Part 10 (1/2)
In j.a.pan, delicious, malodorous j.a.pan, we leave him to the reader, who will find in these letters to Henry Edward Krehbiel, Ball, W. D.
O'Connor, Gould, Elizabeth Bisland, Page M. Butler, Basil Hall Chamberlain, Ellwood Hendrick, and Mitch.e.l.l McDonald the most entertaining, self-revealing literary correspondence published since the death of Robert Louis Stevenson. He interpreted the soul of old j.a.pan at the critical moment when a new Western one was being a.s.sumed like a formidable carapace. He also warned us of j.a.pan, the new j.a.pan--though not in a friendly way; he would have been glad to see Western civilisation submerged by the yellow races.
Shy, complex, sensuous, Hearn is the real Lafcadio Hearn in these letters. Therein we discover the tenderness, the pa.s.sion, the capacity for friends.h.i.+p, the genuine humanity absent in his books. His life, his art, were sadly misfitted with masks--though Nietzsche says: ”All that is profound loves the mask”; and the symbolism of the Orient completed the disintegration of his baffling personality.
XIV
THE MELANCHOLY OF MASTERPIECES
I
Possibly it is a purely subjective impression, but I seldom face a masterpiece in art without suffering a slight melancholy, and this feeling is never influenced by the subject. The pastoral peace that hovers like a golden benison about Giorgione's Concert at the Louvre, the slow, widowed smile of the Mona Lisa, the cross-rhythms of Las Lanzas, most magnificent of battle-pieces, in the Velasquez Sala at the Prado, even the processional poplars of Hobbema at the National Gallery, or the clear cool daylight which filters through the window of the Dresden Vermeer--these and others do not always give me the buoyant sense of self-liberation which great art should. It is not because I have seen too often the bride Saskia and her young husband Rembrandt, in Dresden, that in their presence a tinge of sadness colours my thoughts. I have endeavoured to a.n.a.lyse this feeling. Why melancholy? Is great art always slightly morbid? Is it because of their isolation in the stone jails we call museums? Or that their immortality yields inch by inch to the treacherous and resistless pressure of the years? Or else because their hopeless perfection induces a species of exalted envy? And isn't it simply the incommensurable emotion evoked by the genius of the painter or sculptor? One need not be hyperaesthetic to experience something akin to m.u.f.fled pain when listening to certain pages of Tristan and Isolde, or while submitting to the mystic ecstasy of Jan Van Eyck at Ghent.
The exquisite grace of the Praxiteles Hermes or the sweetness of life we recognise in Donatello may invade the soul with messages of melancholy, and not come as ministers of joy.
One can't study the masters too much--I mean, from the amateur's view-point; in the case of an artist it depends on the receptivity of his temperament. Velasquez didn't like Raphael, and it was Boucher who warned Fragonard, when he went to Rome, not to take the Italian painters too seriously. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but it sometimes stifles individuality. I think it is probably the belief that never again will this planet have another golden age of painting and sculpture that arouses in me the melancholy I mention. Music has pa.s.sed its prime and is now entering the twilight of perfections past for ever. So is it with the Seven Arts.
Nevertheless, there is no need of pessimism. Even if we could, it would not be well to repeat the formulas of art accomplished, born as they were of certain conditions, social as well as technical. Other days, other plays. And that is the blight on all academic art.
”Traditional art,” says Frank Rutter, ”is the art of respectable plagiarism,” a slight variation on Paul Gauguin's more revolutionary axiom. No fear of any artist being too original. ”There is no isolated truth,” exclaimed Millet; but Constable wrote: ”A good thing is never done twice.” Best of all, it was R. A. M. Stevenson who said in effect that after studying Velasquez at the Prado he had modified his opinions as to the originality of modern art. Let us admit that there is no hope of ever rivalling the dead; yet a new beauty may be born, a new vision, and with it necessarily new technical procedures. When I say ”new,” I mean a new variation on the past. To-day the Chinese and a.s.syrian are revived. It is the denial of these very obvious truths that makes academic critics slightly ridiculous. They obstinately refuse to see the sunlight on the canvases of the Impressionists just as they deny the sincerity and power of the so-called post-Impressionists. The transvaluation of critical values must follow in the trail of revolutions.
It is a pity that New York as yet has not had an opportunity of viewing the best Cezannes, Gauguins, and Van Goghs. I did not see the exhibition several years ago at the Armory, which was none the less an eye-opener. But I have been told by those whose opinion and knowledge are incontrovertible that this trinity of the modern movement was inadequately represented; furthermore, Henri Matisse, a painter of indubitable skill and originality, did not get a fair showing. It would be a superfluous and thankless task to argue with critics or artists who refuse to acknowledge Manet, Monet, Degas. These men are already cla.s.sics. Go to the Louvre and judge for yourself.
Impressionism has served its purpose; it was too personal in the case of Claude Monet to be successfully practised by every one. Since him many have hopelessly attempted the bending of his bow. Manet is an incomplete Velasquez; but he is a great colourist, and interpreted in his fluid, nervous manner the ”modern” spirit. Degas, master designer, whose line is as mighty as Ingres his master, is by courtesy a.s.sociated with the Impressionistic group, though his methods and theirs are poles asunder. It seems that because he didn't imitate Ingres in his choice of subject-matter he is carped at. To-day the newest ”vision” has reverted to the sharpest possible silhouettes and, to add confusion, includes rhythms that a decade ago would not have been thought possible.
II
I can't agree with those who call Paul Cezanne the ”Nietzsche of painting,” because Nietzsche is brilliant and original while the fundamental qualities of Cezanne are sincerity, a dogged sincerity, and also splendid colouring--the value of the pigment in and for itself, the strength and harmony of colour. His training was in the cla.s.sics. He knew Manet and Monet, but his personal temperament did not incline him to their forms of Impressionism. A sober, calculating workman, not a heaven-storming genius, yet a painter whose procedure has served as a point of departure for the younger tribe. Like Liszt, Cezanne is the progenitor of a school, for Wagner founded no great school as much as he influenced his contemporaries; he was too complete in himself to leave artistic descendants, and Liszt, an intermediate type, influenced not only Wagner but the Russians and the Neo-Frenchman. The greatest disciples of Cezanne are Gauguin and Van Gogh. Mr. Brownell once wrote: ”We only care for facts when they explain truths,” and the facts of Cezanne have that merit. He is truthful to the degree of eliminating many important artistic factors from his canvases. But he realises the bulk and weight of objects; he delineates their density and profile. His landscapes and his humans are as real as Manet's; he seeks to paint the actual, not the relative. There is strength if not beauty--the old canonic beauty--and in the place of the latter may be found rich colour. A master of values, Cezanne. After all, paint is thicker than academic culture.
I saw the first Paul Gauguin exhibition at Durand-Ruel's in Paris years ago. I recall contemporary criticism. ”The figures are outlined in firm strokes and painted in broad, flat tints on canvas that has the texture of tapestry. Many of these works are made repulsive by their aspect of multicoloured crude and barbarous imagery. Yet one cannot but acknowledge the fundamental qualities, the lovely values, the ornamental taste, and the impression of primitive animalism.”
Since that rather faint praise Gauguin is aloft with the Olympians.
His art is essentially cla.s.sic. Again his new themes puzzled critics.
A decorative painter born, he is fit for the company of Baudry the eclectic, Moreau the symbolist, Puvis de Chavannes, greatest of modern mural painters, and the starlit Besnard. A rolling stone was Gauguin, one that gathered no stale moss. He saw with eyes that at Tahiti became ”innocent.” The novelty of the flora and fauna there should not be overlooked in this artistic recrudescence. His natural inclination toward decorative subjects rekindled in the presence of the tropical wilderness; at every step he discovered new motives. The very largeness of the forms about him, whether human, vegetable, or floral, appealed to his bold brush, and I think that critics should take this into consideration before declaring his southern pictures garish. They often seem so, but then the sunset there is glaring, the shadows ponderous and full of harsh complementary reflects, while humanity wears another aspect in this southern island where distance is annihilated by the clarity of the atmosphere. No, Paul Gauguin is certainly not a plagiarist. Clive Bell has written: ”Great artists never look back.” I believe the opposite; all great artists look back and from the past create a new synthesis.
Wells has said: ”Better plunder than paralysis,” the obverse of Gauguin's teaching, and if Vincent Van Gogh ”plundered” in his youth it was not because he feared ”paralysis.” He merely practised his scales in private before attempting public performance. Remember that none of these revolutionary artists jumped overboard in the beginning without swimming-bladders. They were all, and are all, men who have served their technical apprentices.h.i.+p before rebellion and complete self-expression.
The G.o.ds of Van Gogh were Rembrandt, Delacroix, Daumier, Monticelli, and Millet. The latter was a veritable pa.s.sion with him. He said of him, and the remark was a sign-post for his own future: ”Rembrandt and Delacroix painted the person of Jesus, Millet his teaching.” This preoccupation with moral ideas lent a marked intensity to his narrow temperament. Ill-balanced he was; there was madness in the family; both his brother and himself committed suicide. His adoration of Monticelli and his jewelled style led him to Impressionism. But colour for colour's sake or optical illusion did not long hold him. The overloaded paint in his earlier works soon gave way to flat modelling. His effects are achieved by sweeping contours instead of a series of planes. There are weight, sharp silhouettes, and cruel a.n.a.lysis. His colour harmonies are brilliant, dissociated from our notions of the normal. He is a genuine realist as opposed to the decorative cla.s.sicism of Gauguin. His work was not much affected by Gauguin, though he has been cla.s.sed in the same school. Cezanne openly repudiated both men. ”A sun in his head and a hurricane in his heart,”
was said of him, as it was first said of Delacroix by a critical contemporary. Vincent Van Gogh is, to my way of thinking, the greatest genius of the trio under discussion. After them followed the Uglicists and the pa.s.sionate patterns and emotional curves of the Cubists.
Henri Matisse has science, he is responsive to all the inflections of the human form, and has at his finger-tips all the nuances of colour.
He is one of those lucky men for whom the simplest elements suffice to create a living art. With a few touches a flower, a woman, grow before your eyes. He is a magician, and when his taste for experimenting with deformations changes we may expect a gallery of masterpieces. At present, pushed by friends and foes, he can't resist the temptation to explode fire-crackers on the front stoop of the Inst.i.tute. But a master of line, of decoration, of alluring rhythms. Whistler went to j.a.pan on an artistic adventure. Matisse has gone to China, where rhythm, not imitation, is the chiefest quality in art.
Such men as Matisse, Augustus John, and Arthur B. Davies excel as draughtsmen. The sketches of the first-named are those of a sculptor, almost instantaneous notations of att.i.tudes and gestures. The movement, not the ma.s.s, is the goal sought for by all of them. The usual crowd of charlatans, camp-followers, hangers-on may be found loudly praising their own wares in this Neo-Impressionist school--if school it be--but it is only fair to judge the most serious and gifted painters and sculptors of the day. Already there are signs that the extremists, contortionists, hysterical humbugs, Zonists, Futurists, and fakers generally are disappearing. What is good will abide, as is the case with Impressionism; light and atmosphere are its lessons; the later men have other ideals: form and rhythm, and a more spiritual interpretation of ”facts.”
III
The Comparative Exhibition in New York over ten years ago proved that it is dangerous to mix disparate schools and aims and personalities.
And while the undertaking was laudable, seeking as it did to dissipate our artistic provinciality, it but emphasised it--proved beyond the peradventure of a doubt American dependence on foreign art.
Technically, to-day, the majority of our best painters stem from France, as formerly they imitated English models or studied at Dusseldorf and Munich. When the Barbizon group made their influence felt our landscapists immediately betrayed the impact of the new vision, the new technique. Our younger men are just as progressive as were their fathers and grandfathers. Every fresh generation uses as a spring-board for its achievements the previous generation. They have a lot to put on canvas, new sights that only America can show. What matter the tools if they have, these young chaps, individuality? Must they continue to peer through the studio spectacles of their grandfathers? They make mistakes, as did their predecessors. They experiment; art is not a fixed quant.i.ty, but a ceaseless experimenting. They are often raw, crude, harsh; but they deal in character and actuality. They paint their environment--the only true historic method--and they do this with a modern technique. Manet, Goya, Renoir, Monet, p.i.s.sarro, Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas, Whistler, and others may be noted in the technical schemes of nine out of ten native-born American artists. The question at issue is whether our new men have anything to say, and do they say it in a personal manner. I think the answer is a decided affirmative. We can't compete with the great names in art, but in the contemporary swim we fairly hold our own.