On art and artists

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: