle for Gold” of
a number of awful cripples tearing each other to pieces in their
mad struggles for a few gold pieces that have fallen in the street;
the “Sight of Terror” of a man reeling home at night, apparently
after a long drinking-bout, in whose eyes the houses and monuments
take weird, living physiognomies, are most impressive utterances of
the misanthropic pessimism, the satiric bitterness, and the humour
of Veber, also, to be sure, of his predilection for the weird, the
ghostly, and the horrible.
These qualities are repeated in almost all his works up to now. The
greatest and most pretentious, “The Machine,” offends through the
daring symbolism by which he illustrates the murderous power of
woman over the sensual man. On the other hand, “Sunday Morning” is a
bit of life observed with exquisite humour: a barber’s shop in the
village, with a soaped victim under the nimble but not too considerate
hands of the beard-shaver’s wife, whilst some other customers, of
unspeakable comicality in looks, bearing, and dress, smoking, dreaming,
staring, or chattering, wait their turn on the bench by the wall.
“The Hermit and the Female Faun” is a scarcely orthodox, but keenly
witty modernisation of the old theme, the temptation of a saint, which
these square-toes of painters for the past five hundred years have
cherished with predilection, since it permits them to present quite
heathen sights with a hypocritically contrite air. “The Three Good
Friends” are of refreshing cheeriness. The ugliness of these contented
louts is touching. The painter, by way of exception, exhibits them
without malice, rather sympathetically, with a plea for extenuating
circumstances. But generally, his wit belongs, in the main, to the
species of evil-speaking. We laugh over the malice with which a
sharp-tongued observer characterises our fellow-creatures, but we
feel quite well that it is not the better man in us that laughs.
Jean Veber loves to mock at mankind in goblin fashion. He sees men
perpendicularly pushed together like a telescope, horizontally drawn
out as short, square gnomes with pumpkin faces, who, pleased with
themselves and unconscious of their grotesque ugliness, strut about
as if they were so many Apollos and Dianas. Thus Jaurès appears with
mouth agape and flourishing gestures on the rostrum of the Chamber,
at the foot of which breaks a flood of blustering deputies in stormy
session. So in a parody of Rubens’ “Kermes”—itself of the nature of a
parody—villagers resembling sacks amuse themselves with feasting and
drinking and amorous tendernesses which are calculated to disgust us
with love itself. A grandly rigged-out, inexpressibly laughing lady
in a low-cut dress between two greybeards paying their dreadful court
at an exquisitely appointed supper-table; a physician at the foot of
the bed gazing with devotion at the tongue, put out quite a yard, of a
rich, fat lady-patient; a short, stout woman in a fashionable tailor’s
_salon_, whom the slenderest of the show-room girls is trying, with
“cake-walk” movements, to fit with a dress like an umbrella-cover, are
amusing in their stupidity and ugliness. On the other hand, I cannot
follow Jean Veber further when, in “Family Joys,” he tries to make the
newborn child ridiculous—a shapeless bit of sprawling flesh, red as
a crab, which the midwife has brought from the bed of the exhausted
mother at the back of the room, and is exhibiting in triumph to the
gaping family. He should keep his sacrilegious hand off the sanctity of
this event.
The happy combination of a faultless dexterity with an arrogant,
creative humour, in which I would only like to see a trifle less
admixture of gall, renders Jean Veber’s an artistic physiognomy that is
far more interesting than many an idol to whom altars are raised.
Emile Wéry, a young and fortunate man of talent, began his career with
a great success. His view of an Amsterdam canal made a sensation, and
gained the great prize at the “Salon.” Perhaps a little stupefied by
this triumph, he kept for a while to the style of his prize picture, so
that there was reason to fear he would early stiffen into a manner. He
painted, for instance, an attractive triptych, which presents Venice
to us in her three characteristic decorations: the narrow _Calle_, the
slender _Rio_, and the splendid _Canal_. But what we cannot anyhow
fancy absent from a view of Venice—the southern sky, the gleaming
sun, and the warm tints of her old stones and tiles: these are here
altogether lacking. It is all grey, northern grey. It is the same tone
as in the prize picture of Amsterdam. As Faust found Helen in every
woman, so Wéry then found apparently Dutch water-towns in every town,
and Amsterdam herself in Venice. People think they are flattering the
city on the Amstel, when they call it the Venice of the North. Wéry
reversed the compliment: to him Venice was the Amsterdam of the South.
How true it is that we see not with the eyes but with the soul!
The South, combined with his youthful impulses to development, was
to save him from the danger of mannerism. Though he had seen Venice
with his Amsterdam eyes, and found in the azure and gold of the city
of lagunes the leaden waters and mist of the north, further south,
in the light, he bathed his eyes clean from the muddiness of higher
latitudes. In “Sicily” a girl’s brown head, with red cloth in the
midst of a cluster of dark green-leaved branches with ripe oranges,
flashes and glows the whole noon of the magic island, which this
vigorous woman—a golden fruit among golden fruits—is to personify.
But even after his return home he still remained drunk with the light
of Italy. In a new picture, “The Little Ones,” we are once more in a
harbour on the North Sea, at a place where Wéry’s talent takes its
root. Flaxen-haired youngsters are playing round a boat; one of these,
a little chap in wide, flapping trousers, is droll enough to eat.
Water, sky, and river-bank are wedded in silver sheen, and over the
whole reposes a happy sense of comfort, in which the artist’s cheerful
heart is disclosed. He has happily got over his first crisis. Now his
artistic career lies smooth and sunny before him.
Anders Zorn.—This Swede is a virtuoso of amazing skill. He delights in
marvellous effects of light, in surprises, in fixing fugitive views.
His pictures are snap-shots pitched on the canvas with an almost
mechanically smart brush. He is a concert painter possessing talent.
He is one of the great corruptors of young artists nowadays. It is so
fascinating, by a few wild, staggering, nimble strokes of the brush,
to conjure up a human figure or a scene. But this method leads to the
worst superficiality, and attracts most the lazy fellows who wish to
save themselves the trouble of learning properly the principles of
drawing and painting. Zorn did not make the thing easy for himself. He
honestly and industriously acquired a thorough mastery of technique
before turning to execute his dazzling little pieces. He may allow
himself to storm and rage over the canvas, for accuracy has become
automatic in him. In spite of this haste, every line is on the right
spot, and though people often regret that he only hints instead of
stopping and deepening, nevertheless it is continually said: “The man
knows how to build up a figure or a group.” His imitators, however,
have caught only his daubing, and with them superficiality is but a
bold excuse for ignorance of drawing.
Ignacio Zuloaga.—Spain can at the present time boast of a number of
painters who might call out to their greatest predecessors among their
countrymen the proud _anch’io_. What characterises them is a peculiar,
almost mad energy in drawing, which appears in all details, in the
living and the dead, not only in the mien and attitudes of men, but in
the sharp profile of every leaf and blade of grass, in the bold relief
of every stone, in the aggressive self-consciousness of every being as
of every thing. This energy is not to be learnt. One has it or one has
it not. There are foreign painters in plenty, whom Spain has bewitched,
and who their whole life long recount nothing but bull-fights and
processions, shepherds and gipsies, _cigarreras_ and _manolas_; but no
one who knows the genuine Spaniards will confuse these with the foreign
imitators. There is, for instance, the excellent Jules Worms. He has
been exhibiting Spanish scenes uninterruptedly for forty years. They
are always nicely painted, prettily conceived, and pleasantly executed.
As contributions to knowledge of the nation they are not without
value. They have gained him all official honours, and he passes for an
undisputed master of his particular province. And yet how un-Spanish is
this life-long Spanishness of Worms and all his rivals and imitators!
It is as smooth, licked, tricked up, entertaining, and banal as the
railway novel of an inquisitive but superficial globe-trotter. It is a
conventional comic-opera Spanishness, a theatre decoration for scenery,
with groups of costumes for living figures. It lacks the power, the
stern virility which distinguishes the Spanish painters, even those
of the second rank, and gives them a family likeness to their great
ancestors, Valdes, Velasquez, and Ribera.
The most typical of these modern Spaniards is Ignacio Zuloaga, and the
most typical, perhaps, of his pictures are the three sketches from
Spanish folk-life, which were exhibited a few years ago in the “Salon.”
An Andalusian, young, thin, and delicate, with a little crumpled
face of apish ugliness, with a supple body that seems to whirl,
stands in front of a poor mirror, and powders her face with coarse
rice-powder, as though she were sticking on a comic Pierrot-mask,
whilst her sparkling eyes testify that she wants to make herself
thoroughly beautiful for the bull-fight. Then we see her in loud,
bright ribbons, with the inimitably draped mantilla over her head and
shoulders, passing quickly through the street, greeted by two old
connoisseurs with highly-spiced endearment. On the third occasion
she or her sister goes with a diabolically piquant young gipsy girl,
whose insolent laugh discovers gleaming wolfs teeth and turns up the
sharply-curved nose, rapidly over the ground, probably to keep a
Sabbath, from the expression of both grimaces. This is warm life such
as not often glows on painted canvas. Zuloaga has felt his Andalusian
wild creatures to his finger-tips, and renders them with all their
_garbo_ and _salero_—the German _Schneid_ and _Mumm_, and the French
_montant_ and _mousseux_ are weak translations of this expression. The
pictures seem to be painted, not with mineral colours and oil, but with
sulphuric acid and lunar-caustic. These ladies are young witches, of
whom you would imagine that by touch they must give an electric shock
like a torpedo-fish, that, if they open their mouths, red mice will
jump out, and that it must be more natural for them to ride through
the air on a broomstick than to make use of their legs in the usual
way. In the piquant ugliness of their faces, made up with a thick
layer of rice-powder, in the gorgeous Sunday array, in their attitudes
and movements, in the gipsy-girl’s bestially insolent grinning and
winking, in the lustful glances and laughter of the men, there is a
fulness of hot life, an insolent sensuality such as is only met with in
Brangwyn’s youthful works. One often heard the name of Goya pronounced
before these pictures. It is indeed the same temperament, but another
outlook on life, another art. Zuloaga has much of the cutting
virtuosity of his great countryman; but he is no embittered critic of
the world, rather a laughing Sunday’s child who enjoys life with all
his senses.
And, above all, his pictures are patterns of a domestic art which,
through its unreserved sincerity, is at the same time an universal art.
For it reaches so deeply that it penetrates beyond the special type to
humanity in general.
XIII
AUGUSTE RODIN
Rodin’s place in present-day art is a peculiar one. Auguste Rodin has
been raised to the dignity of a test for decadent ways of feeling. We
admittedly call “tests” or proof-objects the objects (for the most
part, the shell-armour of diatoms or the scales of butterflies’ wings)
on which the magnifying power and exactness of analysis of microscopes
is tested. By Rodin the fanatics and snobs of insane tendencies test
the genuineness and power of symbolico-mystic sentiment. What do you
think of Rodin? Do you admire him? Good: then you need further only
adore Besnard and rave about Félicien Rops, and you can claim to be
numbered with the newest, without respect to the colour of your hair or
opportunist baldness. You do not admire Rodin? Then sneak whimpering
from our league. You are no decadent. No beauty with her hair combed
in the Botticelli style will love you; Mallarmé will not write poems,
nor will Nietzsche philosophise for you. Nobody will invite you even
to a Black Mass. Go to the Philistines; you belong to the narrow-minded
community, which is a herd of ruminants.
It would be intelligible if the provocations of the shriekers, who,
after the manner of howling dervishes, dance and rave round Rodin, were
to induce men to take a violent part against this very man. Justice,
however, demands that people should suppress their natural tendency
to make him responsible for the ear-piercing din of his drummers and
trumpeters. After all, he cannot help a horde of swindlers and silly
people making a vulgar disturbance about him and his works. If we
are to judge him, we must try to forget that critical offenders, by
invoking his name, continually outrage the sense of æsthetic decorum
and artistic conscience. Rodin is, in fact, not the originator of
this shameless proceeding, but the victim of the æsthetic Catiline
conspirators who have got possession of him, and are pushing him on
before them, so that it looks from a distance as if he was their
leader. Rodin is not the least _cabotin_. He is of a modest, homely
nature, but no strong character; and he has not been able to stand
against the suggestions of those whose interest it is to eulogise
him, who have for so long chattered his poor head full of their most
brain-firing, æsthetic doctrines, and most profound interpretations
of his alleged purposes, until he has lost his own personality, and
makes the most desperate efforts to become like the picture which his
critical Corybantes present of him to the open-mouthed gapers.
What has raised Rodin to an article of faith among the degenerates
is three peculiarities. First, the choice of his materials, which
appeal to the mysticism and sensual psychopathy of his body-guard of
degenerates; secondly, his technique, which deviates from tradition
in childish, would-be-original whims; and thirdly, his mistaking the
natural limitations of his art, which he wants to make say things for
which sculpture possesses no means of expression. These traits are
proved by a short review of his principal works.
The production which first brought him the custom of the decadents is
a composition which was devised for the gate of Dante’s _Inferno_. He
had worked at it for decades. After a few fragments, which were to be
seen in 1889 in the Universal Exhibition at Paris, he showed the whole
in a plaster model at his private exhibition of 1900. It is inspired
unmistakably by Ghiberti’s door of the Baptistery at Florence, but
stands in intentional contrast to it. The great Quattrocentist depicts
life in Paradise; Rodin’s intention is to show existence in Hell. The
framing and articulation of the work, and nearly all its details, were
rendered with organic necessity from this starting-point. The door
is cut up into panels, which are not divided by stiff, geometrical
lines, but, just as in the case of Ghiberti, are at the same time
immediately separated, and again indirectly connected into a higher
unity, by a feature of the picture itself, _e.g._, a cliff, a man’s
figure, a piece of building. In every panel an act from the _Inferno_
is played. The parts, in the majority of cases indicated only in a
sketchy way, betray strong, indeed mainly perversely directed, erotic
imagination, and the gift of exhibiting human bodies in the movements
of passion. Of course, Rodin, too, has not dropped down from heaven,
but is the descendant of easily demonstrable spiritual forefathers.
This sculpture of violent action, a particular development of French
art, and in no way connected with the Laocoon, as one might easily make
the mistake of assuming, has its first master in Rude, whose power is
revealed most grandly in the “Marseillaise” on the Triumphal Arch at
Paris. Rude’s successor and continuer is the incomparable Carpeaux,
who, as is most clear from his group “The Dance” at the Grand Opera,
in place of the wild heroes of his model and master, substituted wild
Bacchantes; who celebrated, instead of self-oblivious joy in sacrifice
in the service of rugged duty, self-oblivious intoxication in a debauch
of sensuality, but represented a life of excitement no less sublimely
and no less ravishingly than the former. Rodin is closely connected
with Rude and Carpeaux. With him passion descends a step lower still
to the uncivilised and dissolute. Heroic with Rude, voluptuous with
Carpeaux, it is Satanic with Rodin. The “Gate of Hell” exhibits rows
of naked women in all the situations and occupations of the witches’
Sabbath, when it is most devilish. Fits of hysteria shake and twist
these bodies, every motion of which betrays shocking aberration and
eager Sadism. The patients of the Salpetrière or the Atlas of Pictures
edited in this _clinique_ (_Iconographie de la Salpetrière_) evidently
served him for models. And from him, be it incidentally observed,
Alexander appears to have drawn his inspirations with the aggravating
circumstance that he clothes Rodin’s naked women in rich, modern
toilettes, and by this artful means makes them even more obscene. The
feminine genius of tragedy in Rude is inspired by Tyrtæan war-songs.
Carpeaux’s two female dancers have drunk sparkling wine; Rodin’s
demoniac women have swallowed pills of Spanish-fly. Thus it is clear
that Rodin must be dear to all wanton schoolboys, impotent debauchees,
and incipient spinal sufferers.
If the “Gate of Hell” is an illustration of hystero-epilepsy and
feminine Sadism, so, too, is a marble group which he exhibited in 1898
of Masochism. A naked woman with horribly glacial, unmoved features
sits leaning against a wall of rock. A man, apparently growing out
of the earth, kneels before the merciless image, embraces its knees
with despairingly imploring gesture, and presses his head against its
body. This is supposed to show man in an ecstasy of desire, subjugated
by the sexual power of woman. I can only say that a copy of this
group would excellently suit as a frontispiece for an edition of the
collected works of Sacher-Masoch. Other smaller groups of Rodin,
which he exhibited in the Champs de Mars Salon, hint at other forms of
morbid sensuality on which I am reluctant to dwell. They all disclose
a sub-soil of corrupted sensuality in the artist’s soul. That secures
him influence on natures in harmony with his own. The degenerates who
revel with Baudelaire in love of corpses, and with Félicien Rops in
highly-spiced lewdness, find the same excitation in Rodin, and they
intoxicate themselves with his ecstatic lasciviousness just as with the
unnatural or madly exaggerated eroticism of their other fleshly poets
and painters.
So much for Rodin’s choice of themes. Now for his technique. One of his
singularities is that he loves to astonish people by a crude, external
contrast between a block of unworked marble and the most exquisitely
finished and sweetly polished sculpture of bodies. He takes a great
cube out of all proportion, which he leaves as the labourer hewed it as
it came out of the quarry; and he works a little corner of it into a
head and body polished with the utmost nicety. In this way, the figure
grows out of, or into, the natural stone. Looked at from three sides, a
lump of rock or stone is presented to the eye, only on the fourth side
the work of art is revealed, blooming, as it were, in the wilderness.
We may describe this manner as the sculptural form of mysticism. The
association of ideas which Rodin wishes to awaken by this device should
make the idea dawn on the consciousness that here, before our eyes, a
miracle of creation is being accomplished; that we surprise the very
incarnation of the stone; that we are witnesses of the birth of organic
form from the stiff, lifeless original matter, and may observe how the
figure, still half imprisoned in chaos, struggles painfully forth to
a form instinct with life. There are subjects for the representation
of which Rodin’s style would have been a happy invention: perhaps the
creation of Adam from a clod of earth, or the story of Deucalion and
Pyrrha, or a Promethean motive. But its uniform employment for all
possible subjects—on banal busts or groups which have no reference to
creation or genesis—causes the manner to be recognised for what it
is, a snatching at effect by means of eccentricity. Of course, this
striking and easily imitatable freak has founded a school. No American
or Scandinavian who wants to frighten the Philistines with “modernism”
neglects to exhibit a piece of, for the most part, wretched sculpture
as tiny as possible on a clump of unworked rock as Cyclopean as
possible. It cannot be said that the joke is cheap. The unhewn block of
marble often represents a pretty stiff value in hard cash, in any case
a higher one than the corner that has been chiselled. One can only say
that any idiot can succeed in using a ton weight of stone as a support
to a figure the size of a man’s hand.
Yet, in conclusion, it is a comparatively harmless folly which a
practitioner can remedy with a few strokes of the saw. It is sufficient
to cut the sculpture off, and give the rough block to a needy sculptor.
Far worse, because it is incurable, is the æsthetic principle to
which Rodin pays homage in the technique of his more important works
especially. He is, to wit, an Impressionist. A line of motion in an
individuality or group interests him. He seizes it, shapes it with
convincing truth, with an emphasis exaggerated—certainly purposely—to
the point of caricature, and neglects everything that does not serve
to illustrate this line of motion. Sculpture, however, is an art
which does not allow any Impressionism. It demands, according to its
nature, a perfectly accurate formation of the whole figure, and simple
honesty in reproducing the phenomenon. This can be proved by a theory
of perception. Sculpture fills space and is of three dimensions; it
addresses itself, in the first place, certainly to the eye, but also
to the sense of touch. It calls for stereoscopic vision, and is, at
least in theory, capable of further proof by a second sense. Now just
this theoretic possibility of further proof, by means of the sense of
touch, has the prohibitive effect, that fancy feels no inclination
to supplement the image provided by the sense of sight. In works of
painting we add in our mind much which is not optically given in the
picture. In plastic works we have not this psychical habit, because
a testing with the hands is opposed to the free, inventive power of
the imagination, and makes us at once recognise what has been given
in space, and what has been added by our imagination. On this ground,
there is no place in sculpture for intentions or hints. That is enough
for a rough plan, but not for the finished work. Rodin, however, stops
at a stage of completion, which may, at best, pass for a promise, but
never, in any case, for an achievement. He deliberately breaks up the
frame of artistic form. He would fain work with the habits of the
painter’s eye and the painter’s hand, and he applies this treatment to
the statute, standing free and exposed to examination from all sides.
The confused lines which represent the draughtsman’s first sketch
(_ébauche_) have their special charm and meaning on the surface to be
painted. If, however, you translate them into three dimensions, if
every careless movement of the artist’s hand, either still feeling
its way or hurrying on, is finally fixed in clay or bronze, something
inadmissible results, which has no right to proclaim itself a work of
art.
Such a seeking after the right expression, such a stammering in metal
is Rodin’s monument at Calais, which represents the burgesses of Calais
with the rope round their necks, standing before Edward III., who had
successfully besieged that city, and asking for mercy. The crushed
spirit which Rodin tried to express is actually visible in the group;
but the figures which express this emotion are formless from head
to foot. The limbs are rugged boughs; the bodies violate the laws
of anatomy; the whole group is on the stage of technical perfection
reached by the idols hewn from wood by the South Sea Islanders, and
is far inferior to many a pre-historic picture on mammoth’s teeth and
stag’s horn, which may be seen, for instance, in the Museum of St
Germain. Rodin’s domestic trumpeters promptly proclaimed this for a
work of lofty genius. The Corporation of the town of Calais, who had
ordered it, dared not reject it. The decadents’ reign of terror—it was
in the year 1895—was then in all its fury. The whole Paris Press was
in the power of the dictators of the Chat Noir, and the poor Calais
burgesses, clever men of business, but very uncertain in questions of
art, feared to be jeered at as wise men of Gotham, if they rebelled
against the æsthetic edicts of the tyrants of Paris criticism. But
they blush for shame and anger whenever they pass by the memorial, and
now, when the reign of terror of decadent criticism is over, it will
probably not be long before the Calais people pluck up courage enough
to have Rodin’s bronze abomination carted off from the public square,
and withdrawn, in a store-room in the Town Hall, from the scornful eyes
of strangers.
A counterpart of the Calais group is the design for the Victor Hugo
Memorial, which was for the first time exhibited in 1897, and again
five years later, when it was somewhat further advanced. This design
also showed nothing but intentions. The poet is sitting naked by the
seashore. The last shallow wave washes gently up to his feet. Two
female tutelary figures—perhaps History and Legend, or Poetry and
Philosophy—are flying to him horizontally at the level of his head and
whispering secrets in his ear. As a mere intention, the composition
might be allowed to pass; but nothing of execution, practically, was
yet to be seen. Victor Hugo’s body was not modelled; the flying female
figures could not be distinguished, either from a distance or on close
inspection, from cloud packs, or the fantastic animal figures of
Gothic gargoyles. Nevertheless, Rodin disarmed intelligent criticism
by declaring that the work was a mere sketch. Of course, he could no
longer be fairly reproached with its shapelessness, and people had to
content themselves with waiting for its completion, which has not come
to pass up to now.
Rodin has overstepped, in his Balzac Memorial, which he first exhibited
in 1898, the very extensive limits within which his silly aberrations
might have been borne. Master Shallow, who tolerates much, could not
tolerate this work, and broke down under its crushing exaction. When
the public saw this provocative monstrosity, it broke out into that
uncontrollable laughter, whereby the outraged intelligence of mankind
revenges itself with primitive force for restraints that it has long
suffered in silence. In the face of this result, the Committee of the
French Union of Authors, which had commissioned the Balzac Memorial,
resolved unanimously to decline it. In vain the Condottieri, who had
usurped supremacy in art criticism by the most unscrupulous methods
of conspiracy, violence, and oppression, made desperate efforts to
maintain themselves. They were powerless against the armed rising of
sensible people who had at last come to themselves. Their tyranny
was vanquished, and they were swept away. They might still talk all
sorts of twaddle about the stupidity of the masses, and, in impotent
rage, hiss at the victors the well-known shibboleths, “Philistine,”
“provincial,” etc., but this final, faint-hearted nagging sank unheard
in the unanimous cry of scorn from public opinion.
Rodin has represented Balzac as, jumping out of bed in the morning,
he wraps himself unclad in his monk-like dressing-gown, without even
putting his arms in the sleeves, irresistibly impelled to hurry to
his writing-table in order to fix the thoughts of which his creative
brain is full to bursting. Agreed: that, again, is the intention which
Rodin might, perhaps, have secretly put into the figure. What the eye
really sees is a sort of tree-trunk, hewn in the roughest manner by a
woodman with an axe, which is surmounted by a hideously swollen tadpole
head on a goitred neck. Malicious Parisian wit has exhausted all the
droll comparisons that this monstrosity can suggest to flouting humour.
People have called Rodin’s work a meal-sack, a carved potato, a snowman
made by a cheeky schoolboy, an unpacked statue, a stalactite, etc. The
work is all that, for it is nothing at all; but it is pre-eminently
the conclusive refutation of Rodin’s æsthetics. For it is the highest
expression, and, on that account, the unintentional parody, of his
impressionist technique and of his third mistake, viz., ignorance of
the limitations of his art.
Rodin worked at this wretched piece of work for ten whole years. First
he read all Balzac’s works; then he made a journey to Touraine and
spent months there, so as to absorb the human environment from which
Balzac took so many of his models, and to become permeated with the
feelings and impressions with which Balzac may have satiated himself
when composing—all this to make a human figure which was to be the
likeness of a man whom many people now living have known in the flesh.
After these preliminary studies, Rodin finally proceeded to form his
Balzac. His head was to be “a synthesis of his works,” his physiognomy
was to be summed up “in an eye that looks on the _Comédie humaine_
and in an upper lip that is curled in contempt for humanity.” So said
Rodin himself in several interviews which were published at the time
when his statue was exhibited. He was then merely repeating what the
twaddlers of Montmartre had chattered to him. It would be easy to make
jests about this inflammation of the brain, but it is not worth even
cheap raillery. It is quite enough to establish, soberly and drily,
that Rodin, like a child or an idiot, aimed at something impossible.
Sculpture cannot furnish any “synthesis of Balzac’s works.” Nature
herself cannot, in the sense that Balzac himself, when he was alive,
did not synthetise his works, in his externals, in his physiognomy.
He had perhaps the head of a man of mark, but there was assuredly
nothing in his face to show that he had written the “Physiology of
Marriage,” and not written “La Chartreuse de Parme” (Stendhal). Rodin
imagined that a portrait-statue could quite alone, merely by its own
means, supply the place of a biography and a psychological and literary
characterisation of the person represented. This patent lunacy was
necessarily bound to end, as it has ended, in a mad caricature.
“The Thinker,” a colossal statue which was exhibited in 1904, is almost
as bad an aberration as Balzac. It is a gigantic enlargement of a
little sketch that one saw many years ago over Rodin’s “Gate of Dante’s
Hell,” in the confused and scarcely indicated unborn _foetus_ lines of
which confident devotion might imagine all possible promises of future
splendour.
The promises are realised in “The Thinker.” He who still wishes to
shudder with foreboding in the presence of the finished work will be at
liberty to do so. It will be the same sort of man who grew enthusiastic
over the “Balzac,” before which every criticism of intelligent—not
“intellectual”—men dissolved into unextinguishable laughter. “The
Thinker” is brother of the “Balzac,” only it is not so comic, for
it is not dressed in a meal-sack, but is naked, and the bared human
body, when misshapen, excites in a spectator of unvitiated taste, not
cheerfulness, but discomfort, which may even rise to loathing.
“The Thinker” is not only naked, but also flayed. Its anatomy is
executed with obtrusive importance, without the covering epidermis
with its vital warmth. The enormous exaggeration of the muscles, the
impossible assertion of strength which is expressed by the extreme
contraction of all the muscles, therefore also of the counteracting
muscles, are well-known features of sculpture in its worst period of
decline. There is still, however, a distinction between Rodin and
the _rococo_ sculptors, who confused fleshy tumours over the whole
surface of the bodies of their statues with the power of portraying
artistically. At any rate, the latter had a correct knowledge of
myology, or the subject of the muscles, whereas Rodin’s anatomy
is shockingly inaccurate. I really do not think much of Lorenzo
Matthielly’s groups at the Vienna Hofburg-gates; but in the face of
Rodin’s monstrosity I apologise in my heart for all the objections I
have ever made against them. At any rate, with Matthielly every muscle
occupies its proper place. Rodin, however, invents muscles which do
not exist, and never did exist. Two mighty ridges, ending below in
sausage-tips, run down the “Thinker’s” back, which are perhaps intended
for the two _longissimi dorsi_; in this case, however, they are howling
blunders as regards their attachment, their whole course, and their
form. The muscles of the forehead and temples are treated quite as
arbitrarily as those of the back. Where nature only recognises thin
cutaneous muscles and ligatures, there Rodin puts bumps which remind
one of blood tumours after blows from a club, and impart to the face
the appearance of evil _Verschlagenheit_; not, as Fritz Reuter says, in
the sense of craftiness, but in that of receiving a sound cudgeling.
As a record “The Thinker” stands on the same level as the anatomical
plates in Japanese manuals of the healing art of the time of the
Shoguns.
This, however, is not yet the worst; the intellectual element fares
even worse than the bodily one with this oaf who calls himself so
pretentiously “The Thinker.” The flayed man sits crouching, with a
distinctly crooked hump, on a sharp-edged block of stone. His toes
claw convulsively into the ground. He holds a clenched fist before his
mouth, and seems to bite it fiercely. His bestial countenance, with its
bloated, contracted forehead, gazes as threateningly dark as midnight.
He who has to interpret the figure without the help of a title will,
from a back view, conclude it is some one writhing in agony on the
rack; and from a front view, a criminal meditating over some foul
deed. Its mien and bearing would suggest a designation such as “The
Fallen Titan,” “Lucifer’s Rebellion,” or “Cain before he murdered his
Brother.” The last thing which one would think of would be to look for
a mind working behind this bulgy forehead, or to imagine that thought
was supreme in this body seized by a spasm of rigidity in all its
muscles. The name given by Rodin to this wretched performance sounds
like a scoff or a calumny, and it might be thought the misled artist,
robbed by his fanatics of all self-criticism, had intended to make a
malicious parody of Michael Angelo’s _Pensieroso_.
Rodin himself, by his portrait busts, makes it possible to gauge
the whole insincerity of his pose as a profound thinker, and his
genius-playing arrogance; for instance, by that of Octave Mirbeau, and,
still more easily, by a female bust which was exhibited at the same
time as “The Thinker” monstrosity. With the exception of the folly,
which is, moreover, not too obtrusive, that a piece of the rough block
was allowed to remain on both shoulders, there was not the faintest
feature in the bust that could differentiate it from a severely
classical, coldly correct work. Here he had to satisfy a lady client,
and he was irreproachably smooth, executed all the details lovingly,
and produced a soft, delicate flesh, to which the elegant Injalbert
might sign his name. If one were desirous of making an objection to
this pleasant bust, it would, at worst, be that it is too sweet.
He becomes the destroyer of all form, the bungling sham-Titan, the
inscrutable philosopher, dramatist, and lyric poet, whose eye rolls in
a fine frenzy, and who, in the throes of his fever to create, confines
himself to hurried indications—he becomes all this only when he works
for his bodyguard of sympathetic sensitivism.
How future generations will laugh over all this buffoonery of “nerve
art”! Only, indeed, when it comes to know the comments of contemporary
“intellectuals” in addition to the artists’ silly bungling. For the
former will show them in a way to excite sympathy and amusement what
devastation the deafening babble of a band of gossips, dreadfully
ignorant of art and innocent of any feeling for beauty, could produce
in the taste and thought of a large majority, which honestly yearns
after æsthetic education, but, on account of a lack of trustworthy
traditions and adequate instruction in art, has not sufficient
self-confidence to set up the promptings, however obscure, of their own
feeling against the impudent dictates of presumptuous arbiters of taste.
Mysticism and sexual psychopathy in the choice of themes; Impressionism
and incidental eccentricities in technique; overstepping the
limitations of his art, have made Rodin the great man of the fellows
who for some two decades have set the fashion in art and literature. By
these three peculiarities, to which he owes his spurious celebrity, he
will be ruined as an artist, whatever the success he owes to puffing
may be. And that is lamentable, for Rodin is a genuinely gifted
sculptor, who created beauty when he did not yet think himself bound
to work out of gratitude to the “young” journals. Unfortunately, it
is extremely improbable that he will now find his way back to that
simplicity and naturalness in which salvation is alone attainable.
There is no return from Montmartre, not, at any rate, for an old man
who has climbed this height and accepted with passionate earnestness
all what he saw and heard there in advanced years. Young people who are
still capable of change, in many cases awake from the idle dream of
Montmartre æstheticism. Nature does not vouchsafe to the old to begin a
new life.
XIV
RESURRECTION
BARTHOLOMÉ
I do not want to speak of Tolstoi’s novel, but of a work of art—great,
at any rate, materially, as a statue—which every pilgrim to Paris will,
I suppose, wish to see, viz., the monument which Bartholomé dedicated
“To the Dead,” and which is to be seen in the cemetery of Père Lachaise.
It is interesting in so many aspects that one might devote to it a
monograph as thick as a book, which would send out suckers over the
whole domain of æsthetics and the history of art. Never do I feel so
painfully the inadequacy of a short essay as when I proceed to handle
a subject so rich in connections. It is impossible to exhaust it in
this form, and it is painful to leave it as a fragment. One appears
limited, whereas one is only restricted. We must satisfy ourselves with
indications which will easily be looked upon as superficial, though
they are merely terse. What is thought out as a proof takes the form of
mere assertion, and in cases where we should like to convince, we must
think ourselves successful, when we have incited the reader to kindly
co-operation—which, however, goes for the most part its own way.
This pious ejaculation will make it easier for me to accommodate myself
to the conditions which have been imposed on the short essay.
Works of sculpture in public places, which are neither monuments nor
ornamental buildings, viz., such as are not intended to call to mind
special events or particular individuals, are something novel in the
development of high art. Antiquity knew only monumental creations which
had their origin in patriotic sentiments. We have to bear in mind that
religion in ancient communities constituted a part of patriotism,
for there were no gods for mankind in general, but only gods for a
particular people or a particular state. When Socrates had to drain the
cup of hemlock, it was not because he had sinned against Olympus, but
because he had given offence to Athens in the person of her tutelary
divinities. The Battle of the Giants and the Frieze of the Parthenon,
the Pallas Athene of the Acropolis and the Olympian Zeus, were felt, by
those who gazed on them and for whom they had been wrought, as images
from the past and present of their race. Even the “Laocoon” and the
“Farnese Bull” were so regarded: a distinction between the legends of
their race and accredited history, nay, between theology and politics,
did not exist in the consciousness of the multitude at large, or even
in that of the select few. The god made of ivory and gold was the
public worship of a living being who was invested with high rank in
the commonwealth, and the Olympian victor to whom a statue was erected
entered into mythology as a comrade of Hercules, Theseus, and Perseus.
Religious art was the only public art known in the Middle Ages. If
material political interests swayed the minds of communities in Pagan
times, when the nations became Christian the supersensual, _i.e._, the
salvation of the soul, became the great concern of the individual as of
the community. Patriotism disappeared from the domain of emotion; what
took its place—the pride of town, or class, or guild—was merely delight
in material possession, or, if you like, a sort of vulgar dignity
without any ideal background. Faith was their only sentiment, piety
the artist’s sole impulse from which genuine creations could spring.
It followed, therefore, that religious art—the only monumental art
then in existence—attached itself to sacred places, and subordinated
itself to them as really mere accessory decoration. Without resting on
architecture, sculpture stood on its own feet only in the Stations of
the Cross on Calvaries, but, even in this case, it had no object of
its own, but served a definite purpose of worship. The beginnings of a
public art which grew out of an abstract thought of the community—one
not of a religious but of a temporal, of civic nature—are scanty and
dim. As forerunners of such an art we can claim the Roland Pillars of
the Free Towns—the symbol of their civil and criminal jurisdiction—with
their indistinct, historical background of dim memories of Charlemagne
as the legal source of municipal liberties, and perhaps also the
Byzantine Lion of Brunswick.
The Renaissance was the first to create a monumental art that was
to serve no practical, religious, or dynastic purpose, but one
purely æsthetic, from which people looked for no strengthening of
ecclesiastical views, no increase of authority and, through that,
of power in a prince or government, but looked, in fact, only for
delight in beauty. Renaissance art, I admit, rich and free as its
development was, also remained thoroughly under the influence of
mediæval traditions, and knew no other range of themes than those
derived from the Bible and Classic mythology. Even worldlings among the
artists, who had outgrown religious ideas, drew at least their stories
from the New and, even more commonly, from the Old Testament, or from
pagan mythology, which was familiar only to the educated, and to the
multitude at large was meaningless, and devoid of life. A scholastic
pedantry hung about such works as Benvenuto Cellini’s “Perseus,” for
instance, which prevented the masses from appreciating them fully. It
was not, however, done from haughty disdain, for monumental art—the art
of the streets and squares—appeals indeed to the masses. The modelling,
on the one hand, of what is purely human, which appeals to feelings in
every human heart, and is, therefore, understood by every man; on the
other hand, of a subject, well-defined in time and place, which must
be familiar, at any rate, to contemporaries and residents: this degree
sculpture attained only gradually and late. The Goose-man of Nuremberg
and the Brussels Mannikin are instances of local Realism; Tadda’s
“Justice” at Florence and Michael Angelo’s “Pietà”—these in spite of
their religious relations are examples of universal human Idealism.
It is characteristic of the timidity of sculpture, even in its proud
epoch of the Renaissance, that it dared not cast itself adrift from
presenting what was of immediate utility. It thought it needed an
excuse for stepping out into the market-place before all the people. It
found it fairly in supplying towns with water. It created fountains.
These are the first and, for a long time, the only monumental works
which were suggested neither by religion nor by loyalty to some
dynasty; which aim neither at immortalising the memory of a particular
event, nor at refreshing the schoolboy knowledge of the more liberally
educated, but embody, without any pre-possession, a purely artistic
conception of form fulfilled and animated with subjective emotion.
The stages of development of the monumental fountains, which pretend
to be mere sports of untrammelled fancy on the artist’s past, extend
to the present day, in the latest phase, in which the fountain is not
really intended to distribute water, like Sluter’s “Fount of Moses”
at Dijon, or Jean Goujon’s “Fontaine des Innocents” in Paris, but uses
the water only as a decorative element, as Donner’s fountain in the
market-place of Vienna, or Reinhold Begas’s Neptune fountain in the
Berlin Schlossplatz.
We must come down to the last century to find at last a monumental
art of universal feelings or thoughts, still, for the most part,
modestly cringing under the protection of architecture, as groups
on pediments of palaces, theatres, and exhibition-buildings, and
taking possession of the public square in full independence only in
the last decades. Historical works, even of an universal, impersonal
sort, such as the numerous war-memorials in Germany and France, the
_risorgimento_-monuments of Italy, the patriotic battle-memories in
Switzerland—do not come under consideration here, but only abstract
works such as Bartholdi’s “Freedom enlightening the World,” at New
York, or Dalou’s “Republic as the Protector of Labour and Culture,” in
the Place de la Nation, at Paris.
Even these works still continue to show a birthmark, which betrays
their origin from the sculpture of purpose, for Bartholdi’s gigantic
statue is a lighthouse, and Dalou’s “Triumph of the Republic” belongs
to the fountain series.
On the other hand, Bartholomé’s “Memorial to the Dead” is as free
from every idea of commonplace utility as any mouldings for the rooms
of a house. It originated in the artist’s emotion, and had, at its
birth, no other purpose than that of relieving its creator by the
gratification of an impulse. What was to become of the work after it
was finished is a question Bartholomé probably never asked himself
at all. Perhaps he resigned himself to the thought that it would
pass a pensioner’s existence in some museum or other. In any case,
carelessness as to what use would be made of it left him entire freedom
as to the form it should take. And now he had the unexpected happiness
of the work being purchased by the city of Paris, and placed in Père
Lachaise. This has been the first instance, as far as I know, of a
purely subjective, monumental work capturing a public position without
this being justified by a practical service to the community, without
embellishing a building, without satisfying any religious need or
patriotic feeling, without immortalising any historical reminiscence,
without glorifying any event or individual, but basing its claim to
the grateful attention of the people at large only on the grounds that
it attempts to embody in beauty an elemental emotion alive in the
masses, that is to say, a real, common interest of moral order. The
work may become the starting-point of a new monumental art, which will
set itself the hitherto unknown task of presenting, with the authority
of great sculpture, moods and views of the world, viz., the spiritual
conditions common to a people, of interpreting them to that people, and
of fixing them for history.
With all its novelty, Bartholomé’s work is, notwithstanding, not
without organic connection with the historical development of
art. There is no virgin-birth in art. Every work has a pedigree.
Bartholomé’s art is allied to the Campo Santo art of the Middle
Ages, from which it borrows thoughts of consolation and promise. It
nevertheless exhibits a daring progress when it has emancipated itself
from the architecture of gateways, outer walls, chapels, etc., and
forced its way in independent form, complete in itself.
The street of tombs opens at the main entrance of Père Lachaise, and
leads to a gently rising hill, the declivity of which Bartholomé’s
masterpiece occupies. It displays the irregular, decorated side of a
two-storied stone building of ancient Egyptian architecture of the
simplest lines. A high door opens in the middle of the upper story,
into the shadowy depth of which a naked man has entered. Him follows
hesitatingly, with her outstretched right hand grasping his shoulder
and seeking support, a young woman, the lines of whose profile, from
her mouth distorted with fear down to the soles of her feet that detach
themselves reluctantly from the ground, express a horror in presence of
the unknown.
Towards this Gate of Death move, on the right and left, groups, each of
seven persons, whom the artist has striven honestly, yet without real
success, to fashion in various shapes. At the first hurried glance,
the two processions appear to be variously moved; but on looking more
closely into them, we recognise an uniformity which proves a striking
poverty of imagination. On the left, hard by the Gate of Fate, a young
woman is sitting on a stone-bench without support, with her countenance
concealed by her hands. She cannot make up her mind to rise from where
she is resting, in order to take the last step. A second woman is
visible in a similar irresolute attitude, in weak relief on the wall.
Cowering behind the two, kneeling quite low, so that the thighs lie in
parallel lines over the legs, a naked man seems to be whispering words
of encouragement into the ear of the seated woman. Then follows a woman
sunk on her knees as if crushed, who hides her face like the first
with a somewhat different movement, and behind her a man standing, but
bending down to her, and addressing words of consolation. Last of all,
another woman sitting down, whose dishevelled hair is streaming over
her countenance, and, behind her, a man standing upright, likewise as
a consoler. Thus is repeated on this side the theme of the despairing
woman and the calm, comforting man. On the right side the invention
is somewhat richer. Close to the door stands an old man—decidedly the
most expressive figure in the whole composition—clinging tightly to the
door-posts; and with his head and the upper portion of his body bent
forward, he tries to get a terrified glance at the awful mystery, ere
he pulls himself together for entering. To his group belongs a woman
stretched on the ground with her face pressed in her hands before her;
another folding her hands in prayer, and a half-grown girl shrugging
her lean shoulders in terror. There follows a second group of three
figures—a woman with dishevelled hair, bowed low to the ground; a
crouching man supporting her and preventing the feeble figure from
sinking down completely; and a young woman who kneels on one leg, turns
her back to Death’s portal, and glances back on life as though she
still hoped for deliverance.
The lower story shows, through the front-wall, which is removed to its
full extent, the interior of the vault into which the upper Gate of
Death seems to lead down. On a mattress-like couch rest, side by side,
the naked bodies of a man and his young spouse; across their bodies is
laid their little one year old child; in the background is visible in
low relief on the wall a winged angel with outstretched arms, who looks
down lovingly on the three quiet sleepers. With a _naïvité_ which does
not rise above the puerile method of the _quattrocentisti_, of making
their figures express themselves by means of legends issuing from their
mouths, Bartholomé writes on this wall beneath the angel the sense of
his allegory: “They that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon
them hath the light shined.”
Above all, the artist deserves the respect that is due to long and
earnest effort. We have here before us a work of ten years’ labour,
executed with composure, inspiration, and conscientiousness. He who
can do that, of him one may say, without the slightest suggestion
of irony: “With his talent, however applied, the man is certainly a
character.” Many details of the monument, nevertheless, prove that
Bartholomé is not only a character, but also a man of talent. The
husband and wife turn their quiet faces to each other in the rest that
is in the grave, and lay their hands one upon the other; and this
movement is so tender and sincere that it makes a deep impression.
It really expresses in sculpture the love that endures beyond the
grave. It is the solitary true emotion in the whole work; for he
whose eyes grow moist at the sight of the dead child with the sweet
little baby limbs, will say to himself that his emotion is not of an
æsthetic nature, is not evoked by the means of art, but is the purely
physical reaction of a human heart from a cruelly painful impression,
in which no artistic element or inspiration is mingled. The woman who
enters Death’s portal a prey to horror exhibits graceful lines, and
the old greybeard who timidly peers into it is cleverly conceived and
accurately represented.
Beside these excellent details, many middling and absolute weak
ones disturb us. The dead husband in the grave has an Aztec face
of repulsive ugliness, which is not called for by any artistic
considerations. The attitudes of many figures, especially those
squatting or cowering, are in bad taste. A primary personage—the man
who has stepped into the Gate of Death—stalks bending forward with
head bowed down and the muscles of his back contracted, like one
who is hauling with all his might. It is a matter of surprise that
the tow-rope with which the vessel is dragged is not to be seen. I
cannot prove it, but I am convinced that Bartholomé has formed this
man, not after a model, but from what he recollected of a hauler by
Constantin Meunier. I have already called attention to the monotony
of the group _motifs_. The whole conception of the composition, at
any rate of the upper story, is an echo of Canova’s monument to Maria
Christina at Vienna, with the further development that Bartholomé
shows the subterrestrial and supernatural continuation of the theme
which Canova carries only as far as the entrance to the realm of
shades, leaving what follows to the pious belief of the spectator. The
weightiest objection which must be made to the work as a whole is its
offensive lack of repose. All the individual details are, with few
happy exceptions, realistic, whilst the effect of the whole composition
moves in extreme unreality. How has Bartholomé’s most original artistic
instinct not preserved him from trying to present a wholly ideal dogma
with the most vulgar, petty realism? Simple mediæval sculptors might
work thus. In our contemporaries we do not believe in simplicity, and
therefore the discord between idea and form has a jarring effect.
The most ideal dogma that Bartholomé preaches is, however, that of
the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the body; for
his monument can mean only that, if it means anything at all. It is
conceived as a consolation to the sorrow-laden who form the last escort
to a dear one that is dead, or are making a pilgrimage to the grave
of one they loved. And what consolation has he to offer them? See, he
says, in the figures on the upper story, the sorrow with which men
approach the gates of shadow-land. Why this faint-heartedness? Why this
timorous shrinking from the terrors of death? Death has no terrors.
It is entering into peace and the fulfilment of a high promise. And
he shows, in the lower story, the gentle, blessed rest the dead enjoy
who there slumber until their resurrection, watched by their guardian
angel, who awakes them at the appointed hour, and convey their immortal
souls to their divine destination.
That is the cosmic view held by an artist on the threshold of the
twentieth century. Holbein and his predecessors in painting the
Dance of Death were men who believed in Christianity, but the only
consolation that they offered mortals was this: Don’t bewail your
mortal lot, you share it with Pope and Emperor. The path from the
Rationalism of this exhortation to the mysticism of Bartholomé’s dogma
is called by the decadents Progress.
The decadents are consistent when they call Bartholomé a modern,
one of the most modern, and hail his work as the art of the future.
It is logically on a line with the “progress” and “modernism” of a
Huysmans, Maeterlinck, Bourget, and other New Catholics. But what is
to be said about the city of Paris having this unctuous work erected
in Père Lachaise? Had the Moscow Duma done it, everybody would have
found it natural. But the Paris Municipal Council! This society of
boasting freethinkers which has banished the Cross from the schools and
churchyards, hounded the Sisters of Mercy from the hospitals, has the
dogma of the Resurrection preached officially!
That is the highly interesting ethical side of this work. It reveals
monumentally the confusion in the donkey-heads of the self-styled
freethinkers. That they should decree the honour of a public site to
a composition of a dogmatically religious character is proof of crass
ignorance of their own standpoint, or else of their hypocrisy. I prefer
to assume it to be their ignorance.
XV
JEAN CARRIÈS
The little palace, the charming edifice which was already attractive
as the abode of the Dutuit collection, has received a new value
and consecration. A room has been opened in it, in which a great
artist reveals himself, whose acquaintance, though not indeed quite
exhaustively, but nevertheless very profoundly and familiarly, can be
made only here in the wide world. This artist is Jean Carriès, who died
in 1894, at the early age of thirty-nine, after a marvellously planned
life. To this pattern life, as expressive as any whose story Vasari
has told, belonged a patron who kept what is vulgar away from him,
who saved him from care and anxiety, who made his mind easy as to his
influence on contemporaries and posterity, and, to a certain extent,
symbolically personified his fame for him. This useful part was played
by a certain Herr Hoentschel, who acquired most of Carriès’s works. He
has now presented them to the City of Paris, and, by so doing, rendered
the opening of the Carriès Museum possible. In return his name has
been engraved in letters of gold on the marble slab which declares the
purpose to which the room has been assigned, beside that of his trusted
artist—no mean satisfaction to a high-aiming ambition.
Carriès was the son of a poor artisan of Lyons. He seemed destined,
as he thought, to follow his father’s avocation; but the fairies had
conferred gifts on the proletarian’s child in his cradle: sense of
beauty and power of design. He was for a short time apprenticed to an
artisan; then he taught himself to be an artist. He pursued no beaten
tracks, and could follow no guides. He was left to his own sense of
locality for finding out a path, and he made wide _détours_, but,
nevertheless, raised himself safely to the highest peaks. Phenomena
delighted him as form and colour. His pleasurable sensations sufficed
to impel him to utterance in sculpture and painting; he satisfied
his delight in form by modelling in clay, his delight in colour by
enamelling.
For nearly two decades he sought, strove, and created in solemn
loneliness. Only the patron whom he luckily found at the right time
glanced over his shoulders when at work with bated breath. His
reverential admiration expressed itself in a convincing manner by the
helpful gesture of the open hand. Some intimate comrades were allowed
to witness the lofty drama of an exquisite development. His studio,
however, was far removed from the noise of the market. The heat of
praise and the icy breath of blame brought no disturbance into the
even climate in which his talent was powerfully developing. Quiet and
collected, he worked on until he saw his inner vision realised before
him. Then he said: “It is good”; and allowed a great Sabbath to follow
the hard days of creation. Absolutely unknown to wider circles, in 1892
he stepped before the public for the first time in the Champs de Mars
with a rich exhibition. An hour after the doors of the “Salon” were
open, he was famous. In the history of modern art, never before had
such an impressive revelation been observed. There was no hesitation,
no vacillation. Artists, critics, connoisseurs made pilgrimage, as if
guided by the shepherds’ star in the bodeful procession of the three
kings of the East to Carriès’ glass cases and pedestals, bent their
knees, and brought incense and myrrh. His countrymen shouted for joy:
“France has one great painter more.” Thoughtful persons looked at one
another and said softly: “The world is by one beauty richer.”
All asked: “Who is the man?” for they insisted, in their amazement,
that nobody knew him. And then they found out that Jean Carriès was a
finished artist, a man of thirty-seven, who lived in the provinces, and
had, up to that time, sought nothing but the satisfaction of himself.
He had not wasted the tiniest little spark of his Promethean strength
in the vulgar melodrama of fighting for success. His tragedies were the
great struggle with the resistance of material, and doubt of himself,
and they had been played in secret in his soul. And now was pressed
upon him that for which candidates strive convulsively, and how often
fruitlessly! The Champs de Mars Society elected him with acclamation
to full membership, and dispensed him from the probationary period
is associate. The State asked for specimens to serve as models for
its museums, and tied the red ribbon to the buttonhole of his blouse.
What was purchasable was bought up by the ladies of Arc de Triomphe
quarter during the first days of the “Salon.” A rich American lady,
Mrs Winnareta Singer, commissioned him to carry out the model of his
fantastic “door.” The artists fêted him by a banquet in his honour—a
homage which at that time was not lavished as was the case afterwards.
Mdlle. Luise Breslau painted his portrait, which is now exhibited in
his room in the midst of his works, and showed his admirers a still
youngish man of noble beauty, with a Lucius Verus head, the Cæsarean
nobility of which was not in the least injured by a careless slouched
hat. I do not know whether Mdlle. Breslau has flattered her model or
has been honest, for I never saw Carriès himself; but in the picture
he appears, as one would like to fancy him, every inch a gentleman,
on whom his careless working-dress has the effect of a disguise which
does not for a second deceive as to the rank of the wearer. A delicate,
slender figure; wonderfully active, inspired hands; deep, searching
eyes that seem to sight and fix a dream-picture hovering away; soft,
narrow cheeks, on which uneasy shadows play, under the short beard; a
thoughtful, white forehead over which an abundance of light brown curls
falls. How many women may have indulged in dreams before this likeness,
for it fascinates even men!
The homage received had no intoxicating effect on him; the activity
of the Press concerning him did not infect him with the smallest
beginnings of conceit. He withdrew from the curiosity of the world by
quietly returning to his provincial nest, where, day and night, he
stoked his Earning furnace, and mixed his acids and metallic salts;
suffered under frequent disappointments, and enjoyed rare delights in
the success of a firing or a coloured enamel. In the ensuing year one
looked in vain for him in the “Salon,” and not quite two years after
his unparalleled triumph that came like a bomb, men learnt that he had
died.
His life had ended artistically. Carriès disappeared ere his locks grew
scanty or grey. Beautifully and noiselessly, like another Euphorion,
he soared away from the admiration of his contemporaries in the full
lustre of his fame; and his works, through his early death, experienced
the enhanced value of the Sibylline books. We may call him happy, for
in this room we feel that he had given his best when he died. With a
longer life he might have gone astray, for there is no lack of short
openings to false paths. Very likely he would have repeated himself
many times, and that would have detracted from the dainty charm of
rarity which, besides their noble beauty, is peculiar to his works.
He unites in himself two different and equally perfect artists: the
sculptor and the art-potter. Each tilled a tiny field; but with what
intensity! And what harvests they conjured out of it! As sculptor,
curiously enough, the whole human figure in its Olympian nudity failed
to interest him. He has not on a single occasion sought to represent
the body’s Paradisaic beauty. He confines himself, apparently on
principle, to head and hands; but these are surpassed by nothing, and
equalled only by little, that all the centuries since the Renaissance
have produced. I pass respectfully, yet without deeper feeling, by his
busts of Velasquez and Franz Hals. They are merely exercises of his
hand, perhaps only pastimes. They seem theatrical by reason of the
accentuation of the costume. In their countenances the absence of the
model is too evident. But beside them the busts of Gustave Courbet, of
Jules Breton, especially of Carriès himself, operate with unequalled
authority. They live before us; they think, and they reveal themselves.
In looking at them we involuntarily call to mind the old stories of
the earthen statues which a magician filled with the breath of life in
order that they might serve him.
The same impression, only intensified and deepened, is felt before
the busts of the “Young Girl with the Drooping Head,” the “Dutch
Wife,” and the “Dutch Maiden.” This young Dutch girl is particularly
adorable. I do not consider I am exaggerating when I say she ranks as
a sister, though in a different technique, with the “Mona Lisa.” The
maiden’s innocent eyes, which have no presentiment of the passionate
secrets of Gioconda; the graceful, reposeful countenance, that seems
wondering blissfully over her own blooming youth and the loveliness
of the world, charm us like the miracle of a spring day. Similar joy
streams from his sleeping and waking little children. The softness of
this baby flesh, the delicate texture of this plump, warm, satin skin,
are unattainable. Carriès discovered a new technique for the life of
the outer skin, the results of which, in his hands, are amazing. He
gives a delicate, perpendicular creasing to the membrane of the lips,
and marks it off from the skin of the face in a discreet but firm line,
so that it imparts the illusion of seeing swelling lip-red framed in
mother-of-pearl. The mouths of his women are weirdly seductive. It
would really not surprise me if semi-fools and lunatics were to pounce
upon these ravishing lips with eager kisses.
Even when Carriès is not idealising, but is reproducing portraits true
to nature, he imparts to them an inwardness which seems unfathomable,
like that of a deep soul. For this let any one only look at the “Bust
of an Unknown Lady” and “Mother Callamand”—the former a cold, proud
patrician, perhaps the Clara Vere de Vere, in whom Tennyson admires
“that repose which stamps the caste of Vere de Vere”; the latter a
splendid old nun, probably an abbess, a sturdy, peasant woman who is
conscious of her high rank in the convent, and in whose broad face
goodness and severity, healthy power and enthusiastic spirituality,
are mingled. This gift of filling the subject with inward life is
the strongest element in Carriès’ genius. In a series of works which
were exhibited in the Champs de Mars Salon, and are, unfortunately,
not to be found in the room of the Little Palace, this cropped up
overpoweringly. There were fabulous animals, monsters, which a
luxuriant imagination had invented—toads, frogs, lizards of gigantic
size, in positions humanly conceived, the female reposing on the breast
of the male, whose eyes are closing in rapture, and delicately embraced
by his paws. One might think they would have a grotesque effect; by
no means. Their anthropomorphism brought them in danger of derision;
but the genius of Carriès was here directly revealed. The quasi-human,
emotional life manifested in their attitudes made them pathetic. The
toads’ legs were not seen; their mouths and goggle eyes were not seen.
People saw only the unmistakable trait of love, and were moved by this
exhibition of the primitive feeling—the same in man and beast—which
holds the world together.
Perhaps it is in accordance with this gift of spiritualisation that
Carriès never worked with marble, rarely with bronze, but, as a rule,
and preferably, with potter’s clay. Stone and metal, however painfully
correctly they render, with every stroke of the thumb and impression of
the finger, the clay model, seem to him too hard for the inexpressible
tenderness which he wants to express. Only one material satisfies
him—the one which possesses the softness of flesh and of nerve-plasm.
He can knead only clay so that it retains his lightest vibrations.
There is something about his busts of burnt clay that reminds me of
phonographic cylinders. There is soul-melody inscribed in them in
invisible lines, and, set in our mood, they again begin to give forth
sounds, and to repeat the mood of him who composed them.
The ability with trembling fingers to coax emotions into soft clay
and to render them plastic seems to be something divine. It did not
satisfy Carriès. Anybody else would have found the limits of his genius
enviably wide; to him they appeared narrow, and he tried to pass beyond
them. He wanted to create monumental pieces of sculpture, and he
constructed his “Martyrdom of St Fidelis” and his astounding “Gate.”
The “Martyrdom” is a group, composed of the kneeling martyr in monastic
habit and the executioner behind him, raising his armed fist to deal
the murderous blow. In the details the artist is here, too, distinctly
Carriès, _i.e._, the executioner is of superb cruelty—a fine specimen
of the family of brutalised legionaries or torturers who, in mediæval
_relievi_ of the Way of the Cross, scourge Christ at the pillar and
nail Him to the Cross. Taken as a whole, the master’s art is a failure;
the group has no line. The drama cannot be seen from any side, that
is, the gesture of the executioner, with its menace of death, and the
countenance of the martyr who is awaiting his last trial, cannot be
comprehended at once in a single glance.
If this group is weak, the “Gate” is a complete failure. He imagined
a gateway with a depressed keel-arch top, divided by an intervening
pillar into two gates. The pillars are covered with grotesque masks
and mythical animals from top to bottom. The arch of the gate is
formed by a dragon, in the gaping jaws of which stands a noble lady.
The separate masks and monsters scintillate with spirit, fancy, and
humour. In richness and variety of invention, and in depth of humour,
I unhesitatingly place these heads far above Germain Pilon’s Pont Neuf
masks. The contrast, too, between the fearless maiden standing in the
animal’s jaws, full of quiet self-confidence, and the hideous beast, is
of pregnant symbolism. The work is, nevertheless, an aberration, as a
whole. The masks and monsters have no organic connection with the gate,
either constructively, or in accordance with the meaning. They are
simply stuck on. And the gateway itself is an insoluble riddle. Where
should it lead to? To a lunatic asylum, a museum of caricatures, or a
carnival ballroom? Or should it mean “the abstract door,” the door
pure and simple, without the purpose of an entrance into a building?
The poor, great artist consecrated years of his life to this prodigy,
and never saw that he had wasted them.
The decorator amused himself in devising unheard-of enamels. He
modelled vessels of smooth, supple plant-forms—calabashes, melons,
cucumbers, mamillaria-cactuses, bulging or fallen in, smoothly
swelling, or warty and shrivelled, whimsically dinted like a thin
copper-plate, wantonly hammered, or lumpy and swollen. And over these
whimsicalities, which show an incredible mastery of the material,
he poured glazes which look so fat and moist that they seem to flow
still, viscous and languid. Many are purple, like half-curdled blood;
others white and rich, like fresh cream; and others like coloured
fruit juices; but many a time we think we see thick matter and brains
in frightful discharges; and on some vases the enamel imitates the
lichens which overrun the bark of trees in spots, grooves, and bands.
And when Carriès has done enough with these glazes, which remind us of
opalescent life-saps, he tries diversity in glazes of gold, silver,
coral, and precious stones, which change his stoneware phials into
splendid vessels from a treasury of the Thousand and One Nights.
As a sculptor in clay Jean Carriès stands as high as Della Robbia; in
details—in forming lips and cheeks—far higher than the latter; and, as
a decorator, no one can be compared with him, not even Bernhard de
Palissy—to mention a name by which his rank may be estimated. Carriès
is not a man of to-day, and fashion lies far below the height on which
he works. The wretched æsthetic-babbling coteries of the period cannot
get hold of him, or make use of him for the senseless but furiously
bellowed catchwords peculiar to the polemics of the day. He is not a
modernist, not a classic, not an impressionist; he is not this, he is
not that, but, he is, quite simply, himself. He works up what he has
learnt in his own person; he invents his own, and always gives himself.
He creates from his own soul, without looking to right or left. In him
there is no school, no tendency, and no straining, but only feeling,
personality, and the service of beauty. Yet it is through these great
artistic natures, which belong to no time, that the line of development
in art proceeds, and not through the pitiful _homunculi_, whom Faust
caricatures artificially engender in advertisement-retorts.
XVI
WORKS OF ART AND ART CRITICISMS
During the last years the relation of public opinion to works of art
has been repeatedly discussed, and on each occasion with great warmth.
The discussion, in the main, is concerned with two questions which are
independent even if they are connected with each other, viz.: Has the
public a right to judge a work of art, or must it renounce its own
opinion and simply bow before the verdict of specialists? Have not
all, or, at any rate, many, works of art that have subsequently gained
undisputed recognition by the world, been strongly opposed and rashly
rejected on their first appearance in public?
In 1899 intellectual Berlin was excited about a pertinent question.
Professor Franz Stuck, the Munich painter, had obtained a commission
for a wall-painting for the German House of Parliament. When the artist
sent in his sketch, there came a shriek of most unpleasant astonishment
from the judging committee of the Reichstag, and a member, Dr Lieber,
expressed in public session, in very strong language, his absolutely
unmixed feelings in respect of the work.
The Munich friends of the insulted artist, to their credit, made common
cause for him. They published an armour-clad protest, in which they
characterised the members as “laymen unable to judge,” and reproached
them with impertinence because they “thought they understood everything
better than learned specialists did.”
I expressed my views then in the _Deutsche Revue_ of this opposition
between specialists and laymen in plastic art, and I ask permission to
repeat here in brief the essential part of my arguments.
Who are the experts? From the general drift of the objection on the
part of the Munich artists it was to be concluded that they must be
the practising artists, the critics, perhaps also the professors of
art-history. Let him who does not belong to these three sacrosanct
categories steal weeping away from the confederation of experts. And
even among the critics there is probably a selection to be made. The
critic who praises the artist is to him undoubtedly an expert; the
critic who blames him shows himself incontestably as a _bourgeois_, and
in intelligence stands almost as low as a common University professor
who does not teach art-history.
All this is foolish talk. In matters of art, if, indeed, any one can,
only an individual—never a category—can lay claim to the rank of
expert. Is, perhaps, the practising artist the expert? He is not so
necessarily. There are people whose vocation in life, or, speaking more
correctly, whose usual occupation, is painting, but whose painting is
a continuous insult to art. One may be a professional painter, and yet
a pitiful dauber, and commit such impudent sins against good taste
that every non-expert must recognise this at the first glance, and be
provoked at it. Or is the critic the expert? It would be a good joke to
assert that.
Nearly every verdict on a work or an artist committed to paper by
a professional critic is opposed by another verdict, also by a
professional critic which says the exact contrary. Which of the two
critics is an expert? Which of the two has a right to demand that
people should bow before his verdict, because he habitually makes
phrases about works of art in public? What proof of capacity do the
papers as a rule demand of the _beaux esprits_ to whom they entrust
art criticism? He who has observed dozens of times how ambitious
young newspaper-writers, on their first report of an opening of an
Exhibition, or after forming a coffee-house acquaintance with an artist
thirsting for advertisement, suddenly discover in their minds a gift
for art criticism, and have subsequently cultivated this with brazen
self-consciousness; he will feel highly amused when people try to crack
up art-critics as experts, simply because they exercise this function.
Even professors of the history of art, even directors of museums, are
not, by reason of their office, experts in the sense of possessing very
profound understanding of art. The academic study of art-history lays
the chief stress on the facts belonging to the history of life and
morals, which need have nothing in common with the understanding of
art. One may make in archives the most beautiful discoveries for the
biography of Leonardo, and not feel a single one of his pictures. And
as regards superintendents of museums, it is possible to relate the
funniest anecdotes about their fallibility, and oppose to them simple
connoisseurs, also “non-experts,” who have formed splendid private
collections.
The truth is there are no experts in questions of art, as there are,
perhaps, in questions of technique. Expert knowledge presupposes the
existence of fixed rules, of a canon. There can be no talk of this in
the fine arts. The only element of painting that, at least to a certain
point—to the point where the individual conception and, with it, really
artistic interest first begins—is under objective rules, is drawing,
both from its figure as well as its perspective side. This element can
be taught, learnt, and faithfully measured, for nature furnishes the
scales. On the other hand, the colour element in painting is subject to
absolutely no canon, but at best to subjective feeling, at worst to a
fashion of the period. Every artificial colour is a convention; for, as
I have argued more particularly in my studies of Sisley and Pissarro,
none can truly reproduce the real colours of natural phenomena, and
it is wholly a consequence of education and habit, when the polychrome
of oil-painting or water-colour more easily excites in us the illusion
of colouristic truth than the monochrome of the two-colour or of
black and white art. One decade paints in dark, another in bright
colours. One school likes powerful, another subdued harmonies of
colour. Præ-Raphaelites imitate the tone of old frescoes and faded
Gobelins. Puvis de Chavannes took the colour out of his pictures by a
transparent white-wash, pale as the moon. Besnard, on the contrary,
discharges fireworks, without caring in the least if the mad tumults of
colour that he loved are possible or not in nature. Carrière envelops
his figures in a dense mist. Cottet has, very recently, brought into
fashion the black and dark shadings which go right back from Ribot
and Prudhon to Velasquez and Ribera. Who is right? Who is wrong? Here
everything is feeling, and consequently subjectivity. Of drawing, one
can in all cases say (and by photography irrefutably prove), it is
correct, or it is wrong. Colour does not admit of a similar verdict.
All that can be said of it is: “I like it,” or “I don’t like it.”
For beauty in art, in the present condition of the perception theory,
the physiology and psychology of pleasurable feelings, there is no
other standard than subjective feeling. This is dependent on the
greater or the less sensitiveness of the nervous system, on its
perceptivity of slight qualitative and quantitative differences in the
excitation of the senses, and, therefore, on an essentially congenital
constitution of the organism. The gift of receiving strong impressions
from works of art can be developed by practice, by the frequent and
attentive study of works of art of different kinds; but it cannot be
attained artificially by any effort or any amount of study.
What, then, mean the expressions expert and layman, when applied to
æsthetic verdicts? The classes of society, in which preponderating
occupation with intellectual problems, continued through several
generations, has refined the nervous system and rendered it more
sensitive, produce, as a rule, individuals with a feeling for art.
These live in large towns, in the centres of art life, they travel,
and visit numerous collections, and thus their feeling for art is
developed into a wide understanding of it, that studies works of art
from the historical standpoint. These are the real experts, so far
as there can be any talk of such in æsthetic questions. But these
classes of society, these individuals are only to the very smallest
extent painters or professional critics, _i.e._, critics writing for
the public. To wish to exclude them, on that account, from the expert
class is ludicrous presumption of certain persons who, by their own
authority, confer this title on themselves. The educated public—the
intellectual _élite_—has not the least reason for allowing their
opinion on works of art to be dictated to them by painters who may
well be daubers or crack-brained fools, or by critics who may be
ignorant phrase-mongers.
So much for the first question as to the fitness of the so-called
layman for criticising works of art.
The second question, as to the changes in public opinion about certain
works and their authors, is considerably more complex.
It is not to be gainsaid that such changes have occurred, but they are
much rarer than those would like to make us believe who, from instances
of pretended later conversions of originally rebellious taste on the
part of contemporaries, hope to succeed in proving that the ugly is
beautiful and the beautiful is ugly.
The names which were most often cited to prove the incompetency of
contemporary judgment on works of art of modern tendency are most
unfortunately chosen. Millet, Rousseau, and Corot were looked upon by
their contemporaries as smearers and daubers; Manet was laughed to
scorn, Böcklin pronounced a fool, his friends advised Hans Thoma to
change his name, etc., etc. In order not to go to too great length
I will now leave Thoma and Böcklin out of the discussion. But the
others! That Rousseau and, especially, Corot passed for smearers
and daubers among their contemporaries is simply not true; on the
contrary, justice was at once done to them for their technique. Even
their most unscrupulous opponents admitted that they were draughtsmen
and colourists. What they were reproached with was only the alleged
intellectual insignificance of their work. People remained under the
influence of classical landscape with ancient buildings or ruins, and
a decoration of ideal figures such as Poussin brought into fashion,
and Claude Lorrain cultivated. A landscape without nymphs or shepherds
in Arcadian dress, without temples or figures of Hermes, seemed empty,
insignificant, ignoble. The majority had as yet no taste for the
witchery of mood in wood and field. Why, Corot himself was not clear
about what was new and determinative in his own art, for in some of his
grandest pictures Dryads dance, beneath young-leaved trees immersed in
the mists of springtide, the most correct sham-classic square dance.
It was only in his last period that he renounced this ancient magic.
Rousseau had broken away from tradition more resolutely, and was on
that account less esteemed than Corot by contemporaries whose education
had been perverted by precedent. But the worst that was said against
the two did not go beyond the assertion that they were “vulgar.”
The case of Manet is, of course, different. People have roughly
disowned this painter; but it is absolutely false to talk about a
change in popular opinion about him. Those who “laughed at” him
thirty-five years ago, laugh at him in precisely the same way now.
In my study of the Caillebotte room in the Luxembourg Museum I have
alluded to the angry protest of Gérôme and Gustave Moreau against
admitting the works of Manet and his friends into a State collection.
If the laughers are not so numerous, and if their laughter is not so
ringing as in the “Olympia” year, it is simply because the man is
absolutely done with. Only a few stragglers still talk nonsense about
Manet, men who have missed the connection of “the last train,” and some
greybeards in their dotage—the barricade warriors of the “Salon”—who
fancy they are still breathing the gunpowder smoke of 1863, and will
keep up to the day of their death, which cannot be far off, the happy,
exultant mood of the beer-evenings at the Café de Madrid. None among
the pillars of young and living art recognises Manet as his ancestor.
People know now that he was a discovery of Zola’s. The sharp turn in
the development of art in the last thirty years of the last century
was inaugurated, not by him, but by others. Courbet introduced realism
which has nowadays shrunk to nothing. Monet kindled “Free Light,” and
that was a very great service which, unfortunately, is also no longer
fully acknowledged, for the latest race of Parisian painters again
abandons joyful brightness and goes back to the gloomy, oppressive
tones of “the ’fifties.” Manet, however, found nothing and invented
nothing, and he owes the noise that was, for a period, heard about him
only to his relations with a devoted friend, who vindicated his own
tendency by that of the painter, and said of him all the good which he
thought of himself.
The change in taste from one generation to another is a general law
which I proved in the _Neue Freie Presse_ of 9th August 1896, and
afterwards developed and established in the Florence _Rivista Moderna_
(No. 3, of 1898, “_Le alternanze del gusto_”). I strongly believe
in the prevalence of this law; but if particular cases are followed
in detail, it is recognised that many an apparent change in the
appreciation of a work or an artist rests on an illusion of the senses.
To return to the subject of Manet. An awful din arose at the first
appearance of “Olympia.” Friends and foes waged wild battle with each
other. Each panted for the blood of the other. Twenty years later
the picture that had been so hotly contested was hung in the State
Museum, which roused fresh, but considerably weaker, opposition.
Finally, however, no one any longer protested against its presence in
the picture-gallery, and now a sophist might assert: “There, you see!
The picture which was once laughed at is, thirty years afterwards,
acknowledged as a classical work of art.”
Gently! That is by no means proved. The fight has ceased only because
it has become objectless. Who nowadays waxes warm against Manet? The
man, you know, is dead, not only as a human being, but also as an
artist. He no longer troubles any one. He no longer exercises any
bad influence. He no longer even poisons popular taste, for it is
sufficient to observe the visitors to the Luxembourg, to see that they
pass by the “Olympia” with laughter, and shrugging of the shoulders, or
else with astonishment and shakes of the head. If a belated corybant
raises a shout of “Hail, Manet!” he is merrily allowed to shout. It is
superfluous to shout him down, for nobody listens to him. The truth is
that the taste for Manet is not in the least changed. People find the
“Olympia” every whit as repulsive nowadays as it was thirty years ago;
but they no longer say so with a loud voice and with the veins about
their temples swollen, because, generally, people no longer stop before
its mouldy ugliness.
If you examine very carefully, you will generally find that the
various appraisements of particular works in a new generation do not
originate from later generations regarding it differently than did
contemporaries, but from their generally no longer viewing it with
the same eyes. Let us only bear in mind always that the vast majority
of mankind have no feeling of their own for artistic beauty. They act
as if they had some feeling only because they know that a feeling
for art is pronounced to be a mark of higher culture. We cannot rate
too highly the part played in art idiocy by sham culture, pose, and
self-deception—or, shall we say, more indulgently, by auto-suggestion?
Honest confession of obtuseness to art is hardly found in any but
the two poles of humanity—on the extreme summit and at the lowest
antipode. A man must be either a rustic lout or an overtopping genius
like Prince Bismarck, to confess that he can make nothing of the fine
arts. The culture-Philistine never has this courage. He always pretends
that he finds luxurious enjoyment in the contemplation of art. This
culture-Philistine always repeats what has been said to him; he admires
where the Baedeker-star prescribes admiration. And he is, in many
cases, not even dishonest. He persuades himself that he feels what he
regards it as his duty as an educated man to feel; and he really comes
to feel it in the end, thanks to this self-persuasion. All the effects
of art depend on suggestion, so far as they are not concerned with the
most absolutely primitive and undifferentiated sensual excitations. On
one who has a genuine feeling for art the work of art itself conveys
the suggestion, which is followed by feelings of pleasure. On the
average men, whose blunt nerves take no impression from the work of art
itself, the Baedeker-star—the label—exercises this suggestion. If a
work of art has once got the reputation of excellence, either because
it deserves it, or because it acquired it from a dishonest, busy, bold,
and swaggering clique, the next generation of Philistines in art does
not test it further, but takes it as something accepted. The clique can
then state triumphantly that the work they have puffed is a success.
But has it on that account acquired real success?
The number of free, strong men is extremely small, who have the
courage, desire, and ability to examine the veracity of traditional
labels; but there is a frightful devastation every time that such an
idol-destroyer and overthrower of altars breaks into the Temple of
Renown, which is guarded by that dragon, the Good Old Way. People are
then convinced about the quantity of plaster rubbish which has been
smuggled into proximity with real marble and gold-and-ivory work in the
semi-darkness of the sanctuary, and has enjoyed for hundreds, perhaps
for thousands of years, the same veneration as the wonder-working
revelations of genius.
But suppose we conceive in our mind’s eye the extremely rare case in
which a real masterpiece was misjudged at first, and, later on, was
greeted with acclamations. In this case the question, as a rule, is
not of lack of understanding, but of lack of sense of proportion. The
contemporary age which blames, and the succeeding age which praises,
are both right, _i.e._, they do not praise and blame the same thing,
and the divergent appraisement of the work is simply due to the fact
that contemporaries like to dwell on the faults and overlook the
excellencies, whilst latter generations neglect the faults and regard
only the excellencies. The contemporaries were biassed in severity,
their successors are biassed in indulgence. Ideal justice is not
of this world. But faults remain faults even in the ages that come
after, and excellencies, too, were excellencies even in the period of
their origin; and it is jugglery and forgery when people interpret
the change in appraisement as if a later generation had admired as a
merit that which an earlier generation had stigmatised as a fault. Just
one example to illustrate these propositions: Millet is said to have
passed for “a dauber and smearer.” Now, his contemporaries who blamed
him used no such harsh expression. They said only that Millet drew
incorrectly and painted carelessly, and those with a real feeling for
art notice exactly the same thing to-day, only they say it no longer,
unless the question is expressly put to them. On the other hand, his
contemporaries, too, noticed his deep moral earnestness, his warm
human feeling, the touching simplicity of his style, which we prize so
highly in Millet to-day. But they were not inclined to forgive him his
defects in execution on account of these intellectual merits, whilst we
take his weakness in form into the bargain on account of the feeling
it contains. These weaknesses, however, are there to-day precisely as
they were thirty years ago, and he who fails to see them is guilty of
presumption if he passes a verdict on pictures.
Taking them altogether, the works and artists that were overvalued
by contemporaries are far more numerous than those that were
underestimated at the beginning. And even in the extremely few cases
of the latter category, the injustice of contemporaries did not, as a
rule, take the form of violent opposition, but that of indifference.
Contemporaries did not gainsay their beauty; but it escaped their
attention, because this was claimed by other fashions and styles. No
work of plastic art that is nowadays accepted without dispute was
rejected, when it appeared, with such anger as certain products of the
“Secession” are at the present day.
That is natural. The conditions of art production were half a century
ago absolutely different to what they are now. The artist gave his
personality full scope, and sought to please only a few customers of
rank, without troubling himself about the people at large. To-day he
wants to excite a sensation at any price, and he looks, for this end,
not into himself, but about himself. By creating he is not satisfying
his impulse to give form and shape, but his hunger for success.
Vain _amour propre_, swaggering, conceited vanity and cunning
“pushfulness” are the motives that far too often guide the artist’s
brush or chisel. The coarse vulgarity of the means corresponds with the
coarse vulgarity of the motives and aims. One must make a sensation,
and that is attained most easily by a rowdy rebellion against taste,
truth, and healthy human intelligence. If he annoys his contemporaries,
the ruthless advertiser finds his account more surely than if he
praised them. Only he who startles dares hope to be noticed in our
present huge exhibitions with their three thousand numbers. That is
why the unscrupulous competitor works with the object of startling,
and only with that object. His natural allies are writers who seek by
aggressive criticism to satisfy the same hysterical impulse towards
sensation as he, and the snobs who hope to justify their claim to be
un-Philistine by pretending to discover and appreciate hidden beauties,
where the thick-headed majority of their fellow-men observe and condemn
only unblushing outrages on the sense of beauty.
The necessity for creating a sensation has arisen only in our times
of over-production in all fields of intellectual creation, and of
frightfully murderous competition for success. In the earlier days of
art it played hardly any part at all. On this account it is fallacious
to try to deduce from the, after all, extremely rare romances of
works, originally misjudged but afterwards recognised, in the past,
an argument in favour of certain creations of the present day, which
a large proportion of educated men rejects, not because they do not
understand, them, but because they understand them only too well.
Let men only have the quiet courage not to allow themselves to be put
out of countenance; they will carry their point even before posterity.
XVII
MY OWN OPINION
There is hardly anything which I hate so cordially as opportunistic
criticism, which, in respect of phenomena in art-production presented
in a noisy and pretentious way, affecting to signify modernity and
progress, does not honestly take a side, but with the cunning foresight
of the bat in the fable attempts to come to an understanding with
both the opposing armies, of the birds and of the mice. Criticism
that openly wears the uniform of a pronounced movement in art can be
put up with. The enemy of the movement fights the criticism and the
movement at the same time. It shares all the fates of its banner; it
is in the danger, and it may be in the victory. If the movement for
which it carries weapons succumbs, it gets the worst of it too, and
experiences the treatment accorded to the vanquished. It has to lay
down its weapons of criticism, falls into contempt, and has no longer
the possibility of devastating art life, of perplexing artists, and
oppressing those who enjoy art. Insufferable, on the other hand, are
the clever, the unprejudiced, the eclectics, the smooth civil sneerers
who praise, yet with faintness, who blame, yet with a saving clause,
who carry in their lips such well-known and rather good phrases as:
“Certainly, there is some exaggeration here, but the peculiar style
is not to be misjudged”: “It is certainly no finished creation, but
the work, nevertheless, contains some promise”: “This is not exactly
a work, you know, which one could recommend for imitation, yet there
is much to be learnt from it”: “It is the new wine in Goethe’s _Faust_
that is acting so absurdly, but still perhaps it will yield a good
vintage.” These people who talk so sweetly are those who really poison
the springs of public taste. Thanks to them, movements which ought to
stand without the pale of the law enjoy a sort of equal justification,
as it were, of the æsthetic, historico-artistic copyright. Their mask
of benevolence, justice, and toleration gains them the confidence of
the irresolute, who, left to their own feeling, would recognise, at
once, in certain works, either a gross impropriety of the shameless
sort, or an indubitable manifestation of insanity, yet through the
cheap phrases of opportunistic critics, become doubtful of themselves
and say: “If such sober-minded scholars as this and that critic
constantly find something to recognise in this stuff, I am perhaps
wrong to condemn it at once.”
Moderate feelings are much more widespread than extreme feelings.
They are the normal product of the nervous system in civilised
men; to the great majority of half-coloured, faded grey men subdued
colours only are sympathetic; violent and shrill colours may amuse
it; but, in its innermost being, it feels instinctively drawn only
to the lukewarm ones. It believes them; and on their information, on
their irresponsible recommendation, gives to the most openly rascally
art-firms the credit through which alone they can hold out for a while.
And these critical warpers of justice are not assailable. They always
play an imposing part, and are always right. If an objectionable
movement lasts—and there are aberrations which have held their ground
for at least a generation—then they triumph modestly, for they have
been among its first heralds and have “recognised at once the sound
kernel in the first strange shell.” If the imbecility is as such patent
to all, and disappears amidst the derisive laughter of the intelligent,
they triumph again, only somewhat more self-consciously, for they
have “not let themselves be dazzled by novelty, and have pointed out
its weaknesses, and worked strenuously at its defeat.” Thus every
adventure in art life, every campaign in criticism, be its issue what
it may, increases their esteem; and the longer they continue their
course, which is so mischievous to the community, the more blindly the
multitude yields to their leadership, and the greater devastation they
are guilty of through their dishonourable exercise of their office of
guardians in matters of art.
I well know how this opportunism in criticism arises. It is the result
of the co-operation of the basest and most despicable intellectual
qualities. I find its causes in the dull feeling for the beautiful
which renders weak and indistinct all reactions from artistic
influences, and suffers neither delight nor irritation to arise: in
the cowardly fear of man and pitiful adulation, which aims at injuring
no one and only thinks of keeping a retreat open for itself; finally
in common vanity, which prefers to please a crowd of gaping boobies
rather than the select few, and the flattering, though so cheap,
reputation of being “very intellectual,” to the responsibility of crude
performance of duty. The favourite word by which the opportunistic
critics compound with every artistic confidence trick is “development.”
If the clairvoyant monitor utters the cry of “decay and degeneracy,”
the opportunists reply, “buds of a new and splendid bloom.” They love
to appeal to the history of art. That is right. When the Masolinos and
Masaccios sprang up, the last pupils of Gaddi and Orcagna whimpered,
“Now there is an end of painting.” But what was at an end was Byzantine
art filled by Cimabue and Giotto with some fresh life, and what began
was the ever glorious _Cinquecento_. And much nearer to us: when
Delacroix emancipated himself from the colour rules of David’s pupils,
and broke out into a downright exultation of red and blue and purple;
when Corot, Rousseau, and Dupré set homely nature viewed with lyric
eyes in the place of Poussin’s classic landscape degenerated into
dial painting; then earnest voices likewise accused the innovators of
digging the grave of art, and yet we know nowadays that Delacroix and
Corot were by no means the wild anarchists which the Academicians held
them to be, and that an uninterrupted line of development extends from
David and Prudhon through Géricault to Delacroix, and from Nicholas
Poussin and Claude Lorrain through Joseph Vernet, and even through
Watteau to Corot—a line which was unnoticed by contemporaries, yet
one which we now see clearly. It is the dodge of an unscrupulous
attorney to quote these examples when treating of the art of a Puvis
de Chavannes, an Aman-Jean, the Præ-Raphaelites, _pointillistes_,
_vermicellistes_, and _pipists_. There are sure marks of recognition
by which the authorised can be distinguished from the unauthorised,
the true from the false, development from retrogression, and buds from
gall-nuts. A movement which, indeed, resolutely diverges from the taste
dominant at a given time, though striving to approach nature, need not,
but may, have a future; and he who does not suffer from stiffness in
the joints will not, as a matter of course and on principle, refuse
to follow it with benevolent curiosity. If, however, the new movement
departs from nature, one may confidently say “it leads to nothing.” If
an independent method which strives after personal expression reveals
itself in a revolutionary effort—however peculiarly, nay, perversely,
it might impress—the intelligent man will not condemn, but wait to
see if something living comes from the attempt. If the practised eye,
however, recognises, in the peculiarity, either a cunning imitation or
a cold-blooded, intentional oddity, then one may confidently pronounce
the death sentence, for it contains in itself no germs whatever of
development. The only two eternal sources of art are, and will be,
feeling for nature and personality. Fidelity to nature and honesty
produce living creations. Unnaturalness and affectation are marks of
decay. He who ever holds fast to these simple dicta will hardly ever
run the risk of mistaking a Will-o’-the-Wisp for a lighthouse, or what
is morally, if not practically, a more serious error, of treading under
foot an insignificant chrysalis with the living and beautiful butterfly
it enshrines.
Even of the manifestations of insanity of crack-brained painters,
of the hoaxes of tricky strugglers for success, and the whims of
childishly immature and childishly careless people living from hand
to mouth, who have sprung up in the last two or three decades, the
good man’s insinuating word of the “sound kernel,” of the “tendencies,
capable of development, to a new blossoming of art,” has been spoken
by the opportunistic of critics. Well, time has now given the answer
to these verdicts, at any rate in regard to some of the movements for
which those prophets so benevolently predicted a glorious future.
Fifteen or twenty years ago we saw in the Paris Salon, beside the
expressionless fabrications of the usual daubing artisans—the “Mother’s
Joys,” the “Young Lady at her Toilet,” the “Oyster with Lemons,” which
constitute the stock in trade of all exhibitions of pictures—only two
formulæ appear in hundreds of repetitions: the vulgarly realistic,
after the style, let us say—to mention a particular name—of Bastien
Lepage, that pupil of Cabanel who had degenerated into an apostle
of Courbet; and the pseudo-idealistic, after the model of Puvis de
Chavannes. Workmen with brutalised countenances and greasy blouses, and
unearthly figures in antiquated landscapes of chalky paleness, disputed
the visitor’s attention. A concreteness which did not spare us a single
finger-nail in mourning, struggled for supremacy with a careless
vagueness which styled itself “Abstraction” or “Synthesis” and produced
only questionably schematic types. Whole walls exhibited unbroken
rows of pictures which reminded us of the spectral ballet of the dead
nuns in “Robert the Devil.” Then we came to rooms where an unmixed
company of rag-pickers, and night-men exercising their calling, of
huzzies on the night-prowl, dung-carting stable-helps, and rapscallions
at loggerheads, were quite at home. One of these movements, _i.e._,
painting in faint colours, has hardly a representative left; the
other—the art of vulgarity, meanness, and ugliness—only a dwindling
few.
Here, then, we have two movements, to which “the intellectuals” have
promised a future. One of them is as dead as a door-nail and buried,
the other dying. He who did not let himself be cheated, or want to
cheat others, could predict this outcome with certainty. Debased
realism was a misunderstanding of the impulse towards truth displayed
by the Manet School. This School held itself bound in conscience to
record minutely even the unessential and the ugly accessories. Their
limited imitators sought only that which was ugly and unessential in
the world of phenomena. They thereby wandered far from the eternal aim
of art—to excite an emotion by a work of art; for the mere imitation
of a sight either actually indifferent or frankly repulsive can
never excite an emotion. It was, therefore, easy to recognise that
this tendency could not be lasting. The pseudo-idealism of Puvis
de Chavannes showed the other infallible mark of morbidity, viz.,
impersonality and dishonesty. He tried, by an artificial bleaching of
colours and a semi-transparent white-wash, to produce the effect of
old and faded frescoes, in which their age of several hundred years is
an element of æsthetic effect, by reason of the dim depictment of what
is remote, dead and gone, and unknown; by reason of the longing they
awake for what has for ever passed away and will never appear again.
It was imitation; it was an attempt to deceive. It was not the honest
revelation of personality, but its disguise in a strange, historical
costume. That had no future, and it could not last.
What justified the primitive naturalism of the pioneers, the convinced
fervent service of truth, this survives victoriously every change in
fashion, and, in fact, is developing strongly further. True naturalism,
which grows enthusiastic for the poetry of unpretentious sights, and
was the logical development of Rousseau’s return to nature, and of
Greuze’s village stories inspired by that return (the “Village Bride,”
the “Father’s Curse,” the “Son’s Punishment,” etc.), has held its
ground. On the other hand, loathsome painting, which is naturalism run
mad, has been finally conquered, and the spectral painting of Puvis is
about to follow it into oblivion.
These much-extolled tendencies have, then, no future in them. They were
not buds which were to develop into blossom and fruit. They were wild
suckers in which a generation of artists fruitlessly squandered its
best strength, and which are now withered and blown away by the wind.
And that, too, will be the lot of other aberrations which have not
yet quite run their riotous course. That may be predicted with quiet
confidence, without any being taught by the future of another.
A great philosophical doctrine is deducible from these facts. All
development—including that of art, which is a part of nature and a part
of human nature, and obeys the common laws of nature—all development
is constant, and will be diverted from its logical course by no power.
Its great procession always goes through a main street, and sudden
turnings aside branch off only into blind alleys. Extreme forms have
no stability; they remain individual monstrosities without issue.
The strenuous life is always making efforts back towards the typical
constitution of the species. In art this law may be found deplorable
up to a certain point; for it is inimical to strong individualities,
even to honest and justifiable ones, and favourable to the indifferent
average, whilst in art the absolutely untypical individualities are
full of charm. But, as things are, it is the iron law of development
which no living thing can escape.
It is not easy to oppose successfully the opportunistic criticism which
always professes to see, even in the maddest and silliest things, at
any rate, “germs of artistic development”; but it is, nevertheless, a
duty of subjective morality to do so. My verdict on many notabilities
of fashion stands in sharp contrast to that which one generally
hears and reads about them nowadays. He who does not suffer from the
delusion of greatness, or a morbid distemper of contradiction, feels a
position of this kind painfully. I have earnestly and conscientiously
tried whether my adversaries were justified in demanding that I, as
an individual, should submit to their huge majority. Well, I cannot
concede this right to them. In dozens of instances, I have too closely
observed how the unanimity of contemporary opinion about an artist
arises. It is enough for an artist to invent a whim and obstinately
cling to it, without letting himself be put out by indifference,
vexation, or scorn. Very soon some ass of a critic will come and
explain this whim as an inspiration of genius. This he will do out of
vanity, affectation of originality, or an itch for sensation. He will
do it to give the impression that he is of more brilliant intellect
than the common herd, and that he alone can appreciate a beauty which
the Philistines stupidly pass by. If the humbug of a critic has some
skill in coining phrases, a little perseverance, and a fairly sonorous
pulpit, he will infallibly, in course of time, collect a congregation
around him; for it is easy to gain adherents to a chapel which one
designates as a place of worship for the intellectual _élite_, men of
fine feelings, and those gifted with understanding. Provided that this
sham lasts only a few years, it must needs triumph over all opposition.
A young generation grows up which takes it for granted. No one puts to
the test what has come into his possession, but takes it as a matter
of course. It attains iron permanence. What was a paradox yesterday
has attained the rights of dogma to-day by mere lapse of time. Busy
pens now vie in outbidding each other in the elegance and wittiness
of the phrases with which they express the prescribed admiration for
the great man. If an independent person steps forward, and shows
the worthlessness of the puffed up celebrity, the devotees of the
little chapel, which has grown into a great church, feel an honest
indignation against the heretic. “How does this man dare to doubt, when
we, who are certainly better and cleverer than he, piously believe.”
That is the history of every religion: when it is organised it becomes
intolerant and endeavours to assert itself by means of violence. But,
to the honour of mankind, there are, nevertheless, always independent
spirits who will not let themselves be intimidated, and on whom
authority does not impose. They test the dogma, and kick it away if it
is not firmly based. The stake has not protected religion from these
independent critics; still less can the Corybants of art-reporting
guard a fashionable idol from them.
The right of criticising the views even of the most overwhelming
majority must be maintained. A final proof in disputed questions
regarding æsthetics is, I admit, not to be supplied. All artistic
influence rests on suggestion. The work of art, itself and, originally,
exercises the suggestion on a minority endowed with delicate
sensibilities. On the great majority an opinion of others, delivered
with firmness does so. The great majority of people admire one who
is praised because it is suggested to them by his trumpeters that
it is their duty to admire him. As a matter of fact, they feel the
admiration, without being conscious that not the work of art has
inspired them with it, but the enthusiastic gossip which they have
read and heard about it. These people refuse to believe me when I tell
them that they are admiring something which is an aberration. The
prior suggestion prevents them from tolerating a fresh suggestion from
me. No one, however, can contest this so far as he is quite certain
only of his own feelings. In art, effect is an infallible criterion,
even if of only subjective value. If a man feels definitely as regards
certain pictures that they are valueless and unmeaning, he has a right
to express it as strongly and honestly as he feels it, even if millions
declare that they discover all kinds of loveliness and depth of meaning
in them. One will perhaps fail to convince a single creature, and will,
as likely as not, long remain a preacher in the wilderness. But perhaps
not for ever. The inventors of a fashionable _culte_, whom their
selfishness obliges to stand up for their own work, will not remain in
arms for ever and live. Those who worship after them have not the same
strong, effective grounds, the originator’s vanity, for defending that
_culte_ desperately. The snobs who thronged to it because it was the
singularity and they were the exceptions, necessarily abandon it as
it becomes commonplace and they find themselves in a vulgar majority.
Then the uninfluenced art-conscience again faces the work; it becomes
susceptible to the warning of him who was, up to then, “the one voice
crying in the wilderness,” and in a short time all lips murmur: “That
was indeed a swindle.”
FOOTNOTES
[Footnote 1: In the department of Doubs.]
[Footnote 2: Ps. xc. 10 in Luther’s version.]
[Footnote 3: _Tchin_ is Russian official _noblesse_.]
[Footnote 4: _I.e._, of joy or suffering.]
[Footnote 5: Faust: II. Theil; _sub fin._]
INDEX
Æsthetes, School of, 32
Alexander, John W., 217-8
Aman-Jean, 218-20
Angelo, Michael, 23
Art, emancipation of, 16-22
“—— for art’s sake,” criticism of, 1-5, 12-5
——, future of, 27-9
——, prettiness in, 227-9
——, religious, 296-7
——, utilitarianism in, 11-2
Artist, psychology of the, 5-9
Artists, influence of the Byzantine, 59
Balzac Memorial, 285-8
Barbizon, School of, 97-8
Bartholdi, 299
Bartholomé, 294-307
Baudelaire, 162
Besnard, Albert, 220-3
Böcklin, 326
Boilly, 81
Boldini, Jean, 154, 223-5
Bonheur, Rosa, 92-3
Botticelli, 220, 275
Bouchot, Henri, 57
Bouguereau, William, 225-30
Bourdichon, 58
Brangwyn, Frank, 230-6, 274
Bruniquel, 4
Caillebotte Room, 93
Carpeaux, 278
Carrière, Eugène, 166-84
Carriès, Jean, 308-19
Castiglione’s “Cortegiano,” 24
Catholics, New, 307
Cellini, Benvenuto, 23, 33
Century Exhibition, 70-81, 93-4
Cézanne, Paul, 236-9, 259
Charonton, Enguerrand, 67
Chassériau, 83-4
Chauchard, 91
Chauvinism, 11
Chavannes, Puvis de, 185-200, 343
Cimabue, 60, 121, 339
Clouet, 67-8
Cone, Jacques, 67
Conti, 145
Corneille of Lyons, 67
Corot, 100-3, 131
Cottet, Charles, 201-16
Courbet, 91-2
Couture, 122
Criticism, opportunism in, 336-9
Dante, 18
Daubigny, 104
Daumier, 88-9, 265
Degas, 119
Delacroix, 84-6, 104-5
Delisle, Leopold, 57
Della Robbia, 319
Donner, 299
Drolling, 79
Dupré, 340
Dürer, Albrecht, 188
Enamels, Carriès’, 318
Exhibition, the Century, 70-95
Fountains, 298-9
Fouquet, Jehan, 67-8
Fragonard, 74-5
Frédéric, Léon, 239-244
Froment, Nicolas, 64
_Genre_ painting, 16-7
Gérard, 79
Géricault, 98
Giotto, 60, 121, 339
Girard of Orleans, 60
Gleyre, 148
Gorki, Maxim, 261
Gretchen, 193
Greuze, 74-6
Gross, Baron, 98
Hals, Franz, 209
Hebbel, Friedrich, 144
Höllen-Breughel, 265-6
Huddleston, Judge, 150
Hundred Years’ War, Effects of, 56
Icons, Russian, 59
_Inferno_, Dante’s, 277
John of Orleans, 63-4
Kipling, Rudyard, 93
Lafenestre, George, 57
La Tours, 168
Landscape, literary, 136-7
——, lyrical, 137-9
——, optical, 139-40
Laurens, Jean Paul, 244-6
Leempoels, Jef, 246-50
Leonardo, 188
Lessing, a remark of, 145
Lieberman, Max, 120
Lorrain, Claude, 327
Maeterlinck, 109
Mallarmé, 275
Malouel, Jean, 67
Manet, Eduard, 105, 108, 112, 121, 123, 327-8
Mantegna, 15
Martin, Henri, 250-6
Meissonier, 105
Meunier, Constantin, 33, 34-40
Mignot, Jean, 67
Millet, 89-91, 103-4, 333
Monet, Claude, 105-8, 112, 115-9, 121, 123
Montenard, 256
Moreau, Gustave, 93-4, 155-65
Mouthe, caves of, 3
Museum, the Luxembourg, 110-1
Nietzsche, 275
“Open Air” movement, 93, 100, 102
Palissy, Bernard de, 319
Pavilion de Marsan, 56
Père Lachaise, “Resurrection” at, 300-7
Perréal, Jean, 66-7
Pissarro, Camille, 132-144
Plane, mediæval, 49-51
Poussin, 132
Præ-Raphaelites, 324
Prudhon, 77
Raffaelli, Jean, 114, 119, 256-8
Redon, Odilon, 258
Renaissance, 15, 23-4, 297-9
Renoir, Pierre Auguste, 120-1, 259
Renouard, 123
Reuter, Fritz, 290
Ribera, 209
Ribot, 209
Riesener, 79
Rodin, Auguste, 275-93
Roll, Alfred, 260-2
Rops, Félicien, 154, 266
Rubens, 268
Rude, 278
Ruskin, 149-50
Scheffer, Ary, 86
Sculpture in early Middle Ages, 65
“Secession,” 334
Simon, Lucien, 262-4
Sisley, Alfred, 123-30
Sluter, 299
Solutré, 4
Stuck, Prof. Franz, 320-1
Sweden, rock pictures in, 4
Thiéry, 96-7
—— Salon, 101
Thoma, Hans, 326
Trutat, 81-3
Van Eyck, the brothers, 60-2
Veber, Jean, 264-8
Velasquez, 209
Vernet, Horace, 87
Vigée-Lebrun, 74, 76-7
Watteau, 74-5, 261
Wéry, Emil, 269
Whistler, James, 144-54
Wierz, 155
Wilczek, Count, 68
Worms, Jules, 272
Zorn, Anders, 120, 154, 270-1
Zuloaga, Ignacio, 270-4
Printed at
The Edinburgh Press,
9 and 11 Young Street.
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ON ART AND ARTISTS ***
Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will
be renamed.
Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright
law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,
so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United
States without permission and without paying copyright
royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part
of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG™
concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark,
and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following
the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use
of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for
copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very
easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation
of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project
Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away—you may
do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected
by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark
license, especially commercial redistribution.
START: FULL LICENSE
THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the free
distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
Project Gutenberg™ License available with this file or online at
www.gutenberg.org/license.
Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg™
electronic works
1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg™
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in your
possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
Project Gutenberg™ electronic work and you do not agree to be bound
by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person
or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only be
used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works if you follow the terms of this
agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg™
electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the
Foundation” or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection
of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works. Nearly all the individual
works in the collection are in the public domain in the United
States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the
United States and you are located in the United States, we do not
claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,
displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as
all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope
that you will support the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting
free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg™
works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the
Project Gutenberg™ name associated with the work. You can easily
comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the
same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg™ License when
you share it without charge with others.
1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are
in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States,
check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this
agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,
distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any
other Project Gutenberg™ work. The Foundation makes no
representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any
country other than the United States.
1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other
immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg™ License must appear
prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg™ work (any work
on which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or with which the
phrase “Project Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed,
performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you
are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws
of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is
derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the
copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in
the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply
either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or
obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg™
trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is posted
with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
will be linked to the Project Gutenberg™ License for all works
posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the
beginning of this work.
1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg™
License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg™.
1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
Gutenberg™ License.
1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including
any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access
to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg™ work in a format
other than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in the official
version posted on the official Project Gutenberg™ website
(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original “Plain
Vanilla ASCII” or other form. Any alternate format must include the
full Project Gutenberg™ License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg™ works
unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
access to or distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
provided that:
• You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
the use of Project Gutenberg™ works calculated using the method
you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed
to the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark, but he has
agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid
within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are
legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty
payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in
Section 4, “Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation.”
• You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg™
License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue
all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg™
works.
• You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of
any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
receipt of the work.
• You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
distribution of Project Gutenberg™ works.
1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project
Gutenberg™ electronic work or group of works on different terms than
are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing
from the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the manager of
the Project Gutenberg™ trademark. Contact the Foundation as set
forth in Section 3 below.
1.F.
1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project
Gutenberg™ collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg™
electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may
contain “Defects,” such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate
or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or
other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
cannot be read by your equipment.
1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the “Right
of Replacement or Refund” described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
Gutenberg™ trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
Gutenberg™ electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
DAMAGE.
1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium
with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you
with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in
lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person
or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If
the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing
without further opportunities to fix the problem.
1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you ‘AS-IS’, WITH NO
OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT
LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement
violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the
agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or
limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or
unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the
remaining provisions.
1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
providing copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in
accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the
production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg™
electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses,
including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of
the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this
or any Project Gutenberg™ work, (b) alteration, modification, or
additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg™ work, and (c) any
Defect you cause.
Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg™
Project Gutenberg™ is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It
exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations
from people in all walks of life.
Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg™’s
goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg™ collection will
remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
and permanent future for Project Gutenberg™ and future
generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see
Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at www.gutenberg.org.
Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-profit
501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
Revenue Service. The Foundation’s EIN or federal tax identification
number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by
U.S. federal laws and your state’s laws.
The Foundation’s business office is located at 809 North 1500 West,
Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up
to date contact information can be found at the Foundation’s website
and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation
Project Gutenberg™ depends upon and cannot survive without widespread
public support and donations to carry out its mission of
increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
freely distributed in machine-readable form accessible by the widest
array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
status with the IRS.
The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND
DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular state
visit www.gutenberg.org/donate.
While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
approach us with offers to donate.
International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current donation
methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To
donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate.
Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
Gutenberg™ concept of a library of electronic works that could be
freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
distributed Project Gutenberg™ eBooks with only a loose network of
volunteer support.
Project Gutenberg™ eBooks are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
edition.
Most people start at our website which has the main PG search
facility: www.gutenberg.org.
This website includes information about Project Gutenberg™,
including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
