In drawing and color, on the other hand, the Months show a marked departure from earlier habits in the direction of an essentially modern practice. In the drawing as such there is an increase in looseness with no loss of surety; tightness is sacrificed, but not precision. The figures are still silhouettes to a great extent, but there is an approach to the coalescence of color and drawing. In color by itself there is ever an opposition of large areas of some shade of brown and some shade of green, and a weaving of these areas together by bits of each color in the other and of other colors in both. Though there is never the full impressionistic fusing of edges in atmosphere, there is yet a decided approximation to the vision of a genuinely naturalistic landscape painter, as distinguished from the vision of a draftsman or a miniaturist.
While this is true, and must be accounted to Bruegel as a merit, an evidence of mental and technical growth, it is still in a measure unfair to the never-failing largeness and unity of vision in the earlier work. Whether the other qualities of this work be regarded as merits or defects in themselves depends, of course, upon the technical tenets or preferences of him who makes the judgment. But in Bruegel they were neither merits nor defects; they were characteristics which had to be present in his pictures if he painted at all. They were necessitated by the time in which he lived and by his professional practice previous to painting. They were as much a part of him as his fondness for telling stories; and in the fluctuations of taste stranger things have already happened than would be the return of even this latter element to professional as well as popular favor.
6.
In Bruegel’s time story-telling in pictures generally was still one of the principal means of communicating ideas—even, perhaps mainly, ideas that were not inherently pictorial; prints were still the nearest things to books in popular circulation. Moreover, a nation living under the necessity of never speaking out openly on either politics or religion naturally resorted to symbol, the concrete proverb or the image that said one thing and meant another. The print of the big and little fish not only meant that the great oppressed the small but carried an idea beyond the words of the proverb in showing the big fish ripped up and disgorging; and upon a people so apt at interpreting images the significance of that would not be lost. This people could not only take a hearty enjoyment of the good things of life but they could also face the whole of it without shrinking from any part of it, whether of grossness or of terror. For the latter, indeed, they even had a gusto and the former they laughed away with a saving healthiness. The distinguishing mark of their living and their thinking was a robust realism.
In Pieter Bruegel there emerged from among them a man of genius in complete sympathy with their realistic attitude towards life; knowing it from childhood, he gave it in his art a more complete expression than it had ever had before. The whole originality and fertility of his mind were for long expended upon feeding the popular taste not only for the familiar or exotic beauty of nature but also for a rough philosophy, unorganized but none the less genuine; and a habit so well established in him by years of labor would not vanish all at once even when more purely painter-like interests assumed for him a major importance. His predecessors in painting had been realistic in their measure; in them, however, realism was largely confined to details of execution and was more than counterbalanced by markedly idealistic conceptions. Even in the grotesqueries of Bosch the older disparity between idea and embodiment existed; the diabolism in them was only the obverse of the conventional religious idealism, and its distance from a true realism of content remained the same. When Bruegel came to painting, he both carried the manner of realism farther than his predecessors had done and informed that manner with its appropriately realistic matter, bringing about a new harmony between the body and the spirit of the art. He became the first complete realist in the history of painting.
The Fall of the Rebel Angels is the nearest thing to a rule-proving exception among Bruegel’s great works, the single one which exhibits any of the older disparity between container and content; and this picture, great as it is, could vanish without impairing in the least Bruegel’s essential greatness. To examine the Berlin Proverbs in detail is to get a feeling of being among mad folks because so many of the sayings here illustrated turn upon outlandish actions; but as a picture it is a piece of masterly realistic sanity showing a whole village, in which some of the inhabitants happen to be crazy, intensely busy about its own affairs. The Triumph of Death, so far from being a piece of wild and gross fancy, is actually the lucid statement of an idea as true as any gesture in the picture; it is precisely the relentlessness of its realism in thought as well as in embodiment which frightens people into calling it untrue. The latter two paintings only show that if an artist is realist enough, if he penetrates sufficiently into the actual, he necessarily becomes imaginative; they only reiterate and strengthen Bruegel’s right to be considered the supreme realist in painting.
Part of his realism is his refusal to depict what he did not feel. Only once did he venture upon any of the religious emotionalism that had played so large a part in the work of his predecessors, and then he found the emotion so foreign to his own feelings that he openly borrowed the imagery of it; in relation to the great panoramic realism of the Carrying of the Cross, the group of mourning women remains a mere formalism, dissociated in spirit and in manner from all about it. Jesus himself is simply an unfortunate creature whose approaching execution is the pretext for this holiday. What passes for the conversion of Paul might be the delusion of a man knocked in the head on falling from a shying horse; there is about the event none of the conventional supernaturalism because for Bruegel that sort of thing was not real. The religious subject as such disappears from his work; and this, coming after the ecstatic idealisms of his predecessors, amounts to the expression of an idea concerning the significance—or lack of it—inherent in the churchly religion. He will have nothing to do with what is not human; not even nature enters into the great paintings except as a setting that enhances, by sympathy or contrast, the emotional life of human beings. To these, whom he knows and loves, Bruegel gives himself wholly, to share in their sorrows and their joys. His religion is that of the great humanists in all ages, and his faith is given only to life itself.
Part of his realism is the robust laughter which is the only solution for the fix in which human beings find themselves. It is the spirit that animated Rabelais in describing the birth of his hero and Shakespeare in creating Falstaff. To come closer home to Bruegel, perhaps, it is the spirit of Till Eulenspiegel, whose gross pleasanteries were probably relished by the painter along with the rest of his generation. Bruegel’s passion for completeness in his realism abolishes privacy, and the state of affairs brought to pass by this slicing away of all walls is saved only by humor. Humor is the safety-valve for a spirit resolute to probe life to its last refuge—to probe life, but not to break through by main force, as attempted by later realists so-called.
Another element in Bruegel’s realism is the objectivity of his work. Van Mander’s anecdote already quoted shows that Bruegel went among the peasants, not as a professional artist in search of material, but as a participator in their life; and the great pictures themselves strikingly bear this out. This is not to say that Bruegel never worked directly from life, for there are many drawings which could not have been done otherwise—a team of horses resting, soldiers standing in the way, old market-women squatting beside their wares. But when he came to paint the great pictures, Bruegel worked from a memory stocked with the gestures and actions of people who are unconscious of being watched. Bruegel’s mind was centered upon their life and he was concerned with technic hardly beyond the point where it would enable him to crowd all their life into his given space and shape. His concentration upon the story he was telling, from the encyclopedic narrative of the early works to the simple and straightforward emotionalism of the Months, put him on the crest of a wave of energy which carried him through many an undertaking that would have been impossible for a more self-conscious man. We who see the pictures now are unconscious of the painter because he was himself lost in his subject; and because of this, also, we are unconscious of ourselves. “No glance ever strays across the footlights to the audience,” wrote Meier-Graefe of Hogarth’s scenes. In Bruegel’s work there are no actors, no footlights and no audience. There is only life and participation in life by painter and by us.
And everywhere in these pictures it is the life of Bruegel’s own time. His predecessors had clothed religious themes in contemporary dress, but the outer and the inner remained separate things; Bruegel, retaining the outer, put into it its own proper content. He ousted religious stories by contemporary stories. These he painted so completely that a thorough sociological knowledge of the age might be founded upon or tested by his pictures. The whole life of the time is set down by a hand that never falsifies, that swerves neither to the right of idealization nor to the left of caricature.
Yet to leave him as a painter of contemporary manners only would be almost as false to his greatness as to consider him only as Bruegel the Droll. For he penetrates below the temporary appearances of his time to the permanent in human nature. His pictures can be a means of access to the life of his age, to be sure; but no lover of them would think of using them in this fashion. The important thing is that they give access to a life that is of more than one age; under the costume of the time exists the same humanity that now wears another dress.
In giving himself over so unreservedly to the impermanent, Bruegel took what was for him the only way to the permanent. This cannot be captured by going out after a vague and unlocalized something called life in general; what is presented to the artist for his use is always life in particular. There is an all-life in the steady and swelling succession of human generations; but the only means of access to that is the now-life. The great artist’s major accomplishment lies in revealing the universal through the particular, the permanent through the transitory, the inevitable through the accidental.
This Bruegel does; and how well he does it is to be found by analyzing the thought behind his varied rendering of events and people. Even in his early pictures each creature has his own individuality and yet is part of the crowd, which remains a crowd in spite of all detail; each individual retains his own value of personality and yet is integrated into a collective being. Bruegel’s minute accuracy of drawing expresses his love for the individual as such; his great masses of people express his desire to see life largely and as an interwoven whole. Moreover, the device of making the ostensible subject of a picture an almost invisible incident in it is an expression of an idea as to the relative importance of the individual and what happens to him. Though the actions of the Carrying of the Cross and the Conversion of Paul do actually center around the subject-incident, the incident itself is reduced almost to the vanishing-point; so that the story emphasis is thrown entirely upon the larger life of which the incident is only the temporary focus. The Fall of Icarus likewise expresses this heresy against conventional thinking as to what is truly sublime; only here the unimportance of a particular event is made more emphatic by such a detail as the position of the shepherd as well as by the large indifference of this great luminous calm expanse of land and sea and sky.
Moreover, the sequence of changes in the relative importance of the human figures in the paintings is but the story of Bruegel’s developing conception of the relative importance of man in the scheme of things. In one group of pictures the individual, though fully personalized, is a part of the crowd and the crowd a mass of insects swarming over the landscape. In another group of large-figured peasant subjects man is all-important, filling the whole and shutting nature out. The former are amazing, and one can hardly get too much of them; the latter are interesting and one likes them long. But for the final expression of his mind one must turn to the set of the Months; these five, with the addition of the Paul and the Icarus, form the summit of Bruegel’s art. In them Bruegel reached the solution of the two problems of his life, the life of nature and the life of man; and the solution was the life of man in nature.
The Months sum up his life’s endeavor both in the material he had all along been dealing with and in the conceptions between which all along he had been alternating. They are full of motives and incidents taken from his earlier works—the church he drew so often, children at their games, the great stretches of landscape that he loved. But all things are adjusted to one another in a new way; the people are seen neither too large nor too small, but in a perfect relationship to an immensely embracing nature; and each picture is pervaded by an unbroken harmony of mood. This set marks the attainment of final insight into everything that had concerned him; they constitute his acceptance and affirmation of life.
7.
The more Bruegel’s work is studied the stronger grows the feeling that almost everything may be attributed to him. To go to Vienna and through that group of fifteen pictures to come into direct contact with his mind across three hundred and fifty years is to be convinced that his is one of the inexhaustible minds of the world. The material brilliancy of the painting is more than matched by the brilliancy of the creative soul behind them. Whether he himself was conscious of all that can now be perceived in his work does not much matter; whether it came there with him aware or unaware, it is enough to make him superbly great. But this much is true: the more his mind is apprehended, the more vast and purposeful it appears.
He was fortunate in finding his means of expression in what was then a popular art; everything about that art was so alive that it drew to itself some of the greatest minds of the time. There existed a tremendous amount of give-and-take between the artist and his age, and this degree of interaction it was which had most to do with endowing both art and artist with vitality; they were fed from sources outside of and larger than themselves. Thus it was that Bruegel attained to so comprehensive an expression of himself and his age together that his work has become one of the permanent things of art.
Each picture is a completely functioning organism with several different aspects. There is the aspect of story-telling, that of technical picture-making and that of philosophic thought. Each aspect functions harmoniously with the others. Not only can one analyze out at will the elements proper to each aspect, but one can move from one to another without any feeling of shifting gear or changing speed. (The one exception is the group of mourning women in the Carrying of the Cross.) All these aspects function at the same mental rate. They are all interwoven into powerful wholes. Every picture is a world in itself, and coming to know them is one of the completest experiences that can be found anywhere in the art of painting.
Yet even with this completeness of expression attained, one has before Bruegel’s work a feeling of still more behind, an immensity of mind larger than any art can be. It is the feeling one has before Michelangelo, but not before Raphael; before Shakespeare, but not before Marlowe. The greater ones are not only greater in their art, but they have something left over in themselves which their art suggests but does not directly express. Of this greater company is Pieter Bruegel.
There are purer painters, but for the purity of their art they pay the price of going without something of importance to a complete life. And even their gain in intensity seems hardly a gain in the face of Bruegel’s intensity on all the levels of his completeness. He transposes all life into his pictures in a scale of relative relationship that preserves the values of human life itself. Every other painter lacks something or has something in excess. Bruegel is the most comprehensive and the best balanced, the most energetic and the mellowest. Of all painters he is the greatest realist, and of them all the most humane.