here which shows Ingres’s more serious powers is the tight, elaborate and rather repellent study for the “Apotheosis of Napoleon,” which is a splendid discovery of composition within a round (see Plate). But the real fact is, I believe, that Ingres’s power as a draughtsman hardly ever comes out fully in his drawings; one must turn to his paintings to see how great and sincere a researcher he was. In his drawings he was too much pre-occupied with the perfect description of facts; when he came to the painting he began that endless process of readjustment and balance of contours which make him so great and original a designer. If one places his drawings and studies from the nude for, say, his “Venus Anadyomene” beside the photograph of the picture one gets some idea of the tireless and passionate research for the exact correspondence of the contours on either side of the figure which Ingres undertook. He throws over one by one all the brilliant notations of natural form in the studies, and arrives bit by bit at an intensely abstract and simplified statement of the general relations. But though the new statement is emptied of its factual content, it has now become far more compact, far more intense in its plasticity. Here and there among Ingres’s innumerable drawings one may find a nude study in which already this process of elimination and balance has taken place, but the examples are rare, and if one would understand why Ingres is one of the great masters of design, one must face the slightly repellent quality of his oil paintings rather than allow oneself to be seduced by the elegance and ease of his drawings.
It would, I think, be possible to show that very few great designers have attained to full expression in line. I suspect, indeed, that the whole tradition of art in Europe, since about the end of the fifteenth century, has been against such complete expression. If we compare the great masterpieces of pure drawing such as the drawings of figures on Persian pots of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and the few remaining examples of drawings by the Italian primitives of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, with the vast mass of European drawings subsequent to that date, we see, I think, the contrast of aims and purpose of the two groups. Somewhere about the time of Filippino Lippi there was formulated an idea of drawing which has more or less held the field ever since in art schools.
As most drawing has centred in the human figure we may describe it in relation to that, the more so that this view of drawing undoubtedly came in with the study of anatomy. The general principle is that there are certain cardinal facts about the figure, or points of cardinal importance in the rendering of structure—the artist is trained to observe these with special care, since they become the points de repère for his drawing. And since they are thus specially observed they are noted with a special accent. When once the artist has learned to grasp the relations of these points de repère firmly he learns also to pass from one to the other with great ease and rapidity, not to say with a certain indifference as to what happens in the passage. By this method the essentials of structure and movement of a figure are accurately given and the whole statement can be made with that easy facility and rapidity of line which gives a peculiar pleasure. Such drawing has the merit of being at once structurally accurate and more or less calligraphically pleasing. The most admired masters, such as Vandyke, Watteau, even to some extent Rubens, all exhibit the characteristics of such a conception. Now in the earlier kind of drawing there were no recognised points de repère, no particular moments of emphasis; the line was so drawn that at every point its relation to the opposed contour was equally close, the tension so to speak was always across the line and not along its direction. The essential thing was the position of the line, not its quality, so that there was the less inclination to aim at that easy rapidity which marks the later draughtsmanship. Essentially, then, this earlier drawing was less descriptive and more purely evocative of form. It may well be that the demands made upon the artist by the closer study of nature brought in by the Renaissance became an almost insuperable barrier to artists in the attempt to find any such completely synthetic vision of form as lay to hand for their predecessors. We see, for instance, in Albert Dürer’s “Beetle” an example of purely descriptive and analytic drawing with no attempt at inner coherence of form. On the other hand, of course, all the great formalists made deliberate efforts to come through the complex of phenomena to some abstract synthesis. Fra Bartolomeo and Raphael clearly made such abstraction a matter of deliberate study,[51] but as I have pointed out in the case of Ingres, the
obsession of fact has generally forced the artist to such a long series of experiments towards the final synthetic form that it is only in the finished picture that it emerges fully.
On the other hand, some modern masters have also found their way through, more or less completely, and from this point of view few drawings in the exhibition are as remarkable as the drawing of a seated woman by Corot (see Plate). Here one supposes it may be a kind of naïveté of vision rather than the exhaustive process of an Ingres, that has led Corot to this vividly realised plasticity of form. I find the essentials of good drawing more completely realised here than in almost any other drawing in the exhibition, and yet how little of a professional draughtsman Corot was. It is hard to speak here of Degas’s works as drawings. With one exception they are pastels and essentially paintings, but they are of great beauty and show him victorious over his own formidable cleverness, his unrivalled but dangerous power of witty notation.
At the opposite pole to Corot’s drawing with its splendid revelation of plastic significance we must put Menzel with his fussy preoccupation with undigested fact. It is hard indeed to see quite how Menzel’s drawings found their way into this good company, except perhaps as drunken helots, for they are conspicuously devoid of any æsthetic quality whatever. They are without any rhythmic unity, without any glimmering of a sense of style, and style though it be as cheap as Rowlandson’s is still victorious over sheer misinformed literalness. Somewhere between Menzel and Corot we must place Charles Keane, and I fear, in spite of the rather exaggerated claims made for him in the preface, he is nearer to Menzel, though even so, how much better! The early Millais drawing is of course an astounding attempt by a man of prodigious gift and no sensibility to pretend that he had the latter. It is a pity there are no Rossettis here to show the authentic inspiration of which this is the echo.
I come now to the Rembrandts, of which there are several good examples. Rembrandt always intrigues one by the multiplicity and diversity of his gifts and the struggle between his profound imaginative insight and his excessive talents. The fact is, I believe that Rembrandt was never a linealist, that he never had the conception of contour clearly present to him. He was too intensely and too inveterately a painter and a chiaroscurist. The last thing he saw was a contour, and more than anything else it eluded his vision. His vision was in fact so intensely fixed on the interplay of planes, their modulation into one another, and on the balance of directions, that with him the drawn line has a quite peculiar and personal meaning. It is used first to indicate directions of stress and movement, as, for instance, a straight line will be dashed down to indicate, not the contour of a limb, but its direction, the line along which stress of action takes place. He seems almost to dread the contour, to prefer to make strokes either inside or outside of it, and to trust to the imagination to discover its whereabouts, anything rather than a final definite statement which would arrest the interplay of planes. The line is also used to suggest very vaguely and tentatively the division of planes; but almost always when he comes to use wash on top of the line his washes go across the lines, so that here too one can hardly say the line indicates the division so much as the approximate position of a plane.
In conclusion I would suggest that, the art of pure contour is comparatively rare in modern art. For what I should cite as great and convincing examples of that art I would ask the reader to turn to the “Morgan Byzantine Enamels” (Burlington Magazine, vol. xxi. pp. 3, 65, 127, 219, 290), the “Manafi-i-Heiwan” (Burlington Magazine, vol. xxiii. pp. 224, 261), and to Vignier, “Persian Pottery” (Burlington Magazine, vol. xxv. p. 211), while other examples might be found among Byzantine and Carolingian miniaturists.
Now, this art depends upon a peculiarly synthetic vision and a peculiar system of distortion, without which the outline would arrest the movement of planes too definitely. There indeed is the whole crux of the art of line drawing; the line generates a volume, but it also arrests the planes too definitely: that is why in some great modern artists, as we saw in the case of Rembrandt, there is a peculiar kind of dread of the actual contour. It is felt by those who are sensitive to the interplay and movement of planes that the line must in some way, by its quality or its position, or by breaks or repetitions, avoid arresting the imagination by too positive a statement. It was almost a peculiarity of the early art that I have cited that it was able to express a form in a quite complete, evenly drawn contour without this terrible negative effect of the line. I say almost a peculiarity, because I think
a few quite modern artists, such as Matisse (see Plate) and perhaps Modigliani, have recovered such a power, but in the great mass of post Renaissance drawing the art of the pure contour in line has broken down, and the essential qualities even of the great linealists are only to be seen fully in their paintings; the drawn line itself has had to take on other functions.
PAUL CÉZANNE[52]
IN a society which is as indifferent to works of art as our modern industrialism it seems paradoxical that artists of all kinds should loom so large in the general consciousness of mankind—that they should be remembered with reverence and boasted of as national assets when statesmen, lawyers, and soldiers are forgotten. The great mass of modern men could rub along happily enough without works of art or at least without new ones, but society would be sensibly more bored if the artist died out altogether. The fact is that every honest bourgeois, however sedate and correct his life, keeps a hidden and scarce-admitted yearning for that other life of complete individualism which hard necessity or the desire for success has denied him. In contemplating the artist he tastes vicariously these forbidden joys. He regards the artist as a strange species, half idiot, half divine, but above all irresponsibly and irredeemably himself. He seems equally strange in his outrageous egoism and his superb devotion to an idea.
Also in a world where the individual is squeezed and moulded and polished by the pressure of his fellow-men the artist remains irreclaimably individual—in a world where every one else is being perpetually educated the artist remains ineducable—where others are shaped he grows. Cézanne realised the type of the artist in its purest most unmitigated form, and M. Vollard has had the wit to write a book about Cézanne and not about Cézanne’s pictures. The time may come when we shall require a complete study of Cézanne’s work, a measured judgment of his achievement and position—it would probably be rash to attempt it as yet. Meanwhile we have M. Vollard’s portrait, at once documented and captivating. Should the book ever become as well known as it deserves there would be, one guesses,
ten people fascinated by Cézanne for one who would walk down the street to see his pictures.
The art historian may sometimes regret that Vasari did not give us more of the æsthetics of his time; but Vasari knew his business, knew, perhaps, that the æsthetics of an age are quickly superseded but that the human document remains of perennial interest to mankind. M. Vollard has played Vasari to Cézanne and done so with the same directness and simplicity, the same narrative ease, the same insatiable delight in the oddities and idiosyncrasies of his subject. And what a model he had to paint! Every word and every gesture he records stick out with the rugged relief of a character in which everything is due to the compulsion of inner forces, in which nothing has been planed down or smoothed away by external pressure—not that external pressure was absent but that the inner compulsion—the inevitable bent of Cézanne’s temperament, was irresistible. In one very important detail Cézanne was spared by life—he always had enough to live on. The thought of a Cézanne having to earn his living is altogether too tragic. But if life spared him in this respect his temperament spared him nothing—for this rough Provençal countryman had so exasperated a sensibility that the smallest detail of daily life, the barking of a dog, the noise of a lift in a neighbouring house, the dread of being touched even by his own son might produce at any moment a nervous explosion. At such times his first relief was in cursing and swearing, but if this failed the chances were that his anger vented itself on his pictures—he would cut one to pieces with his palette knife, or failing that roll it up and throw it into the stove. M. Vollard describes with delightful humour the tortures he endured in the innumerable sittings which he gave Cézanne for his portrait—with what care he avoided any subject of conversation which might lead to misunderstanding. But with all his adroitness there were one or two crises in which the portrait was threatened with the dreaded knife—fortunately Cézanne always found some other work on which to vent his indignation, and the portrait survived, though after a hundred and fifteen sittings, in which Cézanne exacted the immobility of an apple, the portrait was left incomplete. “I am not displeased with the shirt front,” was Cézanne’s characteristic appreciation.
Two phrases continually recur in Cézanne’s conversation which show his curious idiosyncrasies. One the often-quoted one of his dread that any one might “lui jeter le grappin dessus” and the other “moi qui suis faible dans la vie.” They express his constant attitude of distrust of his kind—for him all women were “des veaux et des calculatrices”—his dread of any possible invasion of his personality, and his sense of impotence in face of the forces of life.
None the less, though he pathetically exaggerated his weakness he never seems to have had the least doubt about his supreme greatness as an artist; what troubled and irritated him was his incapacity to express his “sensation” in such terms as would make its meaning evident to the world. It was for this reason that he struggled so obstinately and hopelessly to get into the “Salon de M. Bougereau.” His attitude to conventional art was a strange mixture of admiration at its skill and of an overwhelming horror of its emptiness—of its so “horrible resemblance.”
The fact is that Cézanne had accepted uncritically all the conventions in the pathetic belief that it was the only way of safety for one “so feeble in life.” So he continued to believe in the Catholic Church not from any religious conviction but because “Rome was so strong”—so, too, he believed in the power and importance of the “Salon de Bougereau” which he hated as much as he feared. So, too, with what seems a paradoxical humility he let it be known, when his fame had already been established among the intelligent, that he would be glad to have the Legion of Honour. But here, too, he was destined to fail. The weighty influence and distinguished position of his friends could avail nothing against the undisguised horror with which any official heard the dreaded name of Cézanne. And it appeared that Cézanne was the only artist in France for whom this distinction was inaccessible, even through “influence.” Nothing is stranger in his life than the contrast between the idea the public formed of Cézanne and the reality. He was one of those men destined to give rise to a legend which completely obscured the reality. He was spoken of as the most violent of revolutionaries—Communard and Anarchist were the favourite epithets—and all the time he was a timid little country gentleman of immaculate respectability who subscribed whole-heartedly to any reactionary opinion which could establish his “soundness.” He was a timid man who really believed
in only one thing, “his little sensation”; who laboured incessantly to express this peculiar quality and who had not the faintest notion of doing anything that could shock the feelings of any mortal man or woman. No wonder then that when he looked up from his work and surveyed the world with his troubled and imperfect intellectual vision he was amazed and perturbed at the violent antagonism which he had all unconsciously provoked. No wonder that he became a shy, distrustful misanthrope, almost incapable of any association with his kind.
I have suggested that Cézanne was the perfect realisation of the type of the artist—I doubt whether in the whole of Vasari’s great picture gallery there is a more complete type of “original.” But in order to accept this we must banish from our mind the conventional idea of the artist as a man of flamboyant habits and calculated pose. Nothing is less possible to the real artist than pose—he is less capable of it than the ordinary man of business because more than any one else his external activities are determined from within by needs and instincts which he himself barely recognises.
On the other hand the imitation artist is a past master of pose, he poses as the sport of natural inclinations whilst he is really deliberately exploiting his caprices; and as he has a natural instinct for the limelight this variety of the “Cabotin” generally manages to sit for the portrait of the artist. Cézanne, then, though his external life was that of the most irreproachable of country gentlemen, though he went to mass every Sunday and never willingly left the intimacy of family life, was none the less the purest and most unadulterated of artists, the most narrowly confined to his single activity, the most purely disinterested and the most frankly egoistic of men.
Cézanne had no intellectual independence. I doubt if he had the faintest conception of intellectual truth, but this is not to deny that he had a powerful mind. On the contrary he had a profound intelligence of whatever came within his narrow outlook on life, and above all he had the gift of expression, so that however fantastic, absurd, or naïve his opinions may have been, they were always expressed in such racy and picturesque language that they become interesting as revelations of a very human and genuine personality.
One of the tragi-comedies of Cézanne’s life was the story of his early friendship with Zola, followed in middle life by a gradual estrangement, and at last a total separation. It is perhaps the only blot in M. Vollard’s book that he has taken too absolutely Cézanne’s point of view, and has hardly done justice to Zola’s goodness of heart. The cause of friction, apart from Cézanne’s habitual testiness and ill-humour, was that Zola’s feeling for art, which had led him in his youth to a heroic championship of the younger men, faded away in middle life. His own practice of literature led him further and further away from any concern with pure art, and he failed to recognise that his own early prophecy of Cézanne’s greatness had come true, simply because he himself had become a popular author, and Cézanne had failed of any kind of success. Unfortunately Zola, who had evidently lost all real æsthetic feeling, continued to talk about art, and worse than that he had made the hero of “L’Œuvre” a more or less recognisable portrait of his old friend. Cézanne could not tolerate Zola’s gradual acquiescence in worldly ideals and ways of life, and when the Dreyfusard question came up not only did his natural reactionary bias make him a vehement anti-Dreyfusard but he had no comprehension whatever of the heroism of Zola’s actions; he found him merely ridiculous, and believed him to be engaged in an ill-conceived scheme of self-advertisement. But for all his contempt of Zola his affection remained deeper than he knew, and when he heard the news of Zola’s death Cézanne shut himself alone up in his studio, and was heard sobbing and groaning throughout the day.
Cézanne’s is not the only portrait in M. Vollard’s entertaining book—there are sketches of many characters, among them the few strange and sympathetic men who appreciated and encouraged Cézanne in his early days. Of Cabaner the musician M. Vollard has collected some charming notes. Cabaner was a “philosopher,” and singularly indifferent to the chances of life. During the siege of Paris he met Coppée, and noticing the shells which were falling he became curious. “Where do all these bullets come from?” Coppée: “It would seem that it is the besiegers who send them.” Cabaner, after a silence: “Is it always the Prussians?” Coppée, impatiently: “Who on earth could it be?” Cabaner: “I don’t know ... other nations!” But the book is so full of good stories that I must resist the temptation to quote.
Fortunately M. Vollard has collected also a large number of Cézanne’s obiter dicta on art. These have all Cézanne’s pregnant wisdom and racy style. They often contain a whole system of æsthetics in a single phrase, as, for instance: “What’s wanted is to do Poussin over again from Nature.”
They show, moreover, the natural bias of Cézanne’s feelings and their gradual modification as his understanding became more profound. What comes out clearly, and it must never be forgotten in considering his art, is that his point of departure was from Romanticism. Delacroix was his god and Ingres, in his early days, his devil—a devil he learned increasingly to respect, but never one imagines really to love, “ce Dominique est très fort mais il m’emm——.” That Cézanne became a supreme master of formal design every one would nowadays admit, but there is some excuse for those contemporaries who complained of his want of drawing. He was not a master of line in the sense in which Ingres was. “The contour escapes me,” as he said. That is to say he arrived at the contour by a study of the interior planes; he was always plastic before he was linear. In his early works, such, for instance, as the “Scène de plein air” (see Plate), he is evidently inspired by Delacroix; he is almost a romanticist himself in such work, and his design is built upon the contrasts of large and rather loosely drawn silhouettes of dark and light. In fact it is the method of Tintoretto, Rubens, and Delacroix.
In the “Bathers resting,” painted in 1877, there is already a great change. It is rather by the exact placing of plastic units than by continuous flowing silhouettes that the design holds. Giorgione, perhaps, is behind this, but no longer Tintoretto, and, above all, Poussin has intervened.
In later works, such as the portrait of “Mme. Cézanne in a greenhouse,” the plasticity has become all-important, there is no longer any suggestion of a romantic decor; all is reduced to the purest terms of structural design.
These notes on Cézanne’s development are prompted by the illustrations in M. Vollard’s book. These are numerous and excellent, and afford a better opportunity for a general study of Cézanne’s œuvre than any other book. In fact, when the time comes for the complete appreciation of Cézanne M. Vollard’s book will be the most important document existing. It should, however, have a far wider appeal than that. I hope that after the war M. Vollard will bring out a small cheap edition[53]—it should become a classic biography. To say, as I would, that M. Vollard’s book is a monument worthy of Cézanne himself is to give it the highest praise.
RENOIR
WHAT a lover of the commonplace Renoir was! It is a rare quality among artists. A theoretically pure artist exists no more than a Euclidean point, but if such a being could exist, every possible actual sight would be equally suitable as a point of departure for his artistic vision. Everything would stir in him the impulse to creation. He would have no predilections, no tastes for this or that kind of thing. In practice every artist is set going by some particular kind of scene in nature, and for the most part artists have to search out some unusual or unexplored aspect of things. Gauguin, for instance, had to go as far as Tahiti. When Renoir heard of this, he said, in a phrase which revealed his own character: “Pourquoi? On peint si bien a Batignolles.” But there are plenty of artists who paint more or less well at Batignolles or Bloomsbury and yet are not lovers of the commonplace. Like Walter Sickert, for instance, they find their Tahiti in Mornington Crescent. Though they paint in commonplace surroundings, they generally contrive to catch them at an unexpected angle. Something odd or exotic in their taste for life seems to be normal to artists. The few artists or writers who have shared the tastes of the average man have, as a rule, been like Dickens—to take an obvious case—very imperfect and very impure artists, however great their genius. Among great artists one thinks at once of Rubens as the most remarkable example of a man of common tastes, a lover of all that was rich, exuberant and even florid. Titian, too, comes nearly up to the same standard, except that in youth his whole trend of feeling was distorted by the overpowering influence of Giorgione, whose tastes were recondite and strange. Renoir, in the frankness of his colour harmonies, in his feeling for design and even in the quality of his pigment, constantly reminds us of these two. Now it is easier to see how an artist of the sixteenth or seventeenth century could develop commonplace tastes than one of our own times. For with the nineteenth century came in a gradual process of differentiation of the artist from the average man. The modern artist finds himself so little understood by the crowd, in his aims and methods, that he tends to become distinct in his whole attitude to life.
What, then, is so peculiar about Renoir is that he has this perfectly ordinary taste in things and yet remains so intensely, so purely, an artist. The fact is perhaps that he was so much an artist that he never had to go round the corner to get his inspiration; the immediate, obvious, front view of everything was more than sufficient to start the creative impulse. He enjoyed instinctively, almost animally, all the common good things of life, and yet he always kept just enough detachment to feel his delight æsthetically—he kept, as it were, just out of reach of appetite.
More than any other great modern artist Renoir trusted implicitly to his own sensibility; he imposed no barrier between his own delight in certain things and the delight which he communicates. He liked passionately the obviously good things of life, the young human animal, sunshine, sky, trees, water, fruit; the things that every one likes; only he liked them at just the right distance with just enough detachment to replace appetite by emotion. He could rely on this detachment so thoroughly that he could dare, what hardly any other genuine modern has dared to say how much he liked even a pretty sight. But what gives his art so immediate, so universal an appeal is that his detachment went no further than was just necessary. His sensibility is kept at the exact point where it is transmuted into emotion. And the emotion, though it has of course the generalised æsthetic feeling, keeps something of the fulness and immediacy of the simpler attitude. Not that Renoir was either naïve or stupid. When he chose he showed that he was capable of logical construction and vigorous design. But for his own pleasure he would, as he himself said, have been satisfied to make little isolated records of his delight in the detail of a flower or a lock of hair. With the exception of “Les Parapluies” at the National Gallery we have rarely seen his more deliberate compositions in England. But in all his work alike Renoir remains the man who could trust recklessly his instinctive reaction to life.
Let me confess that these characteristics—this way of keeping,
as it were, just out of reach of appetite—makes Renoir to me, personally, a peculiarly difficult artist. My taste for exotic artists such as Cosima Tura and his kin amounts at times to a vice. Consequently, I am sometimes in danger of not doing Renoir justice, because at the first approach to one of his pictures I miss the purely accessory delight of an unexpected attitude. The first approach to one of his pictures may indeed remind one of pictures that would be the delight of the servants’ hall, so unaffectedly simple is his acceptance of the charm of rosy-cheeked girls, of pretty posies and dappled sunlight. And yet one knows well enough that Renoir was as “artful” as one could wish. Though he had not the biting wit of a Degas, he had a peculiar love of mischievous humour; he was anything but a harmless or innocent character. All his simplicity is on the surface only. The longer one looks, the deeper does Renoir retire behind veil after veil of subtlety. And yet, compared with some modern artists, he was, after all, easy and instinctively simple. Even his plastic unity was arrived at by what seems a more natural method than, say, Cézanne’s. Whereas Cézanne undertook his indefatigable research for the perspective of the receding planes, Renoir seems to have accepted a very simple general plastic formula. Whatever Cézanne may have meant by his celebrated saying about cones and cylinders, Renoir seems to have thought the sphere and cylinder sufficient for his purpose. The figure presents itself to his eye as an arrangement of more or less hemispherical bosses and cylinders, and he appears generally to arrange the light so that the most prominent part of each boss receives the highest light. From this the planes recede by insensible gradations towards the contour, which generally remains the vaguest, least ascertained part of the modelling. Whatever lies immediately behind the contour tends to become drawn into its sphere of influence, to form an undefined recession enveloping and receiving the receding planes. As the eye passes away from the contour, new but less marked bosses form themselves and fill the background with repetitions of the general theme. The picture tends thus to take the form of a bas-relief in which the recessions are not into the profound distances of pictorial space, but only back, as it were, to the block out of which the bossed reliefs emerge, though, of course, by means of atmospheric colour the eye may interpret these recessions as distance. This is clearly in marked contrast to Cézanne’s method of suggesting endless recessions of planes with the most complicated interwoven texture.
Renoir’s drawing takes on the same fundamental simplicity. An Ingres arrived at the simplified statement necessary for great design by a process of gradual elimination of all the superfluous sinuosities which his hand had recorded in the first drawing from nature. Renoir seems never to have allowed his eye to accept more than the larger elements of mass and direction. His full, rounded curves embrace the form in its most general aspect. With advancing years and continually growing science he was able, at last, to state this essential synthesis with amazing breadth and ease. He continually increased the amplitude of his forms until, in his latest nudes, the whole design is filled with a few perfectly related bosses. Like Titian’s, Renoir’s power of design increased visibly up to the very end of his life. True, he was capable at all periods of conceiving large and finely co-ordinated compositions, such as “Les Parapluies” and the “Charpentier family”; but at the end even the smallest studies have structural completeness.
A POSSIBLE DOMESTIC ARCHITECTURE[54]
HOUSES are either builders’ houses or architects’ houses. Not that speculative builders do not employ architects, but they generally employ architects who efface themselves behind the deadly conventionality and bewildering fantasy of their façades. Architects’ houses are generally built to the order of a gentleman who wishes his house to have some distinctive character, to stand out from the common herd of houses, either by its greater splendour or its greater discretion. The builder’s house, like the dresses of the lower middle class, is generally an imitation of the gentleman’s, only of a fashion that has just gone out of date and imitated badly in cheaper materials. No one defends it. It is made so because you must make a house somehow, and bought because it is the usual and therefore inevitable thing. No one enjoys it, no one admires it, it is accepted as part of the use and wont of ordinary life. The gentleman’s and architect’s house is different. Here time and thought, and perhaps great ingenuity and taste are employed in giving to the house an individual character. Unfortunately this individual character is generally terribly conscious of its social aspect, of how the house will look, not to those who live in it so much as to those who come to visit. We have no doubt outlived the more vulgar forms of this social consciousness, those which led to the gross display of merely expensive massiveness and profusion. Few modern houses would satisfy Mr. Podsnap. But its subtler forms are still apparent. They generally make themselves felt in the desire to be romantic. As it requires much too much imagination to find romance in the present, one looks for it in the past, and so a dive is made into some period of history, and its monuments studied and copied, and finally “adapted” to the more elaborate exigencies of modern life. But, alas, these divers into the past seem never to have been able to find the pearl of romance, for, ever since the craze began in the eighteenth century, they have been diving now here, now there, now into Romanesque, now into Gothic, now into Jacobean, now into Queen Anne. They have brought up innumerable architectural “features” which have been duly copied by modern machinery, and carefully glued on to the houses, and still the owners and the architects, to do them justice, feel restless, and are in search of some new old style to try. The search has flagged of late, people know it is useless, and here and there architects have set to work merely to build so well and with such a fine sense of the material employed that the result should satisfy the desire for comeliness without the use of any style. I am thinking of some of Mr. Blow’s earlier works where a peculiar charm resulted from the unstinting care with which every piece of material had been chosen and the whole fitted together almost as though the stones had been precious stones instead of flints or bricks.
But on the whole the problem appears to be still unsolved, and the architects go on using styles of various kinds with greater or less degrees of correctness. This they no longer do with the old zest and hope of discovery, but rather with a languid indifference and with evident marks of discouragement.
Now style is an admirable thing, it is the result of ease and coherence of feeling, but unfortunately a borrowed style is an even stronger proof of muddled and befogged emotions than the total absence of style. The desire for a style at all costs, even a borrowed style, is part of that exaggerated social consciousness which in other respects manifests itself as snobbery. What if people were just to let their houses be the direct outcome of their actual needs, and of their actual way of life, and allow other people to think what they like. What if they behaved in the matter of houses as all people wish to behave in society without any undue or fussy self-consciousness. Wouldn’t such houses have really a great deal more character, and therefore interest for others, than those which are deliberately made to look like something or other. Instead of looking like something, they would then be something.
The house which I planned and built for myself was the result of certain particular needs and habits. I had originally no idea of building a house: I had so often heard the proverb that “Fools build houses for wise men to live in,” that I had come to believe it, but I required a house of a certain size for my family within easy reach of London. I looked at a great many houses and found that those which had a sufficient number of rooms were all gentlemen’s establishments, with lodge, stabling, and green-houses. Now it was characteristic of my purse that I could not afford to keep up a gentleman’s establishment and of my tastes that I could not endure to. I was a town dweller, and I wanted a town house and a little garden in the country. As I could not find what I wanted, the idea came into my head that I must build it or go without. The means at my disposal were definitely limited; the question was therefore whether I could build a house of the required size with that sum. I made a plan containing the number of rooms of the sizes I required, and got an estimate. It was largely in excess of the sum I possessed for the purpose. I feared I must give up my scheme when I met a friend who had experimented in building cheap cottages on his estate, and learned from him that the secret of economy was concentration of plan. I also discovered in discussing my first estimate that roofs were cheaper than walls. I thereupon started on a quite different plan, in which I arranged the rooms to form as nearly as possible a solid block, and placed a number of the rooms in a hipped or Mansard roof. It will be seen that, so far, the planning of the house was merely the discovery of a possible equation between my needs and the sum at my disposal.
But in trying to establish this equation I had found it necessary to make the rooms rather smaller than I should have liked, and having a great liking for large and particularly high interiors—I hate Elizabethan rooms with their low ceilings in spite of their prettiness, and I love the interiors of the baroque palaces of Italy—I determined to have one room of generous dimensions and particularly of great height. This large room surrounded by small rooms was naturally made into a general living-place, with arrangements by means of a lift to enable it to be used as a dining hall if there were more in the house than could be accommodated in the small breakfast room.
The estimate for this new concentrated plan, in spite of the large dimensions of the living place, came to little more than half the estimate for the former plan, and made my project feasible, provided that I could calculate all details and did not run into extras.
So far then there has been no question of architecture; it has been merely solving the problem of personal needs and habits, and of cost, and if architecture there is to be, it should, I think, come directly out of the solution of these problems. The size and disposition of the plan having thus been fixed, the elevations are given in outline, and the only question is how the rectangle of each elevation is to be treated. Doors and windows are the elements of the design, and here again something will already be determined by needs or tastes. There is need of a certain amount of light, and my own taste is to have as much as possible, so that the windows had to be large rectangles. But when all these things are determined by need there is still a wide margin of choice—the size of the panes in the windows, the depth of recess of the windows within the wall, the flatness or relief of each element. All these and many more are still matters of choice, and it is through the artist’s sense of proportion and his feeling for the plastic relief of the whole surface that a work of mere utility may become a work of art. In the case of the main elevation of my house I found that when all the windows, including the long windows of the high living-place, were duly arranged, there was a want of unity owing to the nearly equal balance between the horizontal and vertical members. I therefore underlined the slight projection of the central part (a projection enforced by by-laws) by varying the material, replacing at this point the plaster of the walls by two bands of red brick. In this way the vertical effect of the central part was made to dominate the whole façade. The artistic or architectural part of this house was confined, then, merely to the careful choice of proportions within certain fixed limits defined by needs, and neither time, money, nor thought were expended on giving the house the appearance of any particular style.
I have gone thus at length into the history of my own house merely as an example of the way in which, I think, a genuine architecture, and in the end, no doubt, an architectural style, might arise. It requires a certain courage or indifference to public opinion on the part of the owner. My own house is neighboured by houses of the most gentlemanly picturesqueness, houses from which tiny gables with window slits jut out at any unexpected angle, and naturally it is regarded as a monstrous eyesore by their inhabitants. Indeed, when I first came here it was supposed that the ugliness of my house was so apparent that I myself could not be blind to it, and should not resent its being criticised in my presence. They were quite right, I did not resent it; I was only very much amused.
To arrive at such a genuine domestic architecture as I conceive, requires, then, this social indifference to surrounding snobbishness on the part of the owner, and it requires a nice sense of proportion and a feeling for values of plastic relief on the part of the artist who designs the house, but it does not require genius or even any extraordinary talent to make a genuine and honest piece of domestic architecture which will continue to look distinguished when the last “style” but one having just become démodé already stinks in the nostrils of all cultured people.
JEAN MARCHAND[55]
THERE are some thirty pictures by M. Jean Marchand now on view at the Carfax Gallery in Bury Street. This gives one an occasion for reviewing the work of this comparatively young artist. M. Marchand belongs, of course, to the revolutionary movement of this century in that he derives the general principles of his art from Cézanne, but he is the most traditional of revolutionaries. Not by the wildest stretch of the imagination could one conceive of M. Marchand deliberately or consciously doing anything to astonish the public. It is quite true that no genuine artist ever did, but some artists have found an added piquancy in the thought that inventions that occurred to them would in point of fact have this adventitious charm. But with M. Marchand such possibilities seem more remote than with most of his compeers. An extreme simplicity and directness of outlook and a touching sincerity in all he does are the most prominent characteristics of his work. Not that he makes one suppose him to be too naïve to play tricks with his art; on the contrary, one sees that he is highly self-conscious and intellectual, but that he knows the utter futility of any deliberate emphasis on the artist’s part. He knows that any effect of permanent value must flow directly from the matter in hand; that it is useless to make anything appear more interesting or impressive than it is; that, whatever his vision is, it must be accepted literally, and without any attempt to add to its importance or effectiveness.
In short, M. Marchand is a classic artist—one might almost in these days say a French artist, and count it as synonymous, but that one remembers that the French, too, have had their orgies of romantic emphasis, and have always ready to hand a convention of coldly exaggerated rhetoric. Moreover, if one thinks of a nearly allied painter