Part 2 (1/2)

IV

But quite aside from the group of poetic painters which stamped its impress so deeply upon the romantic movement at the outset, that to this day it is Delacroix and Millet, Decamps and Corot whom we think of when we think of the movement itself, the cla.s.sic tradition was preserved all through the period of greatest stress and least conformity by painters of great distinction, who, working under the romantic inspiration and more or less according to what may be called romantic methods, nevertheless possessed the cla.s.sic temperament in so eminent a degree that to us their work seems hardly less academic than that of the Revolution and the Empire. Not only Ingres, but Delaroche and Ary Scheffer, painted beside Gericault and Delacroix. Ary Scheffer was an eloquent partisan of romanticism, yet his ”Dante and Beatrice” and his ”Temptation of Christ” are admirable only from the academic point of view. Delaroche's ”Hemicycle” and his many historical tableaux are surely in the cla.s.sic vein, however free they may seem in subject and treatment by contrast with the works of David and Ingres. They leave us equally cold, at all events, and in the same way--for the same reason.

They betray the painter's preoccupation with art rather than with nature. They do, in truth, differ widely from the works which they succeeded, but the difference is not temperamental. They suggest the French phrase, _plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose_. Gerome, for example, feels the exhilaration of the free air of romanticism fanning his enthusiasm. He does not confine himself, as, born a decade or two earlier, certainly he would have done, to cla.s.sic subject. He follows Decamps and Marilhat to the Orient, which he paints with the utmost freedom, so far as the choice of theme is concerned--descending even to the _danse du ventre_ of a Turkish cafe. He paints historical pictures with a realism unknown before his day. He is almost equally famous in the higher cla.s.s of _genre_ subjects. But throughout everything he does it is easy to perceive the academic point of view, the cla.s.sic temperament. David a.s.suredly would never have chosen one of Gerome's themes; but had he chosen it, he would have treated it in much the same way. Allowance made for the difference in time, in general feeling of the aesthetic environment, the change in ideas as to what was fit subject for representation and fitting manner of treating the same subject, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that Ingres would have sincerely applauded Gerome's ”Cleopatra” issuing from the carpet roll before Caesar. And if he failed to perceive the n.o.ble dramatic power in such a work as the ”Ave, Caesar, morituri te salutant,” his failure would nowadays, at least among intelligent amateurs, be ascribed to an intolerance which it is one of the chief merits of the romantic movement to have adjudged absurd.

It is a source of really aesthetic satisfaction to see everything that is attempted as well done as it is in the works of such painters as Bouguereau and Cabanel. Of course the feeling that denies them large importance is a legitimate one. The very excellence of their technic, its perfect adaptedness to the motive it expresses, is, considering the insignificance of the motive, subject for criticism; inevitably it partakes of the futility of its subject-matter. Of course the personal value of the man, the mind, behind any plastic expression is, in a sense, the measure of the expression itself. If it be a mind interested in ”pouncet-box” covers, in the pictorial setting forth of themes whose ill.u.s.tration most intimately appeals to the less cultivated and more rudimentary appreciation of fine art--as indisputably the Madonnas and Charities and Oresteses and Bacchus Triumphs of M. Bouguereau do--one may very well dispense himself from the duty of admiring its productions. Life is short, and more important things, things of more significant import, demand attention. The grounds on which the works of Bouguereau and Cabanel are admired are certainly insufficient. But they are experts in their sphere. What they do could hardly be better done.

If they appeal to a _bourgeois_, a philistine ideal of beauty, of interest, they do it with a perfection that is pleasing in itself. No one else does it half so well. To minds to which they appeal at all, they appeal with the force of finality; for these they create as well as ill.u.s.trate the type of what is admirable and lovely. It is as easy to account for their popularity as it is to perceive its transitory quality. But not only is it a mark of limitation to refuse all interest to such a work as, for example, M. Cabanel's ”Birth of Venus,” in the painting of which a vast deal of technical expertness is enjoyably evident, and which in every respect of motive and execution is far above similar things done elsewhere than in France; it is a still greater error to confound such painters as M. Cabanel and M. Bouguereau with other painters whose cla.s.sic temperament has been subjected to the universal romantic influence equally with theirs, but whose production is as different from theirs as is that of the thorough and pure romanticists, the truly poetic painters.

The instinct of simplification is an intelligent and sound one. Its satisfaction is a necessary preliminary to efficient action of any kind, and indeed the basis of all fruitful philosophy. But in criticism this instinct can only be satisfied intelligently and soundly by a consideration of everything appealing to consideration, and not at all by heated and wilful, or superior and supercilious, exclusions.

Catholicity of appreciation is the secret of critical felicity. To follow the line of least resistance, not to take into account those elements of a problem, those characteristics of a subject, to which, superficially and at first thought, one is insensitive, is to dispense one's self from a great deal of particularly disagreeable industry, but the result is only transitorily agreeable to the sincere intelligence.

It is in criticism, I think, though no doubt in criticism alone, preferable to lose one's self in a maze of perplexity--distressing as this is to the critic who appreciates the indispensability of clairvoyance in criticism--rather than to reach swiftly and simply a conclusion which candor would have foreseen as the inevitable and unjudicial result of following one's own likes and whims, and one's contentment with which must be alloyed with a haunting sense of insecurity. In criticism it is perhaps better to keep balancing counter-considerations than to determine brutally by excluding a whole set of them because of the difficulty of a.s.signing them their true weight. In this way, at least, one preserves the att.i.tude of poise, and poise is perhaps the one essential element of criticism. In a word, that catholicity of sensitiveness which may be called mere impressionism, behind which there is no body of doctrine at all, is more truly critical than intolerant depreciation or unreflecting enthusiasm. ”The main thing to do,” says Mr. Arnold, in a significant pa.s.sage, ”is to get one's self out of the way and let humanity judge.”

It is temptingly simple to deny all importance to painters who are not poetic painters. And the temptation is especially seductive when the prosaic painters are paralleled by such a distinguished succession of their truly poetic brethren as are the painters of the romantic epoch who are possessed of the cla.s.sic temperament. But real criticism immediately suggests that prose has its place in painting as in literature. In literature we do not insist even that the poets be poetic. Poetic is not the epithet that would be applied, for instance, to French cla.s.sic verse or the English verse of the eighteenth century, compared with the poetry, French or English, which we mean when we speak of poetry. Yet no one would think of denying the value of Dryden or even of Boileau. No one would even insist that, distinctly prosaic as are the qualities of Boileau--and I should say his was a crucial instance--he would have done better to abjure verse. And painting, in a wide sense, is just as legitimately the expression of ideas in form and color as literature is the expression of ideas in words. It is perfectly plain that Meissonier was not especially enamoured of beauty, as Corot, as Troyon, as Decamps was. But nothing could be less critical than to deny Meissouier's importance and the legitimate interest he has for every educated and intelligent person, in spite of his literalness and his insensitiveness to the element of beauty, and indeed to any truly pictorial significance whatever in the wide range of subjects that he essayed, with, in an honorable sense, such distinguished success.

Especially in America, I think, where of recent years we have shown an Athenian sensitiveness to new impressions, the direct descendants of the cla.s.sic period of French painting have suffered from the popularity of the Fontainebleau group. Their legitimate attachment to art, instead of the Fontainebleau absorption in nature, has given them a false reputation of artificiality. But the prose element in art has its justification as well as the poetic, and it is witness of a narrow culture to fail in appreciation of its admirable accomplishment. The academic wing of the French romantic painting is marked precisely by a breadth of culture that is itself a source of agreeable and elevated interest. The neo-Grec painters are thoroughly educated. They lack the picturesque and unexpected note of their poetic brethren--they lack the moving and interpreting, the elevating and exquisite touch of these; nay, they lack the penetrating distinction that radiates even from rusticity itself when it is inspired and transfigured as it appears in such works as those of Millet and Rousseau. But their distinction is not less real for being the distinction of cultivation rather than altogether native and absolute. It is perhaps even more marked, more pervasive, more directly a.s.sociated with the painter's aim and effect.

One feels that they are familiar with the philosophy of art, its history and practice, that they are articulate and eclectic, that for being less personal and powerful their horizon is less limited, their purely intellectual range, at all events, and in many cases their aesthetic interest, wider. They have more the cultivated man's bent for experimentation, for variety. They care more scrupulously for perfection, for form. With a far inferior sense of reality and far less felicity in dealing with it, their sapient skill in dealing with the abstractions of art is more salient. To be blind to their successful handling of line and ma.s.s and movement, is to neglect a source of refined pleasure. To lament their lack of poetry is to miss their admirable rhetoric; to regret their imperfect feeling for decorativeness is to miss their delightful decorum.

V

As one has, however, so often occasion to note in France--where in every field of intellectual effort the influence of schools and groups and movements is so great that almost every individuality, no matter how strenuous, falls naturally and intimately into a.s.sociation with some one of them--there is every now and then an exception that escapes these categories and stands quite by itself. In modern painting such exceptions, and widely different from each other as the poles, are Couture and Puvis de Chavannes. Better than in either the true romanticists with the cla.s.sic strain, or the academic romanticists with the cla.s.sic temperament, the blending of the cla.s.sic and romantic inspirations is ill.u.s.trated in Couture. The two are in him, indeed, actually fused. In Puvis de Chavannes they appear in a wholly novel combination; his cla.s.sicism is absolutely unacademic, his romanticism unreal beyond the verge of mysticism, and so preoccupied with visions that he may almost be called a man for whom the actual world does _not_ exist--in the converse of Gautier's phrase. His distinction is wholly personal. He lives evidently on an exceedingly high plane--dwells habitually in the delectable uplands of the intellect. The fact that his work is almost wholly decorative is not at all accidental. His talent, his genius if one chooses, requires large s.p.a.ces, vast dimensions. There has been a great deal of rather profitless discussion as to whether he expressly imitates the _primitifs_ or reproduces them sympathetically.

But really he does neither; he deals with their subjects occasionally, but always in a completely modern, as well as a thoroughly personal, way. His color is as original as his general treatment and composition.

He had no schooling, in the ecole des Beaux Arts sense. A brief period in Henri Scheffer's studio, three months under Couture, after he had begun life in an altogether different field of effort, yielded him all the explicit instruction he ever had. His real study was done in Italy, in the presence of the old masters of Florence. With this equipment he revolutionized modern decoration, established, at any rate, a new convention for it. His convention is a little definite, a little bald.

One may discuss it apart from his own handling of it, even. It is a shade too express, too confident, too little careless both of tradition and of the typical qualities that secure permanence. In other hands one can easily imagine how insipid it might become. It has too little body, its scheme is too timorous, too vaporous to be handled by another. Puvis de Chavannes will probably have few successful imitators. But one must immediately add that if he does not found a school, his own work is, perhaps for that reason, at all events in spite of it, among the most important of the day. Quite unperturbed by current discussions, which are certainly of the noisiest by which the current of artistic development was ever deflected, he has kept on his way, and has finally won all suffrages for an aesthetic expression that is really antagonistic to the general aesthetic spirit of his time.

Puvis de Chavannes is, perhaps, the most interesting figure in French painting to-day. Couture is little more than a name. It is curious to consider why. Twenty years ago he was still an important figure. He had been an unusually successful teacher. Many American painters of distinction, especially, were at one time his pupils--Hunt, La Farge, George Butler. He theorized as much, as well--perhaps even better than--he painted. His ”Entretiens d'atelier” are as good in their way as his ”Baptism of the Prince Imperial.” He had a very distinguished talent, but he was too distinctly clever--clever to the point of sophistication. In this respect he was distinctly a man of the nineteenth century. His great work, ”Romains de la Decadence,” created as fine an effect at the Centenary Exhibition of the Paris World's Fair in 1889 as it does in the Louvre, whence it was then transferred, but it was distinctly a decorative effect--the effect of a fine panel in the general ma.s.s of color and design; it made a fine centre. It remains his greatest performance, the performance upon which chiefly his fame will depend, though as painting it lacks the quality and breadth of ”Le Fauconnier,” perhaps the most interesting of his works to painters themselves, and of the ”Day-Dreams” of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. Its permanent interest perhaps will be the historical one, due to the definiteness with which it a.s.signs Couture his position in the evolution of French painting. It shows, as everything of Couture shows, the absence of any pictorial feeling so profound and personal as to make an impression strong enough to endure indefinitely. And it has not, on the other hand, the interest of reality--that faithful and enthusiastic rendering of the external world which gives importance to and fixes the character of the French painting of the present day.

Had Regnault lived, he would have more adequately--or should I say more plausibly?--marked the transition from romanticism to realism.

Temperamentally he was clearly a thorough romanticist--far more so, for instance, than his friend Fortuny, whose intellectual reserve is always conspicuous. He essayed the most vehement kind of subjects, even in the cla.s.sical field, where he treated them with truly romantic truculence.

He was himself always, moreover, and ideally cared as little for nature as a fairy-story teller. In this sense he was more romantic than the romanticists. His ”Automedon,” his portrait of General Prim, even his ”Salome,” are wilful in a degree that is either superb or superficial, as one looks at them; but at any rate they are romantic _a outrance_. At the same time it was unmistakably the aspect of things rather than their significance, rather than his view of them, that appealed to him. He was farther away from the cla.s.sic inspiration than any other romanticist of his fellows; and at the same time he cared for the external world more on its own account and less for its suggestions, than any painter of equal force before Courbet and Bastien-Lepage. The very fact that he was not, intellectually speaking, wholly _dans son a.s.siette_, as the French say, shows that he was a genius of a transitional moment. One's final thought of him is that he died young, and one thinks so not so much because of the dramatic tragedy of his taking off by possibly the last Prussian bullet fired in the war of 1870-71, as because of the essentially experimental character of his painting. Undoubtedly he would have done great things. And undoubtedly they would have been different from those that he did; probably in the direction--already indicated in his most dignified performance--of giving more consistency, more vivid definiteness, more reality, even, to his already striking conceptions.

III

REALISTIC PAINTING

I

To an intelligence fully and acutely alive, its own time must, I think, be more interesting than any other. The sentimental, the scholastic, the speculative temperament may look before or after with longing or regret; but that sanity of mind which is practical and productive must find its most agreeable sensations in the data to which it is intimately and inexorably related. The light upon Greek literature and art for which we study Greek history, the light upon Roman history for which we study Latin literature and art, are admirable to us in very exact proportion as we study them for our ends. To every man and every nation that really breathes, true vitality of soul depends upon saying to one's self, with an emotion of equivalent intensity to the emotion of patriotism celebrated in Scott's familiar lines, This is my own, my native era and environment. Culture is impossible apart from cosmopolitanism, but self-respect is more indispensable even than culture. French art alone at the present time possesses absolute self-respect. It possesses this quality in an eminent, in even an excessive degree; but it possesses it, and in virtue of it is endued with a preservative quality that saves it from the emptiness of imitation and the enervation of dilettantism. It has, in consequence, escaped that recrudescence of the primitive and inchoate known in England and among ourselves as pre-Raphaelitism. It has escaped also that almost abject wors.h.i.+p of cla.s.sic models which Winckelmann and Canova made universal in Germany and Italy--not to speak of its echoes elsewhere. It has always stood on its own feet, and, however lacking in the higher qualities of imaginative initiative, on the one hand, and however addicted to the academic and the traditional on the other, has always both respected its aesthetic heritage and contributed something of its own thereto.

Why should not one feel the same quick interest, the same instinctive pride in his time as in his country? Is not sympathy with what is modern, instant, actual, and apposite a fair parallel of patriotism?

Neglect of other times in the ”heir of all the ages” is a.n.a.logous to chauvinism, and indicative of as ill-judged an att.i.tude as that of provincial blindness to other contemporary points of view and systems of philosophy than one's own. Culture is equally hostile to both, and in art culture is as important a factor as it is in less special fields of activity and endeavor. But in art, as elsewhere, culture is a means to an actual, present end, and the pre-Raphaelite sentiment that dictates mere reproduction of what was once a genuine expression is as sterile as servile imitation of exotic modes of thought, dress, and demeanor is universally felt to be. The past--the antique, the renaissance, the cla.s.sic, and romantic ideals are to be used, not adopted; in the spirit of Goethe, at once the most original of modern men and the most saturated with culture, exhibited in his famous saying: ”Nothing do I call my own which having inherited I have not reconquered for myself.”

It would indeed be a singular thing were the field of aesthetics the only one uninvaded by the scientific spirit of the time. The one force especially characteristic of our era is, I suppose, the scientific spirit. It is at any rate everywhere manifest, and it possesses the best intellects of the century. _A priori_ one may argue about its hostility, essential or other, to the artistic, the constructive spirit; but to do so is at the most to beat the air, to waste one's breath, to Ruskinize, in a word. Interest in life and the world, instead of speculation or self-expression, is the ”note” of the day. The individual has withered terribly. He is supplanted by the type. Materialism has its positive gospel; it is not at all the formulated expression of Goethe's ”spirit that denies.” Nature has acquired new dignity. She cannot be studied too closely, nor too long. The secret of the universe is now pursued through observation, as formerly it was through fasting and prayer. Nothing is sacred nowadays because everything receives respect. If absolute beauty is now smiled at as a chimera, it is because beauty is perceived everywhere. Whatever is may not be right--the maxim has too much of an _ex cathedra_ sound--but whatever is is interesting. Our att.i.tude is at once humbler and more curious. The sense of the immensity, the immeasurableness of things, is more intimate and profound. What one may do is more modestly conceived; what might be done, more justly appreciated. There is less confidence and more aspiration. The artist's eye is ”on the object” in more concentrated gaze than ever heretofore.

If his sentiment, his poetry, is no longer ”inevitable,” as Wordsworth complained Goethe's was not, it is more reverent, at any rate more circ.u.mspect. If he is less exalted he is more receptive--he is more alive to impressions for being less of a philosopher. If he scouts authority, if even he accepts somewhat weakly the thraldom of dissent from traditional standards and canons, it is because he is convinced that the material with which he has to deal is superior to all canons and standards. If he esteems truth more than beauty, it is because what he thinks truth is more beautiful in his eyes than the stereotyped beauty he is adjured to attain. In any case, the distinction of the realistic painters--like that of the realists in literature, where, also, it need not be said, France has been in the lead--is measurably to have got rid of solecisms; to have made, indeed, obvious solecisms, and solecisms of conception as well as of execution, a little ridiculous. It is, to be sure, equally ridiculous to subject romantic productions to realistic standards, to blind one's self to the sentiment that saturates such romantic works as Scott's and Dumas's, or Gericault's and Diaz's, and is wholly apposite to its own time and point of view. The great difficulty with a principle is that it is universal, and that when we deal with facts of any kind whatever, universality is an impossible ideal. Scott and Gericault are, nowadays, in what we have come to deem essentials, distinctly old-fas.h.i.+oned. It might be well to try and imitate them, if imitation had any salt in it, which it has not; or if it were possible to do what they did with their different inspiration, which it is not. Mr. Stevenson is, I think, an example of the danger of essaying this latter in literature, just as a dozen eminent painters of less talent--for no one has so much talent as Mr. Stevenson--are examples in painting. But there are a thousand things, not only in the technic of the romanticists but in their whole att.i.tude toward their art and their material, that are nowadays impossible to sincere and spontaneous artists. Details which have no importance whatever in the _ensemble_ of the romantic artist are essential to the realist. Art does not stand still. Its canons change. There is a constant evolution in its standards, its requirements. A conventional background is no more an error in French cla.s.sic painting than in tapestry; a perfunctory scheme of pure chiaro-oscuro is no blemish in one of Diaz's splendid forest landscapes; such phenomena in a work of Raffaelli or Pointelin would jar, because, measured by the standards to which modern men must, through the very force of evolution itself, subscribe, they can but appear solecisms. In a different set of circ.u.mstances, under a different inspiration, and with a different artistic att.i.tude, solecisms they certainly are not. But, as Thackeray makes Ethel Newcome say, ”We belong to our belongings.” Our circ.u.mstances, inspiration, artistic att.i.tude, are involuntary and possess us as our other belongings do.

In Gautier's saying, for instance, ”I am a man for whom the visible world exists,” which I have quoted as expressing the key-note of the romantic epoch, it is to be noted that the visible world is taken as a spectacle simply--significant, suggestive or merely stimulant, in accordance with individual bent. Gautier and the romanticists generally had little concern for its structure. To many of them it was indeed rather a canvas than a spectacle even--just as to many, if not to most, of the realists it is its structure rather than its significance that altogether appeals; the romanticists in general sketched their ideas and impressions upon it, as the naturalists have in the main studied its aspects and const.i.tution, careless of the import of these, pictorially or otherwise. Indeed one is tempted often to inquire of the latter, Why so much interest in what apparently seems to you of so little import?

Are we never to have your skill, your observation, your ama.s.sing of ”doc.u.ments” turned to any account? Where is the realistic tragedy, comedy, epic, composition of any sort? Courbet's ”Cantonniers,” Manet's ”Bar,” or Bastien-Lepage's ”Joan of Arc,” perhaps. But what is indisputable is, that we are irretrievably committed to the present general aesthetic att.i.tude and inspiration, and must share not only the romanticists' impatience with academic formulae and conventions, but the realists' devotion to life and the world as they actually exist. The future may be different, but we are living in the present, and what is important is, after all, to live. It is also so difficult that not to take the line of least resistance is fatuity.