Part 1 (2/2)

His qualities, however, are very thoroughly French qualities--poise, rationality, science, the artistic dominating the poetic faculty, and style quite outs.h.i.+ning significance and suggestion. He learned all he knew of art, he said, from the Bacchus Torso at Naples. But he was eclectic rather than imitative, and certainly used the material he found in the works of his artistic ancestors as freely and personally as Raphael the frescos of the Baths of t.i.tus, or Donatello the fragments of antique sculpture. From his time on, indeed, French painting dropped its Italian leading-strings. He might often suggest Raphael--and any painter who suggests Raphael inevitably suffers for it--but always with an individual, a native, a French difference, and he is as far removed in spirit and essence from the Fontainebleau school as the French genius itself is from the Italian which presided there. In Poussin, indeed, the French genius first a.s.serts itself in painting. And it a.s.serts itself splendidly in him.

We who ask to be moved as well as impressed, who demand satisfaction of the susceptibility as well as--shall we say rather than?--interest of the intelligence, may feel that for the qualities in which Poussin is lacking those in which he is rich afford no compensation whatever. But I confess that in the presence of even that portion of Poussin's magnificent accomplishment which is spread before one in the Louvre, to wish one's self in the Stanze of the Vatican or in the Sistine Chapel, seems to me an unintelligent sacrifice of one's opportunities.

III

It is a sure mark of narrowness and defective powers of perception to fail to discover the point of view even of what one disesteems. We talk of Poussin, of Louis Quatorze art--as of its revival under David and its continuance in Ingres--of, in general, modern cla.s.sic art as if it were an art of convention merely; whereas, conventional as it is, its conventionality is--or was, certainly, in the seventeenth century--very far from being pure formulary. It was genuinely expressive of a certain order of ideas intelligently held, a certain set of principles sincerely believed in, a view of art as positive and genuine as the revolt against the tyrannous system into which it developed. We are simply out of sympathy with its aim, its ideal; perhaps, too, for that most frivolous of all reasons because we have grown tired of it.

But the business of intelligent criticism is to be in touch with everything. ”Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner,” as the French ethical maxim has it, may be modified into the true motto of aesthetic criticism, ”Tout comprendre, c'est tout justifier.” Of course, by ”criticism” one does not mean pedagogy, as so many people constantly imagine, nor does justifying everything include bad drawing. But as Lebrun, for example, is not nowadays held up as a model to young painters, and is not to be accused of bad drawing, why do we so entirely dispense ourselves from comprehending him at all? Lebrun is, perhaps, not a painter of enough personal importance to repay attentive consideration, and historic importance does not greatly concern criticism. But we pa.s.s him by on the ground of his conventionality, without remembering that what appears conventional to us was in his case not only sincerity but aggressive enthusiasm. If there ever was a painter who exercised what creative and imaginative faculty he had with an absolute gusto, Lebrun did so. He interested his contemporaries immensely; no painter ever ruled more unrivalled. He fails to interest us because we have another point of view. We believe in our point of view and disbelieve in his as a matter of course; and it would be self-contradictory to say, in the interests of critical catholicity, that in our opinion his may be as sound as our own. But to say that he has no point of view whatever--to say, in general, that modern cla.s.sic art is perfunctory and mere formulary--is to be guilty of what has always been the inherent vice of protestantism in all fields of mental activity.

Nowhere has protestantism exhibited this defect more palpably than in the course of evolution of schools of painting. Pre-Raphaelitism is perhaps the only exception, and pre-Raphaelitism was a violent and emotional counter-revolution rather than a movement characterized by catholicity of critical appreciation. Literary criticism is certainly full of similar intolerance; though when Gautier talks about Racine, or Zola about ”Mes Haines,” or Mr. Howells about Scott, the polemic temper, the temper most opposed to the critical, is very generally recognized.

And in spite of their admirable accomplishment in various branches of literature, these writers will never quite recover from the misfortune of having preoccupied themselves as critics with the defects instead of the qualities of what is cla.s.sic. Yet the protestantism of the successive schools of painting against the errors of their predecessors has something even more cra.s.s about it. Contemporary painters and critics thoroughly alive, and fully in the contemporary aesthetic current, so far from appreciating modern cla.s.sic art sympathetically, are apt to admire the old masters themselves mainly on technical grounds, and not at all to enter into their general aesthetic att.i.tude.

The feeling of contemporary painters and critics (except, of course, historical critics) for Raphael's genius is the opposite of cordial. We are out of touch with the ”Disputa,” with angels and prophets seated on clouds, with halos and wings, with such inconsistencies as the ”Doge praying” in a picture of the marriage of St. Catherine, with the mystic marriage itself. Raphael's grace of line and suave s.p.a.ce-filling shapes are mainly what we think of; the rest we call convention. We are become literal and exacting, addicted to the pedantry of the prescriptive, if not of the prosaic.

Take such a picture as M. Edouard Detaille's ”Le Reve,” which won him so much applause a few years ago. M. Detaille is an irreproachable realist, and may do what he likes in the way of the materially impossible with impunity. Sleeping soldiers, without a gaiter-b.u.t.ton lacking, bivouacking on the ground amid stacked arms whose bayonets would p.r.i.c.k; above them in the heavens the clash of contending ghostly armies--wraiths born of the sleepers' dreams. That we are in touch with.

No one would object to it except under penalty of being scouted as pitiably literal. Yet the scheme is as thoroughly conventional--that is to say, it is as closely based on hypothesis universally a.s.sumed for the moment--as Lebrun's ”Triumph of Alexander.” The latter is as much a true expression of an ideal as Detaille's picture. It is an ideal now become more conventional, undoubtedly, but it is as clearly an ideal and as clearly genuine. The only point I wish to make is, that Lebrun's painting--Louis Quatorze painting--is not the perfunctory thing we are apt to a.s.sume it to be. That is not the same thing, I hope, as maintaining that M. Bouguereau is significant rather than insipid.

Lebrun was a.s.suredly not a strikingly original painter. His crowds of warriors bear a much closer resemblance to Raphael's ”Battle of Constantine and Maxentius” than the ”Transfiguration” of the Vatican does to Giotto's, aside from the important circ.u.mstance that the difference in the latter instance shows development, while the former ill.u.s.trates mainly an enfeebled variation. But there is unquestionably something of Lebrun in Lebrun's work--something typical of the age whose artistic spirit he so completely expressed.

To perceive that Louis Quatorze art is not all convention it is only necessary to remember that Lesueur is to be bracketed with Lebrun. All the sympathy which the Anglo-Saxon temperament withholds from the histrionism of Lebrun is instinctively accorded to his gentle and graceful contemporary, who has been called--_faute de mieux_, of course--the French Raphael. Really Lesueur is as nearly conventional as Lebrun. He has at any rate far less force; and even if we may maintain that he had a more individual point of view, his works are a.s.suredly more monotonous to the scrutinizing sense. It is impossible to recall any one of the famous San Bruno series with any particularity, or, except in subject, to distinguish these in the memory from the sweet and soft ”St. Scholastica” in the _Salon Carre_. With more sapience and less sensitiveness, Bouguereau is Lesueur's true successor, to say which is certainly not to affirm a very salient originality of the older painter.

He had a great deal of very exquisite feeling for what is refined and elevated, but clearly it is a moral rather than an aesthetic delicacy that he exhibits, and aesthetically he exercises his sweeter and more sympathetic sensibility within the same rigid limits which circ.u.mscribe that of Lebrun. He has, indeed, less invention, less imagination, less sense of composition, less wealth of detail, less elaborateness, no greater concentration or sense of effect; and though his color is more agreeable, perhaps, in hue, it gets its tone through the absence of variety rather than through juxtapositions and balances. The truth is, that both equally ill.u.s.trate the cla.s.sic spirit, the spirit of their age _par excellence_ and of French painting in general, in a supreme degree, though the conformability of the one is positive and of the other pa.s.sive, so to say; and that neither ill.u.s.trates quite the subserviency to the conventional which we, who have undoubtedly just as many conventions of our own, are wont to ascribe to them, and to Lebrun in particular.

IV

Fanciful as the Louis Quinze art seems, by contrast with that of Louis Quatorze, it, too, is essentially cla.s.sic. It is free enough--no one, I think, would deny that--but it is very far from individual in any important sense. It has, to be sure, more personal feeling than that of Lesueur or Lebrun. The artist's susceptibility seems to come to the surface for the first time. Watteau, Fragonard--Fragonard especially, the exquisite and impudent--are as gay, as spontaneous, as careless, as vivacious as Boldini. Boucher's G.o.ddesses and cherubs, disporting themselves in graceful abandonment on happily disposed clouds, outlined in c.u.mulus ma.s.ses against unvarying azure, are as unrestrained and independent of prescription as Monticelli's figures. Lancret, Pater, Nattier, and Van Loo--the very names suggest not merely freedom but a sportive and abandoned license. But in what a narrow round they move!

How their imaginativeness is limited by their artificiality! What a talent, what a genius they have for artificiality. It is the era _par excellence_ of dilettantism, and nothing is less romantic than dilettantism. Their evident feeling--and evidently genuine feeling--is feeling for the fact.i.tious, for the manufactured, for what the French call the _confectionne_. Their romantic quality is to that of the modern Fontainebleau group as the exquisite _vers de societe_ of Mr. Austin Dobson, say, is to the turbulent yet profound romanticism of Heine or Burns. Every picture painted by them would go as well on a fan as in a frame. All their material is traditional. They simply handle it as _enfants terribles_. Intellectually speaking, they are painters of a silver age. Of ideas they have almost none. They are as barren of invention in any large sense as if they were imitators instead of, in a sense, the originators of a new phase. Their originality is arrived at rather through exclusion than discovery. They simply drop pedantry and exult in irresponsibility. They are hardly even a school.

Yet they have, one and all, in greater or less degree, that distinct quality of charm which is eternally incompatible with routine. They are as little constructive as the age itself, as anything that we mean when we use the epithet Louis Quinze. Of everything thus indicated one predicates at once unconsciousness, the momentum of antecedent thought modified by the ease born of habit; the carelessness due to having one's thinking done for one and the license of proceeding fancifully, whimsically, even freakishly, once the lines and limits of one's action have been settled by more laborious, more conscientious philosophy than in such circ.u.mstances one feels disposed to frame for one's self. There is no break with the Louis Quatorze things, not a symptom of revolt; only, after them the deluge! But out of this very condition of things, and out of this att.i.tude of mind, arises a new art, or rather a new phase of art, essentially cla.s.sic, as I said, but nevertheless imbued with a character of its own, and this character distinctly charming.

Wherein does the charm consist? In two qualities, I think, one of which has not hitherto appeared in French painting, or, indeed, in any art whatever, namely, what we understand by cleverness as a distinct element in treatment--and color. Color is very prominent nowadays in all writing about art, though recently it has given place, in the fas.h.i.+on of the day, to ”values” and the realistic representation of natural objects as the painter's proper aim. What precisely is meant by color would be difficult, perhaps, to define. A warmer general tone than is achieved by painters mainly occupied with line and ma.s.s is possibly what is oftenest meant by amateurs who profess themselves fond of color. At all events, the Louis Quinze painters, especially Watteau, Fragonard, and Pater--and Boucher has a great deal of the same feeling--were sensitive to that vibration of atmosphere that blends local hues into the _ensemble_ that produces tone. The _ensemble_ of their tints is what we mean by color.

Since the Venetians _this_ note had not appeared. They const.i.tute, thus, a sort of romantic interregnum--still very cla.s.sic, from an intellectual point of view--between the cla.s.sicism of Lebrun and the still greater severity of David. Nothing in the evolution of French painting is more interesting than this reverberation of Tintoretto and Tiepolo.

By cleverness, as exhibited by the Louis Quinze painters, I do not mean mere technical ability, but something more inclusive, something relating quite as much to att.i.tude of mind as to dexterity of treatment. They conceive as cleverly as they execute. There is a sense of confidence and capability in the way they view, as well as in the way they handle, their light material. They know it thoroughly, and are thoroughly at one with it. And they exploit it with a serene air of satisfaction, as if it were the only material in the world worth handling. Indeed, it is exquisitely adapted to their talent. So little significance has it that one may say it exists merely to be cleverly dealt with, to be represented, distributed, compared, and generally utilized solely with reference to the display of the artist's jaunty skill. It is, one may say, merely the raw material for the production of an effect, and an effect demanding only what we mean by cleverness; no knowledge and love of nature, no prolonged study, no acquaintance with the antique, for example, no philosophy whatever--unless poco-curantism be called a philosophy, which eminently it is not. To be adequate to the requirements--rarely very exacting in any case--made of one, never to show stupidity, to have a great deal of taste and an instinctive feeling for what is elegant and refined, to abhor pedantry and take gayety at once lightly and seriously, and beyond this to take no thought, is to be clever; and in this sense the Louis Quinze painters are the first, as they certainly are the typical, clever artists.

In Louis Quinze art the subject is more than effaced to give free swing to technical cleverness; it is itself contributory to such cleverness, and really a part of it. The artists evidently look on life, as they paint their pictures, as the web whereon to sketch exhibitions of skill in the composition of sensation-provoking combinations--combinations, thus, provoking sensations of the lightest and least substantial kind.

When you stand before one of Fragonard's bewitching models, modishly modified into a great--or rather a little--lady, you not only note the color--full of tone on the one hand and of variety on the other, besides exhibiting the happiest selective quality in warm and yet delicate hues and tints; you not only, furthermore, observe the clever touch just poised between suggestion and expression, coquettishly suppressing a detail here, and emphasizing a characteristic there; you feel, in addition, that the entire object floats airily in an atmosphere of cleverness; that it is but a bit, an example, a miniature type of an environment wholly attuned to the note of cleverness--of competence, facility, grace, elegance, and other abstract but not at all abstruse qualities, quite unrelated to what, in any profound sense, at least, is concrete and vitally significant. Artificiality so permeated the Louis Quinze epoch, indeed, that one may say that nature itself was artificial--that is to say, all the nature Louis Quinze painters had to paint; at least all they could have been called upon to think of painting. What a distinction is, after all, theirs! To have created out of nothing, or next to nothing, something charming, and enduringly charming; something of a truly cla.s.sic inspiration without dependence at bottom on the real and the actual; something as little indebted to facts and things as a fairy tale, and withal marked by such qualities as color and cleverness in so eminent a degree.

The Louis Quinze painters may be said, indeed, to have had the romantic temperament with the cla.s.sic inspiration. They have audacity rather than freedom, license modified by strict limitation to the lines within which it is exercised. But there can be no doubt that this limitation is more conspicuous in their charmingly irresponsible works than is, essentially speaking, their irresponsibility itself. They never give their imagination free play. Sportive and spontaneous as it appears, it is equally clear that its activities are bounded by conservatory confines.

Watteau, born on the Flemish border, is almost an exception. Temperament in him seems constantly on the verge of conquering tradition and environment. Now and then he seems to be on the point of emanc.i.p.ation, and one expects to come upon some work in which he has expressed himself and attested his ideality. But one is as constantly disappointed. His color and his cleverness are always admirable and winning, but his import is perversely--almost bewitchingly--slight. What was he thinking of? one asks, before his delightful canvases; and one's conclusion inevitably is, certainly as near nothing at all as can be consistent with so much charm and so much real power. As to Watteau, one's last thought is of what he would have been in a different aesthetic atmosphere, in an atmosphere that would have stimulated his really romantic temperament to extra-traditional flights, instead of confining it within the inexorable boundaries of cla.s.sic custom; an atmosphere favorable to the free exercise of his adorable fancy, instead of rigorously insistent on conforming this, so far as might be, to customary canons, and, at any rate, restricting its exercise to material _a la mode_. A little landscape in the La Caze collection in the Louvre, whose romantic and truly poetic feeling agreeably pierces through its elegance, is eloquent of such reflections.

V

With Greuze and Chardin we are supposed to get into so different a sphere of thought and feeling that the change has been called a ”return to nature”--that ”return to nature” of which we hear so much in histories of literature as well as of the plastic arts. The notion is not quite sound. Chardin is a painter who seems to me, at least, to stand quite apart, quite alone, in the development of French painting, whereas there could not be a more marked instance of the inherence of the cla.s.sic spirit in the French aesthetic nature than is furnished by Greuze. The first French painter of _genre_, in the full modern sense of the term, the first true interpreter of scenes from humble life--of lowly incident and familiar situations, of broken jars and paternal curses, and buxom girls and precocious children--he certainly is. There is certainly nothing _regence_ about him. But the beginning and end of Greuze's art is convention. He is less imaginative, less romantic, less real than the painting his replaced. That was at least a mirror of the ideals, the spirit, the society, of the day. A Louis Quinze fan is a genuine and spontaneous product of a free and elastic aesthetic impulse beside one of his stereotyped sentimentalities.

The truth is, Greuze is as sentimental as a bullfinch, but he has hardly a natural note in his gamut. Nature is not only never his model, she is never his inspiration. He is distinctively a literary painter; but this description is not minute enough. His conventions are those not merely of the _litterateur_, but of the extremely conventional _litterateur_.

An artless plat.i.tude is really more artificial than a clever paradox; it doesn't even cast a side-light on the natural material with which it deals. Greuze's _genre_ is really a _genre_ of his own--his own and that of kindred spirits since. It is as systematic and detached as the art of Poussin. The forms it embodies merely have more natural, more familiar a.s.sociations. But compare one of his compositions with those of the little Dutch and Flemish masters, for truth, feeling, nature handled after her own suggestions, instead of within limits and on lines imposed upon her from without. By the side of Van Ostade or Brauer, for example, one of Greuze's bits of humble life seems like an academic composition, quite out of touch with its subject, and, except for its art, absolutely lifeless and insipid.

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