Sincerity did not rule in all parts of the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1900, but a quickening air of freedom was breathed in the great palace of art. The temporary proprietors of this colossal building, the French artists, did not pretend to any motive that they did not possess. “Make room! Out of the way! Out!” we fancied we heard from all the dusky corners of the vast halls in a voice of thunder. “Foreigners from both worlds? To the south wing with them! In the corner! Under the staircase! That’s quite too good for them. The dead? The famous of yesterday? What do the disturbers want? Haven’t they had their share of ribbons, titles, commissions from the State, and other forms of the artist’s ideals? Back with you! To the furthermost building in the rear! If any one wants to make journeys of discovery, he can steer away. The chief buildings, the foregrounds, the splendid halls for us, the chers maîtres of to-day. We are the strongest, therefore we need do no violence to our feelings. We are alive, therefore we are right.”
Certainly, certainly. I do not contradict this; but it suits my inclination to wander past the conquerors of the day to the shadows in the back premises, into the remote and also, as to equipment, significantly neglected halls of the Century Exhibition, to the great vault in which is collected that which was to make plain the development of French art from the Revolution to Carnot, the grandson. What remains when the human being who gives dinners, haunts antechambers, has cousins in the Ministry of the Fine Arts, whispers malice in one’s ear, ceases to acknowledge greetings, and writes flattering letters, has fallen to dust; when rivals and parasites have disappeared; when the puffs of toadies, and the no less valuable ones of envious men and poison-boilers, are hushed and forgotten?
Not much, and there lies the melancholy humour of such wanderings through the realm of shadows. The only feature that always wounded me somewhat in the “Divine Comedy,” is that Dante awards his curses and execrations on the departed according to the rank they occupied among the living. The invectives on the poor soul of a pope have three stripes, those on a prince, two, and on a lord, one. That is an inartistic forgetfulness of the frame chosen by Dante for his poem. If he remained always mindful of his programme of death and hell, he would not be able to distinguish crowns or purple mantles in the red illumination of the under-world. The laughing and sighing philosophy of Hamlet—alas, poor Yorick!—stands higher than the resentful fury of the passionate Italian, who makes the hierarchy overstep the threshold of the grave. It is perhaps the most profound usage of the French language that they deprive the dead of the “Monsieur,” to which every living man, with the exception of those criminally prosecuted and condemned, has a claim. The dead has no longer a title—so much more sorry a fate for him, if, when he was alive, he was nothing more than a title.
The practice is even here somewhat different from the pure theory. The deceased is no longer “Excellency,” “Professor,” not even “Mr.” But the usage of contemporaries to give him a title is still expressed in the respectful tone in which they pronounce his now naked name, and in which one possessed with a delicate sense of hearing perceives the rustle of all the tinsel that surrounded him when alive. In this tone, however, the name becomes familiar to the younger ones, who, without thinking, continue this veneration, unconscious that their accent expresses respect because the bearer of the name so pronounced was once a Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour and an Academician. Thus, my dear Schiller, are your confident words to be understood, you who would never perceive the weft of vulgarity in the ways of man: “He who has satisfied the best men of his time has lived for all time.” Certainly, if by “best” we would understand the best placed, best paid, invested with the best office, or the best decorated. He who during his lifetime has belonged to those favoured by the grace of official newspapers, who has been gauged by them and provided with a “full” mark, will be recognised for all time as full without further test. The Pantheon is the continuation of the minister’s official rooms, the golden book of spiritual history an anthology from the Official Gazette and the Army List, for the use of the children of later centuries. If I must emphasise the essential: the appraisement even of the artist, therefore of the most individual man that exists, is the outcome of social, not individual, factors, or of the latter only when they are socially successful, and, therefore, themselves become social factors. There are, I admit, always proud—perhaps only haughty—natures with an anarchistic, anti-social trait, who will not recognise any arrangement or fixing of the community, not even its hierarchy of fame, and clench their fists against laurel crowns just as they do against crowns. Their rebellion, however, is seldom successful. I know of no case of a bomb-thrower having destroyed a Pantheon.
But as we do not take ourselves tragically, do not begin our own verdict with the threatening formula, “In the name of the Law,” and do not exact any submission from others, we are always entitled to be of our own opinion, and to let the dead influence us without prejudice, untroubled by the distinctions of rank which were bestowed on them in life, and were buried with them. Such a method of observation is unhistorical, but subjectively fruitful; it leads to self-emancipation from many superstitions.
The Century Exhibition of French painting was far from being complete; it was incomparably more fragmentary than the Louvre Museum, which is also not without gaps. But it afforded a general view of the art development of the period represented, and it gave the independent man the chance of correcting numerous opinions which had taken hold of him from study and reading.
It began with the masters who created and flourished before the deluge of 1789—Watteau, Greuze, Fragonard, Vigée-Lebrun. The three first had, for two generations, sunk deeply in general estimation. Then the force of fashion raised them up again to dizzy heights of fame. I do not believe that they will maintain themselves there. It pleases the reactionaries to glorify the ancien régime at the expense of the Revolution, and to this planned and deliberate toil belongs also the unmeasured overestimate of eighteenth century art and artistic work. But it is politics, not æsthetics—no taste for art, but a tendency. In reality, the darlings of the age of the Pompadour and Louis XVI. were petty masters, mere fillings of a particular frame, and, lifted out of this, they lose their best qualities.
Watteau still holds his ground most easily, for he is an amiable teller of stories that are agreeable if nothing of a more serious character occupies one’s mind. He draws elegantly, although without pedantry; his colouring is cheerful, and suits admirably his hushed, silken carpets, coquettish Gobelins, and light lacquered furniture. He is the painter of joyous days wherein life seems an eternal feast. Gracious spring bedecks the earth, his men and women are all young and handsome, his ladies wear entrancing toilettes and coiffures, and his gentlemen silk doublets and lace shirt-frills. Even if they dress as shepherds, they are laughingly addressed thus: “I know you, fair masque; you are a marquis in disguise with your charming friend, the duchess.” Rosy angels hover about them, and mingle familiarly in their pastimes. They have nothing on earth to do except pay each other witty compliments and play at love. I understand why American multi-millionaires pay any price to be surrounded by Watteaus. It is really honourable to the artists of our time that the Trust magnates have not yet succeeded in finding or rearing painters who would flatter their egotism through servile suggestions of a Watteau aspect of the world.
Fragonard appears in a secondary position besides Watteau. He is drier, and with less “swing.” He is not really present in his heart at the pastimes he paints. Watteau is himself a guest at his festivals; Fragonard takes part in the soirées only under a sealed order. The former amuses himself, the latter amuses the person who gives him the commission.
Greuze lives on the fame bestowed on him by the grateful Diderot. He was enthusiastic for Diderot’s tearful bourgeois tragedy, and Diderot repaid him with enthusiasm for his painting; but we have no longer any grounds, I suppose, for regarding him with Diderot’s eyes. When he paints his eternal model of the “Broken Pitcher” in the Louvre, and of his sundry counterparts of it in the Century Exhibition, he is pitilessly pretty. When he sets great dramatic scenes in the Diderot style on the stage—the “Village Betrothal,” the “Father’s Curse,” etc.—he is depressingly melodramatic. His young maiden is marvellously pretty and tame, and will always delight childlike spectators with the charm of her blooming girlhood. He suffered himself to be infected in Italy by Guido Reni’s sweetness, and only transplanted his soft beauties, rolling their eyes, from paradise to the middle-class earth. He is simply the Bouguereau of his age. That name comprises all that can be said of him in praise or blame. Greuze is Bouguereau’s superior in so far as he paints more vigorously, and forms his pretty ingénues of real flesh—not, like Bouguereau, of alabaster and sugar-candy.
Beside the softness of Greuze, Madame Vigée-Lebrun seems a man and a fighter. In a century of gallantry she alone was not gallant. She painted women’s likenesses, and did not pay court to her models; but she elevated them, and gave them meaning. Where the male painters of the period saw only beauty-patches, she suspected she saw a soul. If we look at these women with curiously poised heads, gazing boldly out of their frames, they say proudly and calmly: “I am no trying-on hand; I am no creature of luxury; I am no flesh for lust; I am a personage.” At a distance of a hundred years Vigée-Lebrun is a forerunner of the now innumerable American painters of emancipated womanhood. This brave woman, who was beautiful, and did not overprize, nay, hardly prized her beauty, was an asserter of women’s rights long before the word or the thing was invented.
Prudhon was represented by a “Zephyr,” which has the same peculiarities as his “Crucifixion” and “Crime and Punishment” in the Louvre. He models a human body so that one must take one’s hat off to it. He has the infallible feeling of the great Spaniards for the value of light and shade; but what will always stand in the way of his being loved and not merely respected is his hatred of colour. He confines himself to a strict black and white style, which banishes all gladness and discourages the most willing admiration.
And now the great deluge breaks in, and, like a sea-god David emerges over the raging waves. It is really with him that the century begins, for what preceded him was the art of the ancien régime and of the Trianon. He had at the Exhibition a “Distribution of the Colours,” an “Ugolino,” some portraits; all of the most genuine David in choice of subject as well as treatment. Everywhere the capricious “seeing yellow” which seems to have been a peculiarity of his eye; everywhere the grandly imposing, professorial infallibility of drawing which knows no first trying, no anxious searching, no hot struggle with the never quite attainable Nature. David compels with an imperious Medusa-glance the ever-stirring, the ever-flowing, so that it becomes fixed, and he can shackle the now immovable vision in brazen outlines. So his human beings appear statues, or mimes, which maintain a pose, and his most blameless anatomies acquire a tendency towards the artificial. David’s mood is always uniformly high-pitched. Good-humoured people, who would like to see the majestic man in shirt sleeves for once, lurk in vain for him to unbutton himself. He never forsakes the decoration and costume of high tragedy. At first he sought the drama in ancient history or world-famed poetry. Afterwards, he found it in his immediate surroundings. Fate vouchsafed him the favour of living in a time, the pathos of which was mightier than that of Athens, Sparta, or Rome. He satisfied his deepest longings when, in the “Sabine Women,” he preached to the murderous factions among his people reconciliation and brotherly love, and, in “The Distribution of the Colours” and the “Coronation,” he made Napoleon the equal of the heroes of mythology. He is, therefore, always genuine, even when he may seem to the superficial gaze theatrical. It is the difference between a tone naturally sustained during moments of life at high pressure, and declamation learnt from a teacher of rhetoric.
His pupils, imitators, and rivals have, on the contrary, not succeeded in avoiding declamation. Gérard, Gros, Riesener, and Drolling were, consciously or unconsciously, the greatest flatterers that ever painted portraits. Because David represented Napoleon in the character of an Alexander of Macedon, or an ancient god of war, the others, the smaller painters, in their portraits gave to even the ordinary men of the period the deportment of Olympian gods. Only Gérard’s “Letitia,” who, too, bore apotheosis most easily, is a good modest human being. All the other women are Juno or Pallas Athene; all the men Mars or Achilles. The contrast between the commonplace physiognomies and the magnificence of their appearance is now and then so violent that one is led to surmise that the painter wanted to make fun of his models. “Charles X. in his Coronation Robes,” by Ingres, seems, for example, virtually a parody of David’s “Coronation of Napoleon.”
Géricault stands an examination of his title to fame badly. He has not so correct an eye for the figures of horses as was believed before instantaneous photographs. His portraits of soldiers are really more crude than powerful. Even the sketch for the “Raft of the Medusa,” reveals evidence of straining after effect which our pious admiration refused to notice in the colossal work in the Louvre. On the other hand, the figure of Louis Leopold Boilly gained strangely in the Century Exhibition. Up till then I knew only his “Arrival of a Diligence at a Posting-house,” in the Louvre, and I did not rate him very highly on account of the affected atelier light of this otherwise prettily studied little picture. Here he disclosed himself as a great philosopher and satirist. One picture represents a popular merry-making with wine gratis, another a free performance at the Ambigu-Comique Theatre. There the crowd is fighting murderously over a drink that can be had for nothing; half-grown hobbledehoys throttle bestial greybeards; bullies claw hold of furies; dreadful feet trample on faces and necks in the mad storming of the wine supplies, and the victors in this struggle have their reward: they lie on the ground bestially drunk. The scenes at the entrance of the theatre are not quite so vulgar. There is a less dogged scramble for intellectual enjoyment than for that of the palate. Yet here, too, the most brutal lack of consideration and greedy selfishness triumph; here, too, the strong man overmasters the weak; here, too, among beings who seem to belie their human form, the law of the jungle holds good; and here, too, poor people pay for a little doubtful pleasure with the sufferings, dangers, and exertions of a storming of the Malakoff. In the foreground of both pictures stands a group of well-dressed persons who, half in pity, half in disgust, look at the disorderly pushing of the rabble from a respectful distance. These rich people have the rôle of teaching the moral of the fable. They express the sociological thought of the painter. Boilly deplores the low moral condition of the masses, and reproaches the dominant class with having degraded them to beasts, when it pretends to give them a feast. He rejects with utter disdain the dogma of equality, yet without haughtiness, for he has for the disinherited the somewhat condescending, yet warm pity of a genuine patrician. These are extremely modern—I might call them Toynbee-feelings—and they are expressed with an exact, judicious brush that can conjure forth the confused turmoil of a great, raging multitude, and, nevertheless, remain faithful in all details. Boilly was decidedly a master.
The Century Exhibition also gave the opportunity for a discovery, not only to me, but also to all who brought to it an open mind. There is a painter, Trutat, of whom no one had ever heard anything. Seekers who investigated the provincial newspaper of 1840-60 succeeded in discovering one or two articles about him. That is all. He once or twice exhibited in the “Salon,” but the “Salon” reports of the time make no mention of him. He lived in the first half of the last century, and died at the age of twenty-four. Before his picture—one single picture—men were amazed, and women stood with moist eyes. It is a double picture; in the foreground, a fair young man, pale with sickness, with deep blue eyes and a proud, wild mane; his firm forehead full of impatient dreams of joyous creations, fame, and happiness, yet, in his hollow cheeks, faint shadows of death. Behind him, half obscured in dusk, a woman’s profile, his mother’s head; a good Samaritan with tender gaze, and lips closed in sadness, which once sang cradle-songs, but have learnt silence in the sick-room. In its composition there is a reminiscence of Ary Scheffer’s “St Augustin and St Monica,” in the Louvre. But it is incomparably more profound, for Trutat depicts himself, not saints whom the power of imagination has first to bring before him. The painting is wonderful, firm and full as that of Franz Hals—I deliberately utter this strong statement—so surely and organically matured that one traces beneath the skin all the most delicate muscles and bones. And add to this technique, of which one does not discern how he could have acquired it in a fleeting morning of life, the intensity of feeling which has raised the work to the rank of those high creations in which a soul is revealed. The picture is full as a swan’s song, of foreboding and love. The great youth does not understand himself alone, without his mother—the dear mother must be with him, if he goes out to the market among people. Shall she nurse him? Shall she protect him? Can he dispense with her for a moment as he must be taken away from her so soon? All this is in that mysterious picture, and it was in it when Trutat, though he did not know it, painted his own requiem. Only nobody then understood the riddle; Trutat as little as the rest. He is another Regnault, only a still more genuine one. And no one has made lamentation about him, although his tragedy is more painful than Regnault’s. For the latter attained immortality in the apotheosis of death in battle, whilst miserable consumption slew Trutat ingloriously.
The Romantic fever begins to seize the century. The painters hasten to hang round them the botanical box, and seek the blue flower. The first to go forth into the moon-illumined, witching night was Chassériau! Poor Chassériau! It would have better suited his bent to paint salons with rich Empire-furniture, wherein respectably dressed citizens sit with their wives and daughters, and pleasantly tell each other the anecdotes of the day. His portrait of the two sisters in red shawls and yellow plaited dresses shows this—a neat, pretty, bourgeois painting, which denies itself all enthusiasm, and all soaring. But now the tarantula stings him, and he occupies himself only with obsolete subjects such as Orpheus, châtelaines, fairy-tale princesses with black slaves, Macbeth and the three witches. The last picture is particularly characteristic of him. The three witches have their white beards and pointed noses, as prescribed by the romantic code; but they are merely grotesque, but not in the least weird. We have the impression that they have met in a peaceful country in order to gossip about their neighbours, and make coffee. They publicly proffer the knight, who should be Macbeth, a small bowl. The heath by night lacks every trace of mood; the ugly old women every touch of the demoniac. Chassériau painted, just as J. Fr. Kind—the [“Freischütz”] Kind—wrote poetry.
I am afraid I must likewise be guilty of heresy in respect of another great man; but Delacroix, too, fails to justify the idolatry people have displayed and, to some extent, still display towards him. I do not misjudge his joyous coloriture, although his harmonies are rather loud than grand. I am not blind to the characteristic mobility of his composition, although it is generally far more a stagey flourish than assertion of strength in the service of a will conscious of what it is aiming at. What excites in me, however, unconquerable opposition is his phrasing. If any art demands intuition it is painting. Delacroix, however, usually has not exercised intuition, but has clothed with the cool work of his brain abstract thoughts in conventional forms. For this, look at “Greece expiring on the Ruins of Missalonghi”—a picture which was once of enormous influence and highly praised. On some disordered masonry stands a young lady in the bal masqué dress of a Greek, who has no thought of giving up the ghost, but is playing a part in robust health, and will change her dress, and have supper later. At some distance behind her we catch sight of a young negro in the uniform of a Janissary, climbing a rubbish heap, brandishing a flag with a crescent on it, and a curved sabre. This slightly painted Turkish warrior appears not to see the young Greek girl; at all events he does nothing to her, and does not even threaten her. There is no association between the two figures; the action is disconnected. At most the Turk is interesting as an acrobat or banner-swinger. No murderous propensities are noticeable in him. The countenance of the Greek lady is pale and weary; but a rest in bed seems the only thing she needs. It says much for the keenness of their Philhellenism that this picture could move the people of the period. Delacroix had, however, no intuition at all when he painted it; he only illustrated an unplastic, insipid phrase.
His other paintings are mostly illustrations of a text. “Comedians and Buffoons” were unmistakably suggested by Victor Hugo. Confused ideas occur to him. Thus “The Good Samaritan” was not painted to the passage in the Gospel, but to a story of chivalry; for the gentle benefactor takes the sick man on his charger—he is a mounted Samaritan!—just as a knight takes the noble lady he is carrying off.
Delacroix was a literary painter; we know that from his correspondence; but without that, his pictures would betray it. He read much more in books than in nature, and he supplied paintings that gave evidence of education and much reading, in which the art-hating, blind-souled Philistines of education delight royally. It may be that the confusion of his portrayal and the loudness of his palette was felt by his contemporaries as a deliverance from the coldness and precision of David’s school. I suspect, however, his earliest admirers valued him chiefly because he fed on the same books, plays, and newspapers as themselves.
Ary Scheffer stands in the same spiritual plane as Delacroix, but lacks the keenly joyous colour and the theatricality of his stage-setting. Schubert’s songs and Schumann’s are music even without the lyric text, and what music! I cannot imagine what Ary Scheffer’s pictures from Shakespeare, Goethe, and Byron would be without the poets and their poems. His picture in the Century Exhibition, “The Dead ride fast,” is, if I exclude from my conception my remembrance of Bürger’s ballad, an almost touching example of tastelessness. Leonora’s dishevelled hair, blown by the wind into a stiff, horizontal position, is supposed, for instance, to illustrate the swiftness of the ride—a notion which may have seemed to Scheffer terrible, but is comic.
Horace Vernet had a “Mazeppa,” of course a big modern battle, and several likenesses. He is as popular as on the first day, and will always remain so as long as children play with tin soldiers and the picture sheets of Epinal—the French Neu-Ruppin—find a ready sale. How he dazzles! He does so to a degree which deserves admiration. From a distance his pictures appear to be something; one must look at them quite closely to see that they are nothing, absolutely nothing. The colossal canvas is apparently full of men: thousands of soldiers march, encamp, storm, fight; but, as a matter of fact, not a single figure is painted; the whole pomp of war and victory is composed of little stencilled gingerbread men, without any bones in their bodies, and with scarcely the remotest resemblance to human beings. Could Horace Vernet draw? Had he really any other conception of the human form than that of an inflated india-rubber figure? In Paris and Versailles I have seen many paintings by him, but I cannot yet answer these questions. Horace Vernet is the fourth of a dynasty of painters: the first, Antoine, was great at little figures on sedan-chair panels; the second, Joseph, painted the well-known series of French harbours; the third, Carle, is a master in depicting horses; Horace, the fourth, is the weakest of them all, incomparably inferior in ability to his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather. He alone, however, has attained fame, and his renown throws his ancestors into the shade. The wheel of fortune now and then plays immoral jokes of this sort, perhaps in order to teach its own futility.
Daumier was known to me and, I suppose, most people, only as a draughtsman. We learnt now to prize him as a painter of high rank. His numerous paintings are illustrations to “Don Quixote,” romantic merry-Andrews, street-singers, Molière’s Malade Imaginaire, and a crowded group of lawyers in cap and gown. His manner is the same in oil as in lead-pencil and crayon-drawing: his lines of movement broad and firm, the outlines blunted, and now and again rubbed; all his figures mysteriously surrounded in mist, yet all so clearly and faultlessly represented that one is never led to suspect that their mysteriousness is a trick to hide carelessness or lack of skill. Even his oil-painting is really caricature, but discreet caricature. The nobler method instils into him self-respect, and preserves him from caricature; he just marks roguishly the burlesque features, but does not diverge from reality. Thus his lawyers are portraits, but they look so maliciously intelligent, so inexorably penetrating, that we can doubt of this or that head whether it is a likeness or a caricature. Let us say this: the model will take it for a caricature, but his friends will regard it as a portrait. Daumier is a solitary; he is akin to none of his contemporaries, yet an example of the migration of souls; for in him Hogarth comes to life again, but a Hogarth who for his part would be animated by a spark of Rembrandt’s spirit.
Suddenly another solitary appears in the ranks of the allied men of school and tradition, viz., Millet. Precipitation would infer: the romantic is overcome; a new generation with new modes of feeling arises; the nerves of the century begin to vibrate according to a new rhythm. That is sheer nonsense; nothing has been overcome. The romantic masters still form romantic pupils, the crowd still feels in the traditional way; the range of themes and the fashion of treating them remain what they have been for a generation, but amidst the dependent, the docile ones, the imitator forms for himself, by the law of elective affinity, a divergent group—the group of the forest-folk of Barbizon—and amidst this group steps forth an individual man who forgets the master’s atelier, who, in painting, thinks of neither the salon nor the art-dealers, who looks not into books and newspapers nor on prototypes, but out into the world, and on that account falls completely out of the century.
If we follow up the development of art in the Exhibition, we may easily fall into the error of thinking that with Millet one epoch closes and another begins. Such was not the case in reality. The contemporaries who appreciated Millet were a diminishing few. Official art despised him. There were no distinctions for him on the part of the State. The critical phrase-makers knew nothing of him or mocked him horribly. The rich connoisseurs passed him by. A very small congregation of moderately well-off admirers, whose valuation appraised their most honest admiration at 1,000 francs at most, bought his pictures at prices which just made it possible for him to live in Barbizon in wooden shoes and a blouse, and to bring up his numerous family on potatoes and bacon. But as he was a personality he succeeded—though only after his death. He made a school, like every one who has something to teach. He gained influence on the views of the creators, the critics, and the public. People began to understand his speech, nay, to feel that what he said was beautiful. But to this day there is no Millet epoch in French art, and his fame is really an optical delusion. His works did not bring him into the mouth of the masses, but the caprice of a millionaire. On the day when it occurred to M. Chauchard to pay 600,000 francs for Millet’s “Angelus,” snobs of both worlds took off their hats and murmured in a voice hushed with reverence: “That must be a great painter.” As we see, the world’s fame is but a question of money. Many more men are able to reckon than are able to feel the beauty of art, and, to the vast majority, its price is the infallible, the one key to the understanding of a work.
I must say that the millionaire who acted as Millet’s herald of fame, had no sense of proportion. If the work of an artist is to be measured by a gauge, the figures of which represent gold coins, Millet does not reach the altitude of 600,000 francs, unless we estimate at least thirty of his contemporaries equally high. In technique, Millet follows the Dutch; a David Teniers without humour and without aim at humour. His landscape, never the essential with him, is poorer than that of Rousseau and François, not to speak of Corot. His greatness lies in his personality, in his simplicity, in his avoidance of pose, in the pious earnestness with which he follows the daily toil of the field labourer. That is no new note in art, but it is the manifestation of an individuality. Many are his superiors purely as painters. But souls cannot be compared and measured: they are incommensurable.
Courbet follows on Millet. Those mad on systematising have classed the two together as pioneers of Naturalism. What blindness to the essential! If anything does connect them—according to the Hegelian method—it is their very antithesis. Millet—let us think of the “Man with the Mattock,” “The Gleaners,” even “The Pig-Killing,” and the two pictures in the Century Exhibition: the field-labourer, who, his day’s work ended, is putting on his coat, and the mother feeding her little child with pap, as well as “The Angelus”—Millet indicates, in heavy painting and little-pleasing colours, in people whose coarse externals do not attract a spirituality that ennobles them and makes us forget their soil-stained smock-frocks and their hard features. Courbet, on the other hand, draws faultlessly, and is master of every knack of the trade; but, with his rich means, he never gets above the spiritual stage of photography, and he knows not how to open to us the smallest corner of the moral and spiritual being of his men and women.
But, strangely enough, this same Courbet, who never conceives human beings except as soulless forms, can put a soul into nature and her lower-conditioned life. His justly famed “Sea-Waves” breathes a dramatic will-power. His “Roes in the Wood” are spirited. Ancient, mysterious wisdom appears to possess even his trees. Animals and plants, sea and land, speak in Courbet; man alone is dumb. He is a pantheist who excludes only man from the All-Divine. That is pessimism rooted in the most profound unconsciousness, which hints at serious organic disturbance.
Rosa Bonheur, represented by a wonderful “Team of Oxen before a Hay Waggon,” is in this respect akin to Courbet. She, too, is an eloquent advocate of the beauty and profound feeling of the brute; but, more logical than Courbet, she confines herself to representing animals, and does not meddle with human beings. Man fails to interest her; she takes no heed of his indifferent appearance. The animal alone attracts her attention. A Rudyard Kipling of the brush, she has painted all her life the “Jungle-Book,” that tells of the wise and good and honest beasts, and the cunning men. Sir Edwin Landseer was also an animal-painter, but of quite another sort than Rosa Bonheur. When Landseer wanted to flatter the beasts, he gave them human qualities. Rosa Bonheur would have felt she was insulting her dear animals, if she had painted a picture like the “Diogenes” in the National Gallery in London. The humanising of animals seems to her like degrading their special animal beauty. Her love of animals was morbid; it was, however, a deep and powerful emotion that made of her a great artist.
Our wandering through the Century Exhibition led us finally past the great landscape-men, the founders of modern landscape-painting, to Manet and Monet, Renoir and Degas, with whom a new century of art begins. In a later section on the Caillebotte room in the Luxembourg Museum, I shall study closely the authors of the Open Air Movement. The fight against the children of classicism and romance was furious, and “free-light” was victorious in the degree in which it deserved victory. But even in those days of turmoil there were idyllists who remained undisturbed by the tumult, and did not notice it. Gustave Moreau painted his colour stories from a palette of gold and precious stones, from a palette of Limosin and the glass-painters of Gothic cathedrals, as if there had never existed an “Olympia” of Manet or a “Funeral Procession of Ornans,” of Courbet. The high importance of Moreau, to whom I return in a special study, lies in the fact that he teaches us the feebleness of all classification of art development into epochs. True artists are not subject to time, and move side by side without influencing reciprocally their orbits. They are not subject to Newton’s law of gravitation.
The Century Exhibition taught us something more. It sharpened our sight for distinguishing between the literary painters and the painters proper. The former, as a rule, find fame quicker than the latter, but their fame affects posterity as a bad jest. They are illustrators of the time, and what it brings, that is the worthless, art-destroying “actuality.” Every attempt to put painting at the service of contemporary thought, to demand of it philosophical collaboration in the development of political, moral, and social doctrines, is a sin against an art whose essence directs it to the eternal aspects of the phenomenal world. Only those are genuine painter temperaments which can follow reflectively the play of light on surfaces in motion, and tell us what feelings this play awakens in them. All symbolism, all allegory, all graphic accompaniment of poetry, is weak. Only what has been really seen has permanence, even if it is reproduced with little skill. You cannot paint from hearsay, only from the impressions which the eye takes in, and the soul delivers. It is astonishing that so primitive a biological truth should be so difficult to grasp.