The house in which Gustave Moreau spent the seventy-seven years of his life (1826-98) has been turned into a museum which contains nearly all his life’s work, according to the catalogue 1132 items, from the copies and sketches of his youth, through the great finished paintings, down to the promising sketches, unfulfilled promises, of his old age. This collection falls little short of being complete. Perhaps, with the sole exception of the incomparably less interesting Wierz, there is no contemporary artist less often met with in public and private galleries than Gustave Moreau. He never sold his pictures, for he was lucky enough not to be obliged to do so; and, in the time of his maturity, he did not exhibit, for he shunned contact with men who were strange and unfamiliar to him. He who wishes to get to know him must, then, not shirk a pilgrimage to his house, which he inherited from his parents, inhabited by himself, and left as an unencumbered legacy to his native town. And the journey will be found worth the trouble, for Gustave Moreau is a curious phenomenon, affecting to melancholy and depressing, at least for men enamoured with life and action, but nevertheless full of mysterious, strangely pathetic allurement, even for those who prefer to breathe in air and sunshine under a bright sky.

Gustave Moreau stands apart from the mighty procession of French art in the nineteenth century, which was headed by the classic cohort, continued by the powerful band of the knights and squires of romanticism, and then unrolled itself before our eyes, in the legion of the bourgeois National Guard of Philistine academic routine-art, in the blouse-wearing troop of Realists, and, lastly, in the vacillating and oscillating sun-flower groups of Symbolism. He is not to be classed in this line of development. He went his way alone, deaf to the strains of the world of which he heard only those with which he himself was in harmony from the beginning. He had some few kindred spirits among contemporary painters, but he did not know them, and they did not know him either, and they exercised no influence on each other, but grew up independently of one another from the same conditions of like temperaments and peculiar moods that in the middle decades of the nineteenth century dominated narrow, exclusive circles, without being characteristic of this or any other time. For these temperaments are purely subjective, and accord with the external only so far as civilisation, when it has reached a certain grade of intensity and artificiality, always produces men with widely preponderating development of fancy, who are continually looking into their inner selves, and cannot withdraw their eyes from the fascinating spectacle of the wonderful events being enacted therein.

Moreau was just such a visionary. Remote from life, remote from actuality, he ever remained engrossed in his dream, and his noble art served him to retain his apparently multifarious, but, in reality, little changing dream-pictures. His museum is, then, a world by itself, with which the objective outer world has no more in common than have dreams and ravings with pictures of the actual which serve them as a stimulus, and furnish them with the elements of their subjective combinations.

Since the earliest stages of development of the spiritual life there have existed, side by side with men of observation and action, thinkers and dreamers who turn away from actualities, and build up around them a world of ideas which their excessively developed power of imagination could fashion, and endow with romantic life according to their own inclination and necessities. Thus arose all symbols, mythologies, fables, and superstitions that were enshrined in folk-lore, traditions, and, more especially, in all arts. Civilisation brings with it, by this means, besides its recognition of nature, a world of shadows invented by men freely—even if according to fixed psychological laws—like a ghostly double, the astral body of the real world; and our prescriptive education, which comprises in itself more æsthetic than positively scientific ingredients, renders us all double citizens of the real and the imaginary world. The majority of us chiefly live in the former, and visit the latter only in rare moments, which to some mean only recreation, but to others consecration and exaltation. A small minority, however, renounce their citizenship of the actual world and withdraw wholly to the world of imagination, which has been conjured up by the artistic fancy of mankind in thousands of years of creative activity.

Moreau was a citizen of the shadow-world, wherein he spent, an eternal Phæacian Sunday, and he never grew weary of lingering over its beauties. We learn by his representations to know it thoroughly in all its parts. Its landscapes are curiously jagged rocks which seem to be formed of corals; chalk plains with moon-glimmering reflections; mountain steeps in cumulous clouds; lakes and seas of oil, opalescent or charged with indigo. The animals that people this hypnotising paradise are unicorns with silvery coats, amazing dragons that are too curly to inspire fear, milk-white flying-horses, seven-headed hydras standing bolt upright on the tips of their tails, Stymphalian birds with women’s faces, sphinxes, chimæras, and phœnixes. Even the flamingos, which come nearest to the terrestrial fauna, are here with the tips of their wings dipped, as it were, in blood, immeasurably more oddly pathetic than we know them. The flora exhibits (besides monumental marvels of Peru, which remind one of the rose windows in Gothic cathedrals) a “mystic blossom,” a somewhat calla-like creation that sprouts forth from a luminous rock in the blue, mirroring mere, and on its slender summit, between great high leaves, bears the Blessed Virgin surrounded by a dazzling halo. The spiritual beings that move amidst these marvellous animals and plants, are gods, heroes, and poets: Tyrtæus, Orpheus, Hesiod, Sappho, Jason, Helena, Odysseus, Penelope, Pasiphae, Hercules, Dejanira, Œdipus, Jupiter, Apollo, the Muses, Semele, Leda, Europa, Prometheus, the Oceanides, Moses, Buddha, Jesus Christ, the Good Samaritan; the acts or, more correctly, the states in which these gods, demigods, and genii are represented are taken from all mythologies and theogonies. Every mysticism that has at any time or place arisen, like a silver haze, from the chaotic brain of man, has found admittance into Moreau’s soul and flows up and down in it in changing pictures. As to orthodoxy of any sort or kind, he is quite unconcerned. His mind, when stirred, clings with the same delicacy to the saint of every origin, and he kneels, like the large-hearted heathen of antiquity, at the threshold of the most varied realms of divinity. The Pallas Athene in the hall of the king’s palace at Ithaca, who enjoys the massacre of the suitors, is formed after the same type as the Blessed Virgin of the “mystic blossom”; hovering in long, trailing, white garments, radiant with a halo, ecstatic in look and mien and the clasping of her hands. The statues of the Chaldæan gods in the triumph of Alexander the Great imitate hieratic repose, and the Eastern posture of the Buddha-Amina statues. Prometheus on the Caucasian peak, palpitating beneath the vulture’s beak, is allied by a family likeness to Christ scourged at the pillar. Jason on the poop of the Argo, and the fair man among the “Three Magi from the East,” are cast in the same mould. Moses, looking down from the frontier hill on the blue plains of Canaan, and the great Pan, gazing at the spectacle of the procession of the spheres, seem brothers. Jupiter, with Semele on his bosom melting away with its heat, has the unapproachable sublimity of the canonical, the orthodox God the Father. For Moreau there are no dead religions; with a humble shyness and feelings of awe, he approaches all that has ever been reverenced by man.

Moreau’s transcendental imaginations necessarily reveal themselves to the senses in other colours, as in other forms than those familiar to us by experience. An eerie light fills his pictures with the shimmering radiance of mother-of-pearl. The rarest, and, therefore, as jewels, the most treasured exceptional forms of the planetary world are the material of which everything in these pictures consists; the buildings are of gold and precious stones; there is a twinkle of rubies, sapphires, and emeralds everywhere. Moreau’s amazing art produces from his palette of oil-colours effects that lie far outside its technique; they are huge Limoges plates with rivers of transparent enamel; paintings on glass with sun-illumined, jewel-like fragments of colour; Byzantine mosaics of bits of lapis lazuli, jasper, and cornelian. With this palette certain Quattrocentists such as Mantegna, certain Flemish artists as Van Eyck and Roger van der Weyden, as also Holbein, have in their pictures produced a small number of beauty-spots. No one prior to Moreau has painted big pictures entirely with it.

The first impression received from the Moreau Museum is that of having entered an enchanted castle, which has about it something of the treasure cave of the mountain sprites, something of the palace of the Elf-queen, as we know them from the “Thousand and One Nights,” and German folk-stories. And if we have tarried longer, and our eyes have grown accustomed to the ripple of pearls and precious stones, of enamel and gold, we are astonished at the strange, weird stiffness and stillness of all these splendid creatures, and really feel we are surrounded by ghosts and spectres that have assumed only in pretence the guise of men.

Moreau formed his views on Baudelaire’s rules. In the rooms of his museum we fancy we are looking at a series of book-illustrations for the Fleurs-du-mal.

“I hate the movement which displaces the lines, and never do I weep and never laugh” would, as an inscription above the entrance, most fittingly convey in words the main feature of Moreau’s art. For nearly all his pictures, but most of all for the “Triumph of Alexander the Great,” “Penelope’s Suitors,” and the “Daughters of Thespius,” the verses of the Paris Dream would suit as a deliberate description.

This silence d’éternité is the characteristic of Moreau’s art. Here nothing moves; all is as stiff as Lot’s wife after she was turned into a pillar of salt, as the men in the fairy-tale after the wizard has, by a wave of his magic wand, made the warm life stagnate in their veins. Moreau succeeds in reversing Pygmalion’s miracle. His brush takes the life out of every human body he paints, and turns it into a statue. In none of his figures do we feel that he painted from a model. They all give the impression of being copies from statuary, and we are, for instance, not surprised that his manifestly unfinished “Moses Looking at the Promised Land” has a long bearded head as white as marble on an almost flesh-coloured body. We assume that Moreau has here simply reproduced the natural colour of his stone prototype. Among all his thousand works, one alone has really struck me as having something like a stir of passion traceable, viz., his “Messalina.” The abominable empress, slave of her animal passions, is ascending the dirty couch at a den in the Suburra. The young vulgarian whom she has beckoned to her clasps her waist with both arms; the attendant torch-bearer of the crowned slut turns her head away from the repulsive sight. One can very well understand the movement of this slave who is ashamed of her mistress, but has only to obey and hold her tongue. The eagerness, too, with which the youth kneeling before the couch creeps up to the body that is offered him, is true and warm. Here is real life, even if in one of its lowest manifestations. But Messalina herself, though the protagonist of this tragedy of Cæsarean madness, is again entirely Moreau. With her stony repose in a situation with which it is so inconsistent, with her Assyrian fish-bladder-eyed profile, she resembles an idol in a Babylonian temple, and one wonders how the passion of the favoured one can endure the icy coldness gleaming from this idol.

His temperament indicated to him, from his earliest awakening to artistic impulse, the course of his education, just as it did, later, the choice of his material. As a youth in Italy he copied Pompeian mural paintings with fervour, and later revelled at the sight of the Quattrocentists. Here he recognised at first sight kindred souls; here, as it were, his blood spoke. He tries, by imitating them piously, to keep them for reminiscences later on. His mystic bent to the old, the obsolete, the risen as from a grave, is a trait connecting him with the Præ-Raphaelites, who were almost his contemporaries. With them he has in common, too, the uncommonly exact and accurate technique. He is a cold but unerring draughtsman. All his accessory work, his architecture, ornaments, implements, and clothing, are marvels of archæological learning or, when this fails, of invention and patiently, painfully achieved execution. His conscientiousness went so far that he painted perhaps twenty or more far advanced sketches of each detail of his large compositions ere he proceeded to the main work, and this, nevertheless, he often left unfinished, because he felt he had not done enough to satisfy his conscience.

Those empty, or merely vaguely filled-in spots instead of faces in big pictures, in which all besides—the patterns of the garment stuffs and carpets, the decorations on the splendid vases, the finery, weapons, capitals of the pillars—are precisely rendered as complete productions, give suddenly to the sympathetic an idea of the pains of this struggling spirit. Moreau shunned life, which was too stormy, noisy, and bustling for his morbid need of repose and quiet, but it did not cease to attract him as a mysterious riddle. He would gladly have understood it, comprehended it, and held it fast, but he had to admit to himself that he was powerless to reach it. A homunculus artificially generated in the retort, he can live only in his glass vessel, and must die if he ventures out of it; but through his prison walls he gazes at the great, broad, free nature, replete with tempestuous life, and in the cold of his glassy den he shudders with longing for this world, so near and yet beyond his reach. His longing is, however, never to be appeased; he will never feel the joys of the warm breath of life.