Part 11 (1/2)
8th: That in the manner of rendering nature, the essential is sincerity and purity (more copy-book maxims for us!).
9th: That movement and light destroy the materiality of bodies (a truism in art well known to Watteau, Rembrandt, Turner, and latterly, to Claude Monet and the earlier group of Impressionists). And now for the milk in the cocoanut.
We fight, concludes the manifesto: 1st: Against the bituminous tints by which it is attempted to obtain the patina of tone upon modern pictures. (The chief objection against this statement is its absolute superfluousness. The Impressionists forty years ago attacked bituminous painting and finally drove it out; now it is coming back as a novelty. The Futurists are gazing backward.) 2d: Against the superficial and elementary archaism founded upon flat tints, which, by imitating the linear technique of the Egyptians, reduces painting to a powerless synthesis both childish and grotesque. 3d: Against the false claims of belonging to the future put forward by the Secessionists and the Independents, who have installed new academies no less trite and attached to routine than the preceding ones. 4th: We demand for ten years the total suppression of the nude in painting.
There are thirty-four pictures in the show, the catalogue of which is a curiosity. Boccioni's The Street Enters the Home has a note in the catalogue which points out that the painter does not limit himself to what he sees in the square frame of the window as would a simple photographer, but he also reproduces what he would see by looking out on every side from the balcony. Isn't this lucid? But you ought to see the jumble in the canvas caused by the painter casting aside the chief prerogative of an artist, the faculty of selection, or, rather, as Walter Pater puts it, the ”tact of omission.”
There is the motion of moonlight in one canvas and in No. 24, by Russolo, ent.i.tled Rebellion, there is an effort to delineate--better say express, as the art of delineation is here in abeyance--the collision of two forces, that of the revolutionary element made up of enthusiasm and red lyricism against the force of inertia and reactionary resistance of tradition. The angles are the vibratory waves of the former force in motion. The perspective of the houses is destroyed just as a boxer is bent double by receiving a blow in the wind (refined image!). As this picture is purely symbolical, it is not open to objections; but isn't it rather amusing?
Memory of a Night, by Russolo (No. 23), is ”a fantastic impression produced not by line but by colour.” An elongated insect or snail--is it a man or a gra.s.shopper?--is in the first plane; back of him is a girl's face with pleading eyes; an explosion of light in the background is evidently intended for an electric lamp; the rest is chaos.
The Milliner (No. 32) by Severini, the painter calls: ”An arabesque of the movement produced by the twinkling colours and iridescence of the frills and furbelows on show; the electric light divides the scene into defined zones. A study of simultaneous penetration.” The deathly grin of the modiste is about the only ”simultaneous penetration” that I could see in the canvas.
As confused as is No. 27, The Pan-Pan Dance at the Monico, by Severini, there are some vital bits, excellent modelling, striking detail, though as a whole, it is hard to unravel; the point d'appui is missing; the interest is nowhere focussed, though the dancer woman soon catches the eye. No doubt a crowded supper room in a Continental cafe, the white napery, variegated colours of the women's attire, the movement and blinding glare of the lights are a chaotic blur when you first open your eyes upon them; but the human eye with its almost infinite capacity for adaptation soon resolves disorder into order, formlessness into form. The trouble with the Futurist is that he catches the full force of the primal impression, then later loads it with his own subjective fancies. The outcome is bound to be a riddle.
I confess without hesitation there are several pictures in the exhibition which impressed me. Power is power, no matter the strange airs it may at times a.s.sume. Browning's Sordello, despite its numerous obscure pa.s.sages, is withal a work of high purpose, it always stirs the imagination. I found myself staring at Carra's Funeral of the Anarchist Galli and wondering after all whether a conflict shouldn't be represented in a conflicting manner. Zola reproached both De Goncourt and Flaubert for their verbal artistry. ”Vulgar happenings,”
he said, ”should be presented in the bluntest fas.h.i.+on.” And then he contradicted himself in practice by attempting to write like Hugo and Flaubert. Signor Carra, who probably witnessed the street row at the funeral of Galli between the students and the police, sets before us in all its vivacity or rhythm--or rhythms--the fight. It is a real fight. And while I quite agree with Edgar Degas, who said he could make a crowd out of four or five figures in a picture, it is no reflection on Carra's power to do the same with a dozen or more. A picture as full of movement and the clash of combatants as is the battle section of the Richard Strauss Symphony, A Hero's Life. Realism is the dominating factor in both works. The cane and club swinging sympathisers of the anarchist are certainly vital.
In what then consists the originality of the Futurists? Possibly their blatant claim to originality. The Primitives, Italian and Flemish, saw the universe with amazing clearness; their pictorial metaphysics was clarity itself; their mysticism was never muddy; all nature was settled, serene, and brilliantly silhouetted. But mark you! they, too, enjoyed depicting a half-dozen happenings on the same canvas. Fresh from a tour through the galleries of Holland, Belgium, and France, after a special study of the Primitives, I quite understand what the Futurists are after. They emulate the innocence of the eye characteristic of the early painters, but despite their strong will they cannot recover the blitheness and sweetness, the native wood-note wild, nor recapture their many careless moods. They weave the pattern closer, seeking to express in paint a psychology that is only possible in literature. And they endeavour to imitate music with its haunting suggestiveness, its thematic vagueness, its rhythmic swiftness and splendour of tonalities. In vain. No picture can spell many moods simultaneously, nor paint soul-states successively within one frame.
These painters have mistaken their vocation. They should have been musicians or writers, or handle the more satisfactory, if less subtle, cinematograph.
Will there ever be a new way of seeing as well as representing life, animate and inanimate? Who shall say? The Impressionists, working on hints from Watteau, Rembrandt, Turner, gave us a fresh view of the universe. Rhythm in art is no new thing. In the figures of El Greco as in the prancing horses of Gericault, rhythm informs every inch of the canvas. The Futurists are seeking a new synthesis, and their work is far from synthetic; it is decomposition--in the painter's sense of the word--carried to the point of distraction. Doubtless each man has a definite idea when he takes up his brush, but all the king's horses and all the king's men can't make out that idea when blazoned on the canvas. The Futurists may be for the future, but not for to-day's limited range of vision.
XV
IN THE WORKSHOP OF ZOLA
Taine once wrote: ”When we know how an artist invents we can foresee his inventions.” As to Zola, there is little need now for critical judgments on his work. He is definitely ”placed”; we know him for what he is--a romancer of a violent idealistic type masquerading as an implacable realist; a lyric pessimist at the beginning of his literary career, a sonorous optimist at the close, with vague socialistic views as to the perfectibility of the human race. But he traversed distances before he finally found himself a field in which stirred and struggled all human animality. And he was more Zola when he wrote Therese Raquin than in his later trilogies and evangels. As an artist it is doubtful if he grew after 1880; repet.i.tion was his method of methods, or, as he once remarked to Edmond de Goncourt: ”Firstly, I fix my nail, and then with a blow of the hammer I send it a centimetre deep into the brain of the public; then I knock it in as far again--and the hammer of which I make use is journalism.” And a tremendous journalist to the end was Zola, despite his books and naturalistic theories.
Again, and from the diary of the same sublimated old gossip, Goncourt, Zola speaks: ”After the rarefied a.n.a.lysis of a certain kind of sentiment, such as the work done by Flaubert in Madame Bovary; after the a.n.a.lysis of things, plastic and artistic, such as you have given us in your dainty, gemlike writing, there is no longer any room for the younger generation of writers; there is nothing left for them to do, ... there no longer remains a single type to portray. The only way of appealing to the public is by strong writing, powerful creations, and by the number of volumes given to the world.” Theory-ridden Zola's polemical writings, like those of Richard Wagner's, must be set down to special pleading.
Certainly Zola gave the world a number of volumes, and, if the writing was not always ”strong”--his style is usually mediocre--the subjects were often too strong for polite nostrils. As Henri Ma.s.sis, the author of an interesting book, How Zola Composed His Novels, says, ”he founded his work on a theory which is the most singular of mistakes.”
The ”experimental” novel is now a thing as extinct as the dodo, yet what doughty battles were fought for its shapeless thesis. The truth is that Zola invented more than he observed. He was myopic, not a trained scrutiniser, and Huysmans, once a disciple, later an opponent of the ”naturalistic” doc.u.ments, maliciously remarked that Zola went out carriage riding in the country, and then wrote La Terre.
Turgenieff declared that Zola could describe sweat on a human back, but never told us what the human thought. And in a memorable pa.s.sage, Huysmans couches his lance against the kind of realism Zola represented, admitting the service performed by that romancer: ”We must, in short, follow the great highway so deeply dug out by Zola, but it is also necessary to trace a parallel path in the air, another road by which we may reach the Beyond and the Afterward, to achieve thus a spiritualistic naturalism.”
Mr. Ma.s.sis has had access to the ma.n.u.scripts of Zola deposited by his widow in the National Library, Paris. They number ninety volumes; the dossier alone of Germinal forms four volumes of five hundred pages.
Such industry seems fabulous. But, if it did not pa.s.s Zola through the long-envied portals of the Academy, it has won for his ashes such an honourable resting-place as the Pantheon. There is irony in the pranks of the Zeitgeist. Zola, snubbed at every attempt he made to become an Immortal (unlike his friend Daudet, he openly admitted his candidature, not sharing with the author of Sapho his sovereign contempt for the fauteuils of the Forty); Zola, in an hour becoming the most unpopular writer in France after his memorable J'accuse, a fugitive from his home, the defender of a seemingly hopeless cause; Zola dead, Dreyfus exonerated, and the powdered bones of Zola in the Pantheon, with the great men of his land. Few of his contemporaries who voted against his admission to the Academy will be his neighbours in the eternal sleep. His admission to the dead Immortals must be surely the occasion for much wagging of heads, for reams of plat.i.tudinous writing on the subject of fate and its whirligig caprice.
This stubborn, silent man of violent imagination, copious vocabulary, and a tenacity unparalleled in literature, knew that a page a day--a thousand words daily put on paper every day of the year--and for twenty years, would rear a huge edifice. He stuck to his desk each morning of his life from the time he sketched the Plan general; he made such terms with his publishers that he was enabled to live humbly, yet comfortably, in the beginning with his ”dear ones,” his wife and his mother. In return he wrote two volumes a year, and, with the exception of a few years, his production was as steady as water flowing from a hydrant. This comparison was once applied to herself by George Sand, Zola's only rival in the matter of quant.i.ty. But Madame Sand was an improviser; with notes she never bothered herself; in her letters to Flaubert she laughed over the human doc.u.ments of Zola, the elaborate note taking of Daudet, for she was blessed with an excellent memory and a huge capacity for scribbling. Not so Zola. Each book was a painful parturition, not the pain of a stylist like Flaubert, but the Sisyphus-like labor of getting his notes, his facts, his characters marshalled and moving to a conclusion. Like Anthony Trollope, when the last page of a book was finished he began another.
He was a workman, not a dilettante of letters.
In 1868 he had blocked out his formidable campaign. Differing with Balzac in not taking French society as a whole for a subject, he nevertheless owes, as do all French fiction writers since 1830--Stendhal alone excepted--his literary existence to Balzac; Balzac, from whom all blessings, all evils, flow in the domain of the novel; Balzac, realist, idealist, symbolist, naturalist, humourist, tragedian, comedian, aristocrat, bourgeois, poet, and cleric; Balzac, truly the Shakespeare of France. The Human Comedy attracted the synthetic brain of Zola as he often tells us (see L'Oeuvre, where Sandoz, the novelist, Zola himself, explains to Claude his scheme of a prose epic). But he was satisfied to take one family under the Second Empire, the Rougon-Macquarts--these names were not at first in the form we now know them. A friend and admirer of Flaubert, he followed, broadly speaking, his method of proceeding and work; though an admirer of the Goncourts, he did not favour their preference for the rare case or the chiselled epithet.
Every-day humanity described in every-day speech was Zola's ideal.